The article I read talked a lot about the benefits to drivers. That translates fairly directly to the service being offered to customers. Having your driver more easily figure out where to pick you up or drop you off is a huge service win for customers. Keeping your driver more focussed on navigation translates not only to better trips but safer ones as well. The statement was that they did not want to rely on a 3rd party to generate 90% of the pixels your customers are looking at. How did you miss all this customer focus? I am not sure it is fair to say this was all about profit juicing for Lyft.

My issue with the article is just the mind-boggling premise that leveraging an Open Source mapping project is “the impossible” vs using Google Maps. Also, there are lots of other options including of course ESRI.