Six weeks after Jump and Lime bike share companies merged and temporarily paused operations, the company is bringing shared bikes back to Seattle.
Beginning today, you will once again be able to rent a battery-assisted bike as a healthy, sustainable option to get around without a car.
Lime will bring back about 500 bikes this week. These will be the red Jump bikes that left in the spring, but are now operated by Lime. The bikes will be $1 to unlock and 36 cents a minute to ride. For now, riders should use the Uber App to reserve the bikes, but Lime plans to add them to the Lime app in the future.
Lime will be disinfecting handlebars, seats, seat adjustment levers, and screens every time the bikes are rebalanced, serviced, or battery swapped. We ask that all users help keep our community healthy by washing their hands before and after each use and disinfecting the handlebar if possible. Remember to stay six feet away from others and always wear a helmet while riding a bike.
In 2017, Seattle was the first major city to launch a free-floating bike share program where bikes don’t have to be parked at bike share racks.
The program allows private companies to partner with the City and provide customers with the option to rent a bike when they need it. Jump’s and Lime’s merger and return marks the latest in many changes to the program over the past three years, but demand for the service has remained consistently high with the people of Seattle taking 2.2 million rides on shared bikes in 2019.
While 2020 has been a challenging year in many ways – including for the bike share program – we expect that bike share will be an essential part of our recovery plan. As travel picks up in the city, we are committed to making sure people have sustainable options to get around without a car.
SDOT will continue to invest in safe bike routes across the city. We have committed to a bold vision to accelerate bike investments in 2020.
Seattle has about 200 miles of bike lanes, paths, and greenways, including the recently expanded Center City Bike Network and 20+ miles of new Stay Healthy Streets which are calm, neighborhood streets for people to walk, roll, bike, and skate.
This year, we will continue to build our network of safe bike routes, with bike safety and complete streets projects planned throughout Seattle.
Bike share companies pay the City for permits to operate, and we invest that money right back into programs which make it easier for all groups of people to travel safely. For example, last year we used this funding to build 1,500 bike parking spaces throughout Seattle.
We also used bike share proceeds to pay for other programs to give people with disabilities new opportunities to ride customized adaptive cycles which meet their specific needs. Last year, we partnered with Outdoors for All to create the nation’s first free adaptive cycle rental program for people with disabilities.
We are committed to continuing our efforts to make bike share work better for everyone by addressing the problem of improperly parked bikes that block sidewalks.
Last year, we announced a plan to address the problem of improperly parked bikes creating obstacles for people with disabilities:
- We teamed up with Disability Rights Washington and with Rooted in Rights to create a video showing how real people are affected when bikes are left blocking the sidewalk.
- We added a feature to report badly parked bikes in Find It, Fix It app.
- We adopted a stricter and more comprehensive parking standard to hold bike share companies accountable for where their bikes are parked.
As a result, we saw a big decrease in bad bike parking in the second half of 2019. Our random audits conducted in Spring 2019 found that 17% of parked bikes were blocking access for people with disabilities, but fortunately this number fell to 6% in the Fall and Winter after we announced our plan.
We will continue to work to address this problem and are working with the bike share company to create more educational tools in their app and ways to verify people have parked their bike correctly before they end their rental.
We want the bike share program to be successful, and are happy to welcome Lime back to Seattle. Bike share is just one of the many ways which we are working to make sure people have many safe, convenient, and healthy options to get around without a car.