Transportation: Lime pulls e-bikes from local cities
As it faces competition from more focused transportation rivals, Lime is cutting back on the vehicle that helped it get its start: the bicycle.
In coming weeks, Lime — once known as LimeBike — will phase out its electric bikes and replace them with electric scooters throughout the Bay Area. In cities where scooters aren’t allowed, Lime service will roll to a stop.
The San Francisco company, which changed its name in May, got its start with bike rentals on a single college campus in 2017 and has since deployed tens of thousands of free-floating stand-up electric scooters in cities worldwide. In December, Lime CEO Tony Sun told The Chronicle that scooters were its fastest-growing segment.
According to media reports, Lime has also removed bikes in St. Louis; Hartford; Tacoma, Wash., and parts of Ohio.
“You can’t deny the technological advantages of the scooter,” said Somesh Dash, a partner at Menlo Park venture firm IVP, which helped lead a $310 million round of funding valuing Lime at $2.4 billion this month. “You get a lot more speed and durability in the scooter form factor than a normal bike.”
Bird, Lime’s biggest rival, only rents scooters. The Santa Monica company’s valuation is close to Lime’s and it has also been seeking new investment, according to Bloomberg.
Lime bikes will soon disappear from cities where the company operated with permission: South San Francisco, Burlingame, San Mateo, Foster City, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, El Cerrito and Alameda. Lime said it will work with those city governments to bring scooters there for the first time.
At its peak, Lime had roughly 1,000 bikes on the road in the Bay Area. But there wasn’t demand to support a fleet of that size, Lime said. The startup cut back to 500 bikes across those cities.
During these pilots, Lime learned “a great deal” about the Bay Area’s preference for different transportation options, a spokesman said, given factors including weather, regulations and availability.
“There is no one-sizefits-all transportation solution,” Lime said. Lime is also experimenting with rentals of small cars it calls LimePods in Seattle.
Dash, the tech investor, said he expects Lime will tailor its offerings in each market where the startup operates. The Bay Area is a particularly challenging region because of its weather and hills.
“The vision has always been multimodal transportation,” Dash said. “How do we make sure we get the right vehicle, to the right area, at the right time?”
Lime will start pulling bikes immediately and finish the process over the next 30 days.
Uber’s Jump subsidiary continues to rent sidewalk-parked or “dockless” electric bikes in San Francisco. Motivate, which is owned by Lyft, continues to rent vehicles from Ford GoBike-branded bike stations in San Francisco, San Jose and parts of the East Bay.
Although Lime is headquartered in San Francisco, it doesn’t have a permit to put scooters on city streets. The startup recently appealed the Municipal Transportation Agency’s decision to grant scooter licenses to just two companies, Skip and Scoot, under a oneyear pilot program. The agency said this week that Lime’s rejection was fair, but the company could be considered for another chance when the program expands in April.
The MTA could double the number of permitted scooters to 2,500 then.