People in Seattle took 24,118 trips on Lime bikes and scooters every day on average during the month of July. That is nearly five times the average weekday ridership for both Seattle Streetcar lines combined, and it’s about half the average number of vehicles using the $2 billion SR-99 tunnel under downtown (47,291 average vehicles per day based on WSDOT’s 2023 count, the most recent available). And Lime did all this while paying Seattle for the privilege.
The reported July 2024 ridership data for Lime’s scooters and bikes is so high I asked Lime to double check the numbers to make sure they aren’t the result of a software bug, and they confirmed they are correct. The figures reported to SDOT’s data dashboard for the month of July represent a 71% increase over the company’s previous monthly ridership record set the same month in 2023. Note that these numbers are reported by Lime, and we do not have the ability to independently verify them.
Lime continues to increase its dominant role in Seattle’s micromobility scene, and it seems users have mostly stopped being company-agnostic and are now going straight to the Lime app to find a ride. Bird saw a 40% decline in ridership in July 2024 compared to July 2023, SuperPedestrian shut down their Link scooter service completely, and Veo “temporarily paused” service in Seattle in March. I have reached out to Veo asking for an update on their plans to return and will post when I learn more (UPDATE: Veo said they have not renewed their Seattle permit, but they “remain committed to keeping in touch with the City and community partners and hope to serve Seattle again in the future.” They also sent the results of a focus group they conducted, which I will cover in a future post). Even Gig Car Share, which is only sort of a competitor to Lime, is shutting down in December. But Lime’s reported growth outpaces simply gobbling up rides from their competitors.
Lyft, operator of Portland’s BikeTown bike and scooter share program, has applied to operate in Seattle in the past but never actually launched here. They seem to be the most likely competitor to Lime at this point, assuming Bird does not make a miraculous turnaround.
Lime also introduced a new pricing scheme called LimePass in which users can save money by buying “minute bundles.” For example, $7 gets you 30 minutes of riding within a 24-hour period, and you don’t need to pay the $1 unlock fee every time you start a ride. 30 minutes of riding would cost $14.50 under regular pricing, assuming you only unlocked a device once. So especially if you are stringing together multiple shorter trips, LimePass is a lot cheaper. Other bundles include $10 for 60 mins over 3 days, $27 for 180 minutes over 7 days, and $34 for 280 minutes over 30 days. If you quality for the ORCA Lift low-income transit pass, you also qualify for the excellent and deeply-discounted Lime Access program.
Seattle has been operating a competitive market for bike and scooter share services since 2017, and Lime has been a leading player since the beginning. It is difficult to see how any other companies could compete at this point without a massive upfront investment on a level we don’t see venture capital firms throwing towards micromobility companies the way they were back when these services first started. Some cities have moved from an open or controlled market system to a dedicated vendor system in which only one company is given permits to operate. At this point, it seems like Seattle has all but ended up there, as well. Lime is not quite a monopoly yet, but they may be one Bird bankruptcy away from it.
So far, Lime has been a benevolent almost-monopoly. Prices have gone down thanks to their LimePass scheme, they launched an even better model of their e-bike a couple months ago, and they will bring a brand new sit-down scooter called the Lime Glider to Seattle later this month. The company is improving service, lowering prices and getting more riders. The state of modern tech capitalism has me on edge waiting for the enshittification to begin, but so far Lime has defied that expectation.
Seattle and Lime could begin to consider what a different arrangement might look like. After a recent trip to southern California, I was inspired by the great experience using Long Beach’s very orderly and affordable bike share system. With Lime ridership now a significant part of our city’s transportation system, it might be time to make that relationship more formal through some kind of public-private partnership to expand the city’s orderly bike and scooter parking space while also making our streets safer.
Hoboken, New Jersey, has eliminated traffic deaths in recent years in large part by daylighting their intersections and crosswalks using a variety of different types of curb extensions that shorten crossing distances and reduce illegal car parking. It is already illegal in Washington State to park within 30 feet of a stop sign or traffic signal or within 20 feet of any crosswalk, which includes essentially every street corner. Parked cars can obscure the vision of road users as they approach conflict points, a problem that is getting worse as vehicles get bigger and taller. Seattle already has extensive experience installing curb extensions, but they are not creating them at the rate needed to address our traffic safety crisis. Typical intersections have four approaches, so we need as many as four curb extensions per intersection. And Seattle has a lot of intersections. Even if we prioritize curb extensions on busier commercial streets, that’s still an enormous amount of work.
One affordable style of curb extension is to create an on-street bike and scooter parking area. Dedicating space at intersections across the city to bike and scooter parking would embrace the fact that these vehicles are an important part of our city’s transportation system while also keeping the devices out of walkways and curb ramps where they impede accessibility. In 2017, they were a disruptive innovation squeezing into spaces wherever they could fit. But it’s 2024 now, and it’s time to make sure they have a safe and responsible place to be. A massive expansion of on-street curb extensions with bike and scooter parking would be a win-win-win for the city’s transportation safety, mobility and accessibility goals.
Comments
11 responses to “In July, Lime bikes and scooters carried half as many trips as the $2B SR-99 tunnel”
Maybe it’s just me but, given a choice, i won’t put $20 up front in a Bird account before i even take my first ride. So i just use Lime. Someone should tell them they’re pushing away customers !
While I applaud the growth of transportation alternatives to cars, I would like to challenge any implied assumption that all these Lime bike and scooter rides are replacing other modes of transportation. My daily bicycle commute includes the downtown waterfront, the string of waterfront parks heading NW to Magnolia, and the Locks. In these locations, during the tourist season the majority of rides would appear to be tourists taking joy rides. Many of those are in violation of Lime’s user agreement (18+, one person only, yield to pedestrians, follow traffic rules). Building a better system for educating these casual riders should be the responsibility of Lime and their competitors. Having been victim to a Lime scooter hit and run the last day of May that left me in the hospital for 3 days and unable to ride for 2 months, I found that their support for my experience was inadequate and that they should be forthcoming and supportive of reporting incidents to SPD and to insurance companies. Again, there is a definite place for these alternatives – I know people who used Lime bikes as a gateway to buying a bike and becoming a regular bicycle commuter – but we need to be realistic about the additional hazards from inexperience or indifferent people choosing to use them.
Don’t forget the most violated rule that should be enough to ban these scourges for good: “Riding on sidewalks is against the law”
False.
Section 11.44.120 RIDING ON A SIDEWALK OR PUBLIC PATH.
Every person operating a bicycle upon any sidewalk or public path shall operate the same in a careful and prudent manner and a rate of speed no greater than is reasonable and proper under the conditions existing at the point of operation, taking into account the amount and character of pedestrian traffic, grade and width of sidewalk or public path, and condition of surface, and shall obey all traffic control devices. Every person operating a bicycle upon a sidewalk or public path shall yield the right-of-way to any pedestrian thereon, and shall give an audible signal before overtaking and passing any pedestrian.
https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/programs/bike-program/rules-of-the-road
OK, the laws on this are super inconsistent. You are right that bikes, including class 1 and 2 e-bikes, are allowed on sidewalks in Washington State unless signed otherwise. But Ballard Biker is right that in Seattle you are not permitted to ride a motorized foot scooter on most sidewalks: https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=TIT11VETR_SUBTITLE_ITRCO_PT4PEHIBIEPMOFOSCRU_CH11.46RUEPMOFOSC_11.46.010AROP
“Except as otherwise provided in this Chapter 11.46, motorized foot scooters may be operated on roadways, shoulders, alleys, bicycle lanes, and public paths, but not on sidewalks, unless there is no alternative for a motorized foot scooter to travel over a sidewalk that is part of a bicycle or pedestrian path.”
It gets even more complicated when you add in “electric personal assistive mobility devices,” which were defined in law back during the Segway days and have their own set of rules allowing them on sidewalks but NOT in bike lanes or trails for some reason. Now we have all these self-balancing onewheels and solo wheels and such that are legally defined as EPAMDs.
I ride all over town and I see Lime bikes and scooters in all sorts of local places. So it’s clear to me that locals do ride them. It’s obvious more people use the scooters than ride the bikes. When I was out of town, I had to choice of the two and I chose the scooter over the bike. Well, I really appreciate and respect the cities effort to put in bike lanes, it’s pretty clear that it wouldn’t take much to overcrowd them. As it stands, they’re wide open now.
Parking too close to intersections is low-hanging fruit Parking Enforcement steadfastly ignores, along with intruding in the buffer zone on “parking protected” bike lanes.
The point of comparing Lime rides to 99-tunnel transits eludes me. If I go to Ballard from West Seattle I’m not doing it on a scooter.
There’s lots of great things about Portland cycling but the Biketown(contracted to Lyft) monopoly isn’t one of them. The pricing is terrible and the low income pass has gotten less useful. I haven’t ridden them but have seen people onslow socially paced party rides of less than ten miles go through two ore three bikes.
Biketown just started a soft launch of scooters last week to compete with Lime’s scooters but I wish there was some bike share competition in Portland.
https://bikeportland.org/2024/07/25/biketown-adds-e-scooters-with-thousands-more-on-the-way-in-coming-weeks-388827
Isn’t Biketown much cheaper than anything in Seattle? I admit I haven’t been following the market since the City of Seattle dropped out. The prices for the privately run systems always seemed crazy expensive compared to peer cities (like Boston). Maybe everyone has raised their prices as they’ve transitioned to electric vehicles. It would be nice to have a national comparison of bikeshare systems.
Biketown’s website says they’re $1 plus 30 cents per-minute… so a 30-minute ride would cost $10. Apparently the scooters are a bit more, at 37 cents per-minute (that’s sort of weird — I thought the scooters were ). Based on numbers in the post Lime’s regular pricing must be $1 plus 45 cents per minute.
Prices have definitely gone up with electrification, though LimePass seems to be a straightforward price cut. A lot of “pass” programs (in general across various products) offer a discount in exchange for committing to a lot of sustained usage, but at $7 you only have to do one 14-minute ride to save money — that’s not much of a commitment at all! Someone taking one 10-minute trip home after going out would still want the “a la carte” pricing, but that’s about it.
Then with the 30-day pass… I can buy the notion that there are a lot of people that average about that much riding per-day, and for whom it’s clearly better to pay around $34/mo. for access to Lime than to keep and maintain a bike. It’s not me, but I think it’s a fair number of people. By comparison to Biketown… there’s a $99 yearly pass that gives you free unlocks and 15 cent per-minute usage… that’s a bit over $8 per-month, but 280 minutes of riding would cost you $42, for a total of over $50.
I think Lime Pass is definitely a step in the right direction, but I want more. In particular, I strongly feel that trips under 30 minutes should be charged by distance rather than time, as it just doesn’t feel fair to have to pay more because a light is red, a bridge is up, or the bike’s motor is weaker than expected (e.g. low battery). Time-based fares also effectively reward behavior we want to discourage, such as riding too fast, running red lights, or leaving the bike in the middle of a sidewalk, rather than bothering to look for a better spot
At the same time, a discount for two people riding in a group would also reduce incidents of multiple people riding a single scooter together. It may be dangerous, but Lime’s pricing model strongly encourages it, since one scooter costs half the price of two.
Finally, there needs to be a 1-minute grace period after starting a trip where you can end it without being charged and unlock fee, as any trip under one minute is almost certainly an indicator that something is wrong with the bike/scooter being rented, and the customer should not be charged for the “privilege” of unlocking a bike or scooter, only to find that it won’t steer, has a non-working motor, or has no brakes.
The fact that I get effectively dinged with extra fees every time I try a non-working vehicle or hit a red light just feels like a corporation trying to nickel and dime me, and is a big reason why I don’t use the service anymore.