One local Lyft driver is spreading the love around San Francisco, leaving a trail of heartfelt messages via a series of anonymous handwritten notes by his riders for the next lucky passenger.
Lyft driver Zia Ahmed encourages his customers to pass on their musings for a project he calls Lyft Me Up San Francisco.
“I was always chatting with the people I’d be giving rides to,” Ahmed told ABC News. “They all have interesting stories to tell, and I wanted to capture that so I’d caption a few notes of our chat after they got out.”
Last September, Ahmed began asking his riders to leave notes in a leather-bound journal for the passengers after them. With more than 2,000 poignant entries, the book is full of restaurant tips, funny jokes, drawings, and words of wisdom. Ahmed told The Huffington Post that about once a day, he gets a message that truly makes him reflect, ponder, or smile in delight.
“Everybody would be glued to their cell phones or tablets or laptops and I wanted to take them out of that for one second to have a normal human conversation,” he explained.
The notes are being collected and published in a book that he expects to be out later this month. And while he hopes to scale the project to other cities, Amed admits he was really only hoping to capture the essence of SF.
“It’s a fabulous place with amazing people,” he told HuffPost. “I want to capture people at this specific time in history. On a broader scale, I want to tell these short stories. They are beautiful little snippets from people’s lives saying amazing things.” Embedded above are some of our favorites.
