Lime electric scooters roll into Paris
California- based bicycle-sharing service Lime launched a fleet of dock-free electric scooters in Paris yesterday as part of a wider roll-out in several European cities.
Lime, which operates bike and scooter schemes in about 60 cities and university campuses in the United States, has already launched operations in the German cities of Berlin and Frankfurt and in Zurich, Switzerland.
“Paris is our first big-scale deployment in Europe, we have big ambitions in Europe,” Lime France director general Arthur-Louis Jacquier told Reuters on Thursday.
“Lime plans to launch in 26 European cities by year-end,’’ he said, but declined to specify in which countries.
“Private-equity funded Lime started as a bicycle-sharing scheme in California, but when the firm also started offering electric scooters, demand from users was 10 times higher than for bicycles,’’ Jacquier said.
Lime, founded in June 2017, has raised $350 million from Silicon Valley investors and plans a next financing round for several hundred millions of dollars for its US and international expansion.
Lime users can find and unlock the scooters with a mobile phone app and leave them anywhere after their ride, which will cost €1 ($1.16) per ride plus €0.15 per minute. Their speed is limited to 24 kilometres (15 miles) per hour and they have a range of 50 kilometres.
“All scooters will be picked up every night around 9 p.m. for recharging and repairs,’’ said Jacquier, who was an executive with Gobee Bike, which earlier this year stopped its European bike sharing operations due to vandalism.
“Gobee was a good learning experience. Lime is very different. By picking up the scooters every night we will avoid problems with breakage,” he said.
Lime arrives in Paris as the city’s own alternative mobility solutions are in deep chaos.
The city on Thursday ended the Bollore SA’s contract to operate its electric vehicle car-sharing scheme due to financial problems while a change of operator at its pioneering Velib bike-sharing scheme has left a large part of its docking stations unusable.
Bollore, a French conglomerate that also manufactures Autolib’s 4,000 electric minicars, “still wants to find an agreement to keep the system operating,’’ the company said in a statement.
The dispute could raise questions about the viability of car-share programmes that Bollore supplies in several other cities, including Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Singapore.
A spokesman for Bollore said its carshare programmes in other cities were functioning well and continuing to grow.