Lyft renames rental bikes Bay Wheels
San Francisco’s familiar blue Ford GoBikes are getting rebranding and a paint job from their new corporate owner, Lyft, which will also start returning electric bikes to the fleet.
Lyft is rechristening its street-rented bikes as Bay Wheels.
Riders will be able to tell at a glance whether a bike is pedalpowered or electric. Bay Wheels’ pedal-driven bikes will be wrapped in colorful artwork created by local artists such as Oakland’s Hueman, while the electric bikes will have black wheels with a splash of Lyft’s signature pink hue. The changeover will take several weeks.
“We wanted a name that reflects that this (bike-rental) system is special and unique to the Bay Area and that it’s a public-private partnership with Bay Area cities,” Lyft wrote in a blog post.
Riders can rent any Bay Wheels bike via Lyft’s ridehailing app. The cost is $2 for 30 minutes, and $3 for each additional 15 minutes. Ford GoBike also offers monthly and annual memberships, and those will continue under Bay Wheels.
Lyft yanked all its electric bikes off the road in April after reports of injuries caused by a braking problem. On Tuesday, it will starting rolling out redesigned e-bikes in San Jose, with ones for San Francisco and the East Bay due later this month.
In a big change, the new e-bikes
will have an integrated lock allowing riders to park them at traditional bike racks or next to poles, although they can also be parked in Bay Wheels’ bike stations.
Lyft now has about 1,000 pedal-powered bikes in San Francisco. It plans to add 4,000 electric bikes in the city over the next year. Over an indeterminate time period, it will add another 3,500 docked bikes, but their introduction depends on San Francisco identifying and approving sites to install the docks. Some neighbors complain that the docks consume parking spots or contribute to gentrification.
Oakland now has about 500 Bay Wheels bikes, San Jose about 400, Berkeley 200 and Emeryville 100. Lyft will roll out 3,200 additional bikes, all electric models, to those cities over the next year.
Lyft got into short-term bike rentals last year when it acquired Motivate, the company behind Ford GoBike as well as other urban fleets like New York’s Citi Bike, Washington’s Capital Bikeshare and Chicago’s Divvy.
On Friday, Lyft filed suit against San Francisco, saying the city had reneged on a contract guaranteeing it exclusivity for street bike rentals. In late May San Francisco started soliciting bids from other vendors for free-floating bike rentals, aiming to get to 11,000, with 8,500 of them provided by Lyft. Currently Uber’s Jump offers dockless e-bikes under an 18-month pilot set to expire in early July.
“We wanted a name that reflects that this (bike-rental) system is special and unique to the Bay Area.” Lyft blog post