City switches bike-share contracts, saving $90,000
San Mateo has dropped its first contract in favor of a new one with Lime Bike
SAN MATEO >> When Burlingame introduced Lime Bikes as the city-approved dockless bike sharing company in January, San Mateo officials got curious.
“We discovered that bike share users don’t really recognize or respect city boundaries,” Kathy Kleinbaum, San Mateo’s deputy city manager explained by phone. “And once Lime Bikes started showing up in San Mateo, we asked Burlingame about their experience.”
Last week, the San Mateo City Council approved a plan to make the local company’s bike fleet their city-approved bikes, too.
This isn’t San Mateo’s first experience with their own fleet of shared bikes. The city had welcomed a fleet of dockable bikes in 2016, after it was rejected by the Bay Area Bike Share program; the 7,000 blue, Ford bike share racks all over the region. Back then, San Mateo contracted New York-based Social Bikes for $90,000 a year, becoming the only city on the peninsula to bring in its own bike-share
program.
This isn’t to say that the contract with Social Bikes wasn’t working.
“We were planning to expand, to grow the fleet in the city, but we were hitting some operational walls and obstacles,” said Kleinbaum. “Then we found out Lime Bikes was a local company, and so we reached out.”
Lime Bikes said it would operate its dockless fleet of bikes, e-bikes and scooters at no cost to the city. The bikes have GPS, 3-G, and self-locking technology, so that all wheeled transport in the fleet may be locked, tracked and opened by users who have the company’s app.
“We respectfully ended out contract with Social Bikes and negotiated the new deal with Lime Bikes,” Kleinbaum said.
Starting May 1, the company will roll out its 300 bikes, e-bikes and scooters on the streets of San Mateo. Though Kleinbaum noted that the scooters — a growing nuisance in San Francisco
that has prompted rounding up entire fleets at night — will be the last of the fleet to come out. Bikes and e-bikes will be on sidewalks first, Kleinbaum said.
All Lime Bikes will be parked in as yet to be determined Home Zones that will be mapped by the company’s app and can’t be parked in zones adjacent to or in any way blocking: loading zones, passenger loading zones, disabled parking zones, automobile street parking spaces, curb ramps, entryways,
driveways, and street furniture and pathways that require pedestrian access (e.g. benches, play structures). Bikes parked in residential areas that don’t get in the way can stay, but if a complaint is lodged, it’s the company’s responsibility to move it immediately.
“We’ll try this for a year,” Kleinbaum said. “We hope this time around the agreement works for the city.”