But a plan to do just that at 21 intersections across Pioneer Square is not going over well with some of the neighborhood’s most high-profile voices. The Pioneer Square Preservation Board is threatening to block the project or force a costly design overhaul.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been rolling out on-street corrals around the city, utilizing space near intersections where drivers are prohibited from parking under state law. In practice, motorists often park within the 30-foot clear zone and risk parking tickets. SDOT’s micromobility and Vision Zero safety teams are collaborating to implement the quick-build projects as a proven safety countermeasure intended to reduce both the number of crashes that happen on city streets and their severity.

In Pioneer Square, street changes need buy-in from the neighborhood’s historic preservation board, which dates to the 1970s and gives local residents and business owners significant leverage to alter projects within the neighborhood or even hit the brakes.

Despite the fact that city code codifies that one purpose of Pioneer Square’s historic district is “to avoid a proliferation of vehicular parking and vehicular-oriented uses,” projects that reallocate street space away from cars in the neighborhood often meet opposition. One clear undercurrent of this discussion is the “removal” of parking spaces — spaces where it’s mostly not legal to park but where it still happens, thanks to lax enforcement.

Data collected from Seattle’s scootershare companies in 2025 showed around 750 trips per day ending in the Pioneer Square area, or around 275,000 trips across the entire year. Scooter usage in the city continues to increase, with a 96% jump in ridership between 2023 and 2025, according to SDOT. The proliferation of scooters and bikes on sidewalk edges have raised accessibility concerns, and the SDOT sees the on-street corrals as one element scooting riders toward better behavior.

But an initial briefing this week on the proposal brought out a litany of concerns and criticisms of the design of corrals that the department intends to roll out ahead of Seattle’s first World Cup match in June, primarily along the busy First Avenue S and Occidental Avenue S corridors.

The neighborhood’s primary business advocacy group, the Alliance for Pioneer Square, came out strongly against the corrals as currently proposed, pressing for more unique designs that reflect Pioneer Square’s character. The neighborhood already has its own specially-designed bike racks, intended to blend in better with the 1890s architecture common in the area. But the group also questioned the need for additional bike parking in the neighborhood, asserting that existing racks are underutilized.

“We have consistently communicated to SDOT that the proposed signs and designs and locations, particularly those that focus on daylighting, are not appropriate interventions for Pioneer Square,” said Anahí Bendeck, the Alliance’s Design and Planning Manager. “The proposal relies heavily on utilizing the same treatments, materials, and design that is being deployed citywide, without sufficient modification to reflect the neighborhood’s historic context or the actual lived conditions. And we just believe that this one-size-fits-all approach is fundamentally misaligned with the character and the knowledge of the neighborhood.”

Comments in opposition were also read into the record from Pioneer Square business owners, including the co-owner of Magic Mouse Toys, and the co-owner of Friend Museum. Neither business returned a request for comment from The Urbanist on their specific concerns. SDOT plans three corrals at First and Yesler near Magic Mouse, with another planned across the street from Friend Museum at First and King.

Comments were not universally against the proposal, however. In addition to supportive comments by a representative from Lime, Cascade Bicycle Club testified in favor.

“We believe these corrals are a practical, safety focused use of curb space. The majority of proposed sites utilize existing furniture zones or daylight intersections. Daylighting improves visibility at corners, reduces turning conflicts, conflicts, and helps prevent crashes,” Cascade’s Rachel Schaeffer said.

Schaeffer referenced a fatal crash just this week in Capitol Hill, where a turning driver struck and killed a 27-year-old woman at Bellevue Avenue and E Pine Street. “These are small design changes that can have lifesaving impacts.”

While the board wasn’t asked to make a decision Wednesday, numerous board members signaled that they wanted to see the proposal revamped to respond to community concerns.

“We’ve received more comments on this project than I’ve ever seen come in. And there’s deep concerns in the community, and a lot of it was feeling like, there needs to be more robust outreach to stakeholders and communication,” board chair Maureen Elenga said. “Out in front of Pioneer Park […] having that cluster [of corrals] up from there, I think really changes the character. Concern with the materiality of it, these plastic Omega posts are not really compatible with the neighborhood. And I’m wondering, what is the need for bike racks in this situation? We have parking for 200 and some bikes already. So if this is for the rideshare, nobody locks those up and they’re freestanding.”

“I’m fully persuaded by the public comments from the Pioneer Square businesses and from the National Park Service through the Klondike Historic National Park that the proposal is contrary to the nature of the historic district,” board member Catherine Walker said via written comments read by the city employee administering the meeting.

This isn’t the first time that an SDOT project has faced a tough crowd at the Pioneer Square preservation board. A plan to reconfigure S Main Street to upgrade a heavily used bus stop was delayed and nearly fell by the wayside after concerns were raised by nearby business owners and fretted over at the preservation board. Purported impacts to drivers from a proposed bike connection between Occidental Avenue and Western Avenue is a one reason that project hasn’t yet been completed.

Elsewhere in downtown, SDOT is currently navigating the Pike Place Historical Commission’s approval to add vehicle barricades at that popular tourist destination ahead of FIFA. Many of the same aesthetic concerns raised in Pioneer Square are being echoed several blocks north when it comes to changes to the streetscape, which is very different than it was during the time periods that both historic districts were created to highlight. When aesthetic gripes are front-and-center, it’s often hard to suss out whether they stem from a genuine concern over “character” or a simple desire to maintain the status quo.

The proposal will likely see one more briefing before the board is asked to vote. Comments can be submitted to the Pioneer Square Preservation Board on its website.

The post SDOT Bike Corral Plan Draws Fire in Pioneer Square first appeared on The Urbanist.

The post Sunday Video: What Drives Bikeshare Success and Mediocrity? first appeared on The Urbanist.

In fact, a recent op-ed in the Seattle Times by local author Steve Olson even argued the City should ban shared stand-up scooters altogether. It may sound extreme, but a few cities have gone down this route, including Paris, which approved a ban on scooters following a low-turnout 2023 referendum that indicated significant opposition among Parisians.

Of course, Olsen fell into many of the tropes of those opposed to scooters and bikes — blaming them for a spike in traffic deaths, and failing to identify cars as the deadliest force on the road.

“According to SDOT’s Vision Zero Action Plan, ‘the only acceptable number of serious injuries and lives lost on our streets is zero.’ Yet the city continues to allow scooter programs that are causing — and will continue to cause — widespread and devastating injuries as well as loss of life,” Olson wrote.

It’s a sentence where “scooter programs” could easily be replaced with “cars” — or “cars without speed limiting devices” for a slightly more moderate position. Seattle had 43 traffic deaths in 2024, and the vast majority not involve a scooter, but rather involved a motorist in a car. So far in 2025, motorists have struck and killed 16 pedestrians.

That is not to say that scooters aren’t dangerous. Axios recently reported that serious scooter injuries are on the rise, both nationally and locally in Seattle. The number of people admitted to Harborview Medical Center with injuries from e-scooter and e-bike crashes has increased every year since 2020, UW Medicine spokesperson Susan Gregg told Axios, adding that there were 29 such admissions in 2020 and 163 in 2024.

The high center of gravity when people are riding a scooter can make them especially prone to face planting when encountering a curb or pothole. These type of crashes can lead to ER visits, but statistics often lump scooter crashes together whether or not a motorist played a starring role.

Showdown at the parking corral

Seeking to address concerns about sidewalk clutter, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is planning to build more parking corrals for micromobility devices — the collective terms for shared vehicles, whether bike or standing scooters or seated scooters. Lime has encouraged the City to expand corrals at a faster pace and has ramped up education efforts about not riding in the sidewalk (including in a recent advertisement in The Urbanist).

Hayden Harvey, Lime’s Senior Manager of Government Relations in the PNW, said current plans do not provide enough corrals to meet demand.

“237 [parking corrals] is what SDOT sort of has built into their plan today,” Harvey said. “Our analysis is that something more on the magnitude of like 800 are needed in the highest utilization areas of the city, meaning the downtown core, the U District, small portions of Ballard and Fremont.”

Lime backed a city budget amendment from Councilmember Rob Saka, who chairs the transportation committee, which would have allocated $200,000 to accelerate the pace of corral deployment. That amendment was rejected on Friday, but SDOT is still set to spend $675,000 in 2026 to add corrals. The topic is likely to return; councilmembers included a statement of legislative intent asking for a report on corrals.

Without a dense network of parking corrals, the free-floating model is likely to continue. But, adding corrals at scale would open up the possibility of a hybrid model, requiring corral parking in Seattle’s busiest areas for micromobility vehicles.

“The cities that have done this at scale have been able to shift from what you experience today as free-floating parking within certain geographic areas where crowd density is high enough to move to a mandatory parking scheme, where the rider can’t just end their ride wherever they we have various technologies and app that sort of you can only end your ride at the pin,” Harvey said. “This is common in Paris. But what’s fundamental to this type of shift from free floating to like a hybridized mandatory parking scheme is the corral density.”

Safe streets advocates have also made the case that building out a more robust network of protected bike lanes and multimodal trails is a key ingredient to solving safety concerns and addressing sidewalk congestion and clutter. The question of people riding scooters recklessly on sidewalks recently came up during the Life After Cars book tour, which came to Seattle on November 5. Co-author Doug Gordon, who co-hosts the War on Cars podcast along with journalist and co-author Sarah Goodyear, argued more bike lanes and pedestrian streets was the fix.

“The answer is just more space,” Gordon said. “You know? I really think that it comes down to like, that person was on the sidewalk because the street probably didn’t feel that safe, and so we need to take a car lane, if possible, and make that street safer.”

Booming scooter ridership

In April, The Urbanist reported on the upward trend in scootershare ridership: “Across three companies, Seattleites clocked 6.3 million rides in 2024, a new record high, up 28% over 2023. The momentum has continued in the first quarter of 2025, with ridership up 76% over the first quarter of 2024. If this pace is maintained, Seattle would exceed 10 million rides in 2025.”

While Seattle has not crossed the 10 million rides yet, ridership has surpassed 9.3 million with nearly two months still to go. This suggests the city is still on course for 10 million before year’s end, with an average of about 30,000 daily trips.

Lime continues to be the most popular operator in the city; the company just surpassed 9 million rides this year. This spring, Lime launched a new vehicle type: a seated scooter, which has quickly leapfrogged electric bikes in garnering ridership. Standing scooters continue to lead the way, accounting for about three-fifths of ridership, while e-bikes and seated scooters provide the other two-fifths.

The only competition is coming from Bird, which has clocked 330,000 rides through the first 10 months of 2025. Most of those riders are on scooters, through Bird also reports a trickle of bikeshare rides.

Scooter trips are heavily concentrated downtown and in a few surrounding neighborhoods, along with the University District, although a few smaller hot spots are scattered around the city. Some ridership spikes are event-based, but the daily baseline appears fairly high regardless of conditions.

“The weather was pretty terrible yesterday, and something like 14,000 people took tens of thousands of rides in the monsoon,” Harvey said. “So this is not a FIFA thing. This is not a Bumbershoot thing or any other large event. This is Seattleites using Lime every day to conduct the business of their lives as core transportation.”

Parker Dawson, Lime’s Senior Regional Lead for Government Relations, said that the shared micromobility program has provide a good complement to the transit network.

“In many ways, we’re a direct correlation to reducing traffic congestion,” Dawson told The Urbanist. “We’ve also got a direct correlation between our ridership and increased public transit ridership, which is a really great symbiotic relationship to be having in the transit network overall.”

It appears the main thing standing in the way of continued micromobilty growth is scaling up the infrastructure to match the ridership boom — in addition to avoiding a backlash that leads to dropping the regulatory hammer on providers.

While the Seattle Times opinion pages may give readers a different impression, Seattleites appear to have a favorable impression of scootershare and bikeshare, overall. Lime commissioned a poll of Seattle voters from EMC Research, which found widespread support for the program and for expanding parking corrals.

“Two-thirds of Seattle voters think the overall impact of shared electric bike and electric scooter services is positive – despite the fact that most Seattle voters are not regular micromobility users,” a poll memo stated. “Seattle voters overwhelmingly support (82%) building dedicated e-bike/e-scooter parking corrals in higher use areas of the city.”

While most Seattle voters are likely not regular micromobility users, many have dabbled. Lime data shows more than 340,000 unique users have taken rides in Seattle.

Author’s note: Lime buys advertising space from The Urbanist, but does not have a role in dictating editorial coverage.

The post Seattle Scootershare Ridership Continues to Surge, as Critics Make Regulatory Push first appeared on The Urbanist.

Lime has settled into its role as the dominant scootershare and bikeshare provider, boasting nearly 5.9 million rides of those 6.3 million rides in 2024 — more than 93% of the total. The program’s performance led Hayden Harvey, Director of Government Relations at Lime, to call Seattle a top micromobility city.

“This year Seattle truly became one of the great micromobility cities in the entire world and Lime is so proud to be a part of decarbonizing the city’s transportation future,” Harvey said in a statement. “The city’s commitment to sustainable transit options and technological innovation make it a perfect place for Lime to go all out here, bringing new vehicle modes like our throttle e-bike and LimeGlider and we believe that new optionality played a key role in the incredible ridership records we saw throughout 2024.”

Lime is looking to expand its service area, with vehicles now available on the University of Washington campus, helping a few more students get to class on time. Seattle was also the first market that Lime tested out its new glider style seated scooter in fall 2024, with the company pledging more new types of vehicles down the pike.

“2025 is about building on that success by doubling down on investments, expanding our fleet and service area, and deepening our partnership with the city,” Harvey told The Urbanist. “We’ll be bringing more of our newest and best vehicles to Seattle, we have already expanded in 2025 to include the UW campus and hope to do more connecting the greater region, and we look forward to continuing to collaborate and advocate with the Seattle Parks Department and SDOT to increase access to Seattle’s beloved public spaces.”

Scooters are the most popular vehicles with micromobility app users, but the e-bikes in Lime’s fleet are always racking up rides, with nearly 1 million in 2024 — 15% of its overall ridership. The booming bikeshare ridership is part of a larger boom in e-bikes that’s accelerated in hilly Seattle. Free floating scootershare has continued to expand into other regional cities, with Woodinville just the latest city to consider allowing them to operate within its borders.

Lime has credited improvements to Seattle’s separated bike lane network with driving the program’s popularity.

Per ride costs have risen considerably since the $1 ride bikeshare heyday of 2018. Today, Lime scooters or e-bikes cost 47 cents per minute plus tax and an unlock fee. On the other hand, vehicle quality has increased considerably as well, with all vehicles electric-assist. Riders can save considerably by purchasing weekly or monthly passes or shorter term minute bundles. A 280-minute month-long Lime pass currently costs $43.99, which is a 70% discount over full pricing and waives unlock fees.

Parks are still mostly off limits

Increasing micromobility access within Seattle parks has come more slowly. In March 2024, The Urbanist highlighted the fact that Seattle Parks properties had been cordoned off to scooter and bikeshare access, even as access to cars had been restored throughout parkways after a brief pandemic hiatus.

Despite a vague pledge from the City to work on the issue, so far, the park “no-go zones” remain intact, outside of a few limited exceptions. Intended to limit the number of users flying through serene park spaces en route to somewhere else, the move counterintuitively encourages people to drive to parks instead.

Bikeshare’s winding history

Seattle recently passed its eight-year anniversary of shuttering its municipally owned Pronto Cycle Share program, which opened in 2014, but never got off the ground. That system relied on docked bikes, but the City balked at the startup costs necessary to expand the system and voted to shut down the program, which happened March 31, 2017.

Killing Pronto briefly left Seattle without a bikeshare program, but in August 2017, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) launched a new program using a public-private partnership with vendors offering dockless bikes. These startup companies were flush with investor cash at the time and soon flooded the city in bikes that were cheaply built but priced aggressively at just $1 per 30-minute ride initially as the companies battled to capture the market.

Given the low prices and proliferation of bikes, bikeshare ridership took off, reaching a million rides within its first year across the three initial providers. But it also was quickly becoming apparent the business model wasn’t working for many of the companies. Hopes of multiple companies firmly establishing themselves to compete and keep prices didn’t really materialize. In 2018, Chinese bikeshare company ofo pulled out of Seattle (and much of the U.S. market) entirely and by 2020 had folded under a mountain of debt. Spin, meanwhile, announced it was abandoning bikeshare and pivoting to scooters. That left Lime bikeshare on top.

Despite having the Seattle market mostly to itself for a time, raising prices significantly from those early one-dollar ride days, and still seeing significant ridership, Lime still was not turning the profit it hoped to and it wound down service and laid off staff at the end of 2019. Lime’s decision may have stemmed from Jump, a startup that was bought by Uber in 2018, entering and gaining a big share of the market.

Additionally, operators were starting to focus on e-scooters as a long-floated scootershare program finally emerged in 2020 after much foot dragging by the Durkan administration. Lime promised it was coming back.

The Jump versus Lime battle never happened, however, as Jump bought a stake in Lime, who folded the services together. This briefly left Seattle without bikeshare again as the companies processed the merger, but Lime slowly returned its e-bikes to service over the summer of 2020 — now rentable though the Uber app, in addition to the Lime app.

Seattle’s scootershare pilot launching in late 2020 did turn the companies’ attention away from bikes, at least initially, as scooter companies entered the mix. Scootershare ridership took off and exceeded 10,000 daily trips in August 2021, while bikeshare averaged below 2,000 daily trips all year, as the influx of scooters crowded out bikes. However, bikeshare rebounded in 2022 and continued to grow in 2023.

Injury and clutter issues

Micromobility programs, and e-scooters, in particular, have taken significant heat for safety issues. A recent KUOW report noted that the city saw 163 serious injuries from e-scooters and e-bikes last year — a figure that includes both private and rental vehicles. While the Pronto system included helmet dispensers with its bikeshare stations, the free-floating era has come with a ride-at-your-own risk mentality.

Safety concerns were the reason that Mayor Jenny Durkan cited for delaying approval for e-scooters early in her term. Ultimately, Durkan relented and allowed the program to move forward in late 2020.

The companies do offer discount for riders who verify they are using a helmet, but there’s no requirement to actually wear one. Helmets are not a safety panacea, but they do decrease the chance of catastrophic head injuries. A helmet rental system could make it more feasible for scooter users to deploy them, but hasn’t yet been implemented, and would be very cumbersome to implement given the free-floating nature of the network.

While scooter injuries are a growing worry, Seattle did have the distinction of recording no bike deaths in 2024, and halving its pedestrian crash death total from its 2021 peak of 20 to 10, at least in preliminary data. SDOT does not have a separate category for scooters in its data and lumps them together with pedestrian deaths and injuries. While trendlines for active users were encouraging, Seattle’s traffic fatality total was up slightly overall in 2024 due to an uptick in deaths among motorists and motorcycle users.

The other major criticism of dockless scootershare and bikeshare program is that the tend to clutter sidewalks, trails, and bike lanes when users are not careful about parking or they get knocked over subsequently. Similar to helmet, there hasn’t been a full fix, but the apps do incentivize users to park correctly by providing instructions about not blocking sidewalks and requiring users to take photographs of their parked vehicle, which is AI-verified for anything major amiss — hardly foolproof, but better than nothing.

Troubleshooting

An SDOT spokesperson has encouraged users to highlight issues so that the agency can help troubleshoot the boundaries or other issues with the service.

“We can’t fix a problem that we don’t know about, so if people encounter other roads where electric bikes and scooters are supposed to be allowed but the shared devices aren’t working, then we hope they will tell us so that we can look into it and troubleshoot the geographic boundaries,” Bergerson told The Urbanist in 2024. “In the past we have been responsive to the occasional feedback when the geographic boundaries weren’t working as intended, and have made adjustments to fix any unintentional issues.”

Program staff can be reached at ScooterShare@seattle.gov, BikeShare@seattle.gov, or by phone at (206) 684-ROAD.

The post Seattle’s Scooter and Bikeshare Boom Reaches New Heights first appeared on The Urbanist.

After fits and starts, bikeshare and scootershare has turned into a staple mobility option in Seattle, but one place people cannot take one of the rented bikes is to — or through — a Seattle park. Most of Seattle’s major parks are off-limits, with the system cutting power to vehicles when entering the “no-go zones” that surround many Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) properties.

This can create headaches for riders who have to park at the far edge of the park to access them or are forced to use a more circuitous or dangerous route when a pleasant shortcut through a park may have been the desired path.

Overall, ridership doesn’t seem to have suffered much for this anomaly in the Seattle bikeshare and scootershare program. However, it is an untapped market and use case that could help grow the program’s success. And the park zones that have been walled-off from access were apparently created with very little public input or coordination, a significant difference with how the City of Seattle treats plans that impact car access.

While three different private companies operate Seattle’s shared micromobility program, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) sets the parameters. SDOT press secretary Ethan Bergerson indicated the agency bowed to the wishes of Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) on the service zones for shared bikes and scooters.

“SDOT and SPR worked together to determine these boundaries when the bike and scooter share program was created,” Bergerson said. “SPR requested that SDOT set up geographic boundaries around parks to be consistent with SPR policy that motorized vehicles are not allowed in most areas of parks, and that bikes must remain in specific areas such as roads or designated multi-use trails.”

While keeping shared vehicles off areas where all bikes are supposed to be banned makes sense, the no-go zones are blunt. For example, none of Discovery Park’s 534 acres are in a Lime service zone at time of post, including roads with full car access and trails where regular bikes are permitted. Lime is Seattle’s top bikeshare and scootershare provider, accounting for more than 60% total trips in 2023, leading one competitor (Superpedestrian’s Link) to leave the market and another (Veo) to pause service this month while they retool with new vehicles.

Bird is the only other scootershare provider still presently operating in Seattle — and given the company’s bankruptcy proceedings it’s not clear how long that will remain the case. Bird has some no-go zones in parks, but not as extensive as Lime. Only the heart of the Discovery Park is off-limits according to their map, for example. However, the dearth of scooters active on the Magnolia peninsula suggest this part of town hasn’t been a hotspot for Bird generally. Likewise, the Washington Arboretum is more accessible on Bird scooters than Lime.

Seattle Parks staff did not respond separately respond to a request for comment for this article, but did collaborate with SDOT on their responses, Bergerson said.

While parks are a bit more accessible on Bird, the entire University of Washington campus is a no-go zone. In contrast, Lime vehicles are allowed on campus — a testament perhaps to a better working relationship with the university.

One service zone consideration at play is ensuring that the bikes and scooters will be reachable for maintenance staff from the respective companies, but that alone doesn’t explain the boundaries.

“Another factor in the decision was that bike and scooter share companies need to be able to easily retrieve their vehicles for charging or maintenance,” Bergerson said. “Allowing riders to end their trips on park trails where privately owned cars and trucks are not allowed would create challenges for the bike/scooter companies.”

During the early days of the pandemic, SDOT rolled out its Healthy Streets program to increase safe recreation opportunities, which included roads and parking lots within parks, turning more areas into car-free zones that were more pleasant for people walking, jogging, rolling, and biking. However, within the last few years, car access has been restored to most of these places. Yet, bikeshare and scootershare access has not been added.

“In general, we agree that it is reasonable to allow shared bikes and scooters to travel on more paved public roads where cars and trucks are allowed if we can address challenges such as ensuring that bikes and scooters aren’t left in places where they will be difficult for other people to use and the companies don’t have access to easily retrieve them,” Bergerson said.

No timeline on a decision is set yet, though.

“We’ll work with SPR to look into these concerns further,” Bergerson said. “We’ll need to take a closer look at the geographic boundaries in the park system in order to determine which roads and trails are appropriate to reconsider and get a better sense of the timeline to make adjustments.”

Seattle’s king of micromobility, Lime, said pushing the City to add parks to its service zones has not been a point of emphasis as of yet, but expressed some interest if the prohibition was lifted.

“Lime is committed to getting riders where they need to go and Seattle riders keep breaking ridership records,” Lime spokesperson Jacob Tugendrajch said. “We haven’t been pushing [for] parks being opened, but we are open to allowing our riders to enjoy Seattle’s beautiful parks and public spaces if allowed by our City partners.”

SDOT indicated a revision could be on the way.

“We intend to make it so that shared bikes and scooters can be ridden on public roads within parks where cars and privately owned electric bikes are allowed,” Bergerson said.

Bergerson encouraged users to highlight issues so that SDOT can help troubleshoot the boundaries or other issues with the service.

“We can’t fix a problem that we don’t know about, so if people encounter other roads where electric bikes and scooters are supposed to be allowed but the shared devices aren’t working, then we hope they will tell us so that we can look into it and troubleshoot the geographic boundaries,” Bergerson said. “In the past we have been responsive to the occasional feedback when the geographic boundaries weren’t working as intended, and have made adjustments to fix any unintentional issues.”

Program staff can be reached at ScooterShare@seattle.gov, BikeShare@seattle.gov, or by phone at (206) 684-ROAD.

Clarification: An earlier draft stated the Seattle Parks staff did not reply to a request for comment. This is misleading in the sense that they did collaborate with SDOT on their joint responses.

The post Bikeshare’s Limited Access to Seattle Parks Could Soon Be Changing first appeared on The Urbanist.

Seattle’s dockless bikeshare and scootershare program continues to boom, collectively reaching a new high of nearly five million rides in 2023. That works out to more than 13,000 rides per day.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has touted the versatility and utility of the program. SDOT press secretary Ethan Bergerson stressed the program is a complement for transit and a climate-friendly way to get from point A to B.

“In 2017, Seattle was one of the first major cities to launch a free-floating shared bike program, and our bike and scooter share programs have seen ongoing growth over the last few years,” Bergerson said. “People took 4.9 million bike and scooter trips in 2023, using the shared devices to get to work, parks, recreational facilities, restaurants, shopping, and a wide variety of other activities. It’s a quick, climate-friendly way for people to get to wherever they need to go.”

In particular, shared bike and scooter use has spiked during summer months and on big event weekends. As with King County Metro, bikeshare providers can tip their cap to Taylor Swift for their highest ridership day of 2023.

“Bike and scooter share has proven especially useful to complement transit and help people get to and from crowded areas quickly during major events,” Bergerson said. “This summer, we set a one-day ridership record of nearly 32,000 trips on Saturday, July 22 during Taylor Swift’s concert at Lumen Field.”

SDOT has credited the steady improvement of bike facilities with attracting more people to the mode.

“One of the key reasons for the success of the bike and scooter share program is that we are continuing to invest in bike infrastructure across Seattle,” Bergerson said. “As we continue to build more protected bike lanes and improve our network of Neighborhood Greenways and Healthy Streets, it makes the shared bikes and scooters ever more convenient and accessible.”

Accounting for more than 60% of trips, Lime is Seattle’s leading provider of both bikeshare and scootershare. Lime’s leadership agreed with SDOT’s assessment, saying the “micromobility program is stronger now than it has ever been.”

“Seattle may be our oldest active market but it continues to set the pace for micromobility programs in the United States and move the idea of shared e-bikes and e-scooters forward,” said Hayden Harvey, Director of Government Relations at Lime. “Ridership continues to break records and each one of those rides represents a potential connection to public transit, a trip that was sustainable instead of in a car, or a long walk that was shortened and made more convenient. We are grateful for the City’s focus and commitment to decarbonizing transportation, and happy to be Seattleites first choice when getting around on two wheels.”

Lime’s 2023 usage was up 50% over 2022, the company said, and that momentum has carried into 2024, with 55% growth in January and an even bigger uptick in February.  “Lime riders took an estimated 190,000 rides in February 2024, up 77% from February 2023,” Lime said.

E-bikes are booming broadly in the region as prices have come down and interest spiked in transit alternatives during the pandemic, when transit service levels decreased and Seattleites were encouraged to avoid crowded situations and practice physical distancing.

Bikeshare’s weird and windy road

Bikeshare has faced a weird and windy path in Seattle, with some false starts along the way. In 2014, Seattle launched a municipal bikeshare program with docks, which was called Pronto Cycle Share. However, Mayor Ed Murray and the Seattle City Council pulled the plug on Pronto in 2017 as the City balked at investments needed to maintain and expand the program with the addition of e-bikes.

That briefly left Seattle without a bikeshare program, but in August 2017 SDOT launched a new program using a public-private partnership with vendors offering dockless bikes. These startup companies were flush with investor cash at the time and soon flooded the city in bikes that were cheaply built but priced aggressively at just $1 per 30-minute ride initially as the companies battled to capture the market.

Given the low prices and proliferation of bikes, bikeshare ridership took off, reaching a million rides within its first year across the three initial providers. But it also was quickly becoming apparent the business model wasn’t working for many of the companies. In 2018, Chinese bikeshare company ofo pulled out of Seattle (and much of the U.S. market) entirely and by 2020 had folded under a mountain of debt. Spin, meanwhile, announced it was abandoning bikeshare and pivoting to scooters. That left Lime bikeshare on top.

Despite having the Seattle market mostly to itself for a time, raising prices significantly from those early one-dollar ride days, and still seeing significant ridership, Lime still was not turning the profit it hoped to and it wound down service and laid off staff at the end of 2019. Lime’s decision may have stemmed from Jump, a startup that was bought by Uber in 2018, entering and gaining a big share of the market. Plus, operators were starting to focus on e-scooters as a long-floated scootershare program finally emerged in 2020 after much foot dragging by the Durkan administration. Lime promised it was coming back.

The Jump versus Lime battle never happened, however, as Jump bought a stake in Lime, who folded the services together. This briefly left Seattle without bikeshare again as the companies processed the merger, but Lime slowly returned its e-bikes to service over the summer of 2020 — now rentable though the Uber app, in addition to the Lime app.

The scootershare pilot launching in late 2020 did turn the companies’ attention away from bikes, at least initially, as scooter companies entered the mix. Scootershare ridership took off and exceeded 10,000 daily trips in August 2021, while bikeshare averaged below 2,000 daily trips all year, as the influx of scooters crowded out bikes. However, bikeshare rebounded in 2022 and continued to grow in 2023.

A record-setting month of July 2023 saw scootershare average 15,600 daily trips and bikeshare average just over 5,400 daily rides.

Despite earlier concerns raised by former Mayor Jenny Durkan and other skeptics that scooters would be hazardous, there’s been no indication scooters are more deadly than any other transportation mode. Bumps, bruises, and broken bones have resulted from users, particularly inexperienced ones, having run-ins with motorists or obstacles in their path. But no increase in road deaths has been linked to the program. Instead, the increase in road deaths locally and nationally has been linked to larger and heavier cars on the road.

Likewise the worst fears that the micromobility program would pose a massive obstacle on sidewalks and trails appear to mostly have been avoided, outside of the occasional issues with vehicles being strewn about and impeding trails and sidewalk pinch points.

“We are also continuing to work on scooter and bike share parking to keep devices organized for customers and keep sidewalks clear,” Bergerson said. “SDOT manages the service areas and requires scooter and bike share companies to use GPS technology to control bike/ scooter movement and parking in certain areas. SDOT works collaboratively with the companies to ensure that these areas are working well.”

Of course, improvements are always welcomed, which in many cases could will include SDOT widening busy sidewalks and trails, or more quickly enforcing the rules when there are obstructions from parked scooters or bikes — or the proliferation of sandwich boards and other signage impeding sidewalks and decreasing the clear zone. This can be a huge issue, especially for people with disabilities or parents with strollers.

Lime gains as other providers pull out

In 2023, Lime is once again the undisputed leading provider in Seattle for both bikeshare and scootershare. For the year, Lime clocked 2.5 million Seattle scooter trips in 2023 and more than 800,000 bikeshare trips. No other company hit one million trips.

“Lime loves Seattle and Seattle riders love Lime, choosing our e-bikes and e-scooters for two out of every three micromobility rides in the city,” Lime spokesperson Jacob Tugendrajch said. “Ridership is booming because Seattle is successfully building the transportation infrastructure to truly integrate micromobility into its robust transit network. We are happy to work with Seattle to build on that success wherever possible.”

Link by Superpedestrian scootershare was its closest competition with just over 700,000 trips on the year. However, Superpedestrian opted to pull out of Seattle at year’s end.

On Thursday, Veo announced they were pulling their e-bikes from Seattle today, but said they were intending to relaunch with a new fleet. Veo’s vehicles had been a unique bike/seated scooter hybrid vehicle with seats but foot rests rather than traditional bike pedals. The planned new fleet would be conventional e-bikes, it appears.

“[T]his pause is necessary for us to make significant improvements to our service,” Veo wrote. “We’re excited to announce that we’ll be introducing refreshed Cosmo e-bikes equipped with upgraded technology. These upgrades will result in more available vehicles that are reliable, and will provide a smoother, more efficient riding experience for you.”

Veo portrayed the hiatus as lasting just a few weeks, and shared a promo code of SPRING24 for $10 in ride credit to lessen the sting while users wait for vehicles to be available again. Veo averaged more than 1,300 deployed vehicles in 2023, but it’s not clear what service level they will maintain with the new vehicles.

While Veo is out of service, that leaves just Bird scooters as Lime’s competition for now. However, Bird filed for bankruptcy in December so it’s not clear how long they can sustain operations either. Lime’s sizable fleet averaged just over 4,000 deployed vehicles in 2023. Bird averaged almost 1,900 scooters deployed in 2023, but has culled their deployment back a bit in the winter months, which is in line with the typical summer-peak seasonality among operators.

Companies are charging much higher rates than they did in the early days.

Lime e-bikes and scooters are currently priced at $1 to unlock and $0.45 per minute. That can add up quickly, but the Lime pass option can cut costs for longer trips or periods of high usage. Lime has priced 60 minutes of ride time at $11.99 for that option, waiving the unlock fees, but the credit is timed to expire after three days. Lime also has a longer 180-minute week pass for $33.99 or 280-minute month pass for $42.99. Pricing at rival companies is similar.

Outside of some no-go zones, Lime’s service area covers the entirety of Seattle city limits, which means it’s grown well beyond Pronto’s original scope. Lime also has a few limited service zones in Bothell and Redmond. Lime briefly operated in Bellevue under a pilot program, but pulled out in 2019.

Demand for first-mile/last-mile solutions that extend the range of transit is likely to jump later this year as the East Link and Lynnwood Link light rail extensions open. As it stands, Lime has no imminent plans to expand its range, but the company didn’t rule out the possibility.

“Seattle ridership is booming and we’re open to building on our success in the city with expansion to neighboring areas, and any move to do so would be done working as partners to those areas and their local stakeholders,” Tugendrajch said.

Another issue that has emerged for Seattle users is that many Seattle Parks properties remain off-limits to shared bikes and scooters. SDOT sets the service boundaries and said it was open to revisions to increase access to major parks. More on that in a future article.

The post Bikeshare and Scootershare Booms in Seattle, with Lime Leading the Pack first appeared on The Urbanist.

E-bikes are having a moment in Seattle and beyond. Prices are dropping, sales are climbing, and more and more people are discovering that electric-assisted bicycles can help flatten the city’s hills and open up more opportunities to those who might not otherwise bike.

“My wife is seven months pregnant, and she drops our kiddo off at daycare, and then we’ll stop at the grocery store and pick up groceries on the way home,” said David Urbina, who leads the group rides program at Cascade Bicycle Club. “It allows her to keep biking.”

Paul Tolmé, media relations manager at Cascade, agrees that many riders are using e-bikes as a replacement for a car on short trips around the city.

“A large percentage of car trips are three miles or less, or even one mile or less,” Tolmé said. “These are the low hanging fruit in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from our transportation sector, which is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State.”

While the transportation sector composes 39% of Washington State’s climate pollution inventory, it’s an even larger share of Seattle’s emissions at nearly two-thirds.

In addition to owning a bike, Seattleites have the added option of shared e-bike rentals, through three companies: Bird, Lime and Veo Ride. Though rental levels are down from their pre-pandemic peak, they’re on the rise again. 

Kim Pearson is shared mobility program coordinator at the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and she said that the number of shared e-bike rentals between January and August 2023 was up 14% over the same period in 2022. Through September of this year, people took nearly one million shared e-bike trips, which is impressive, though those numbers are a far cry from more than two million trips bike share riders took in 2019 — when bikeshare prices were significantly lower. 

The introduction of scootershare in 2020 seems to have caused a shift, said Pearson.

“It’s catching up from after the pandemic,” Pearson said, “But also I think a lot of people are moving to scooters,” which, she notes, have already reached a rate of 2.8 million trips this year.

Prices plummet, legislature passes rebates

According to a market research study by Circana, the total value of e-bike sales in the U.S. has surged from $240 million in 2019 to $885 million in 2022.

Ken Cisco, retail manager at Seattle Electric Bike, a worker-owned e-bike shop near Green Lake, says he’s also seen sales rising and prices consistently dropping as manufacturers find ways to reduce costs while preserving safety and quality.

The store’s best-selling bike, the mid-range-priced Tern Quick Haul P9, retails for $3,300. “It has customizable assist modes you can change via Bluetooth from your phone, and hydraulic disc brakes,” Cisco said. “This bike, a year ago, would have cost you over $4,000.”

To help first-time buyers get started and to encourage the shift from cars to e-bikes, the legislature added $5 million to the 2023-25 biennial budget for e-bike rebates. According to the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), the agency is still sorting out the details of the program, which reserves 60% of the vouchers for lower income households. 

A WSDOT blog post from August notes that when the project commences, low-income households can receive $1,200 toward the purchase of a new e-bike, while others who don’t meet income eligibility requirements can receive $300. In the two years authorized for the program, WSDOT estimates it will give out 2,300 vouchers at the $1,200 level and 6,200 at the $300 level.

Etiquette and rules of the road

With all these new electric bikes hitting the roads and mixed-use paths, is Seattle ready for the influx? In the European Union and the UK, e-bike sales now make up a fourth of all bicycle sales – and in response to this boom, and to tackle climate change – European cities are rapidly building new cycling infrastructure. Since 2015, for instance, Paris has doubled its bike lane system from a little over 400 miles to more than 800 miles.  

Christiana Farrell, a transportation planner at SDOT, says the city is committed to following through on improvements outlined in the Bicycle Master Plan, noting four South End projects in particular: Martin Luther King King, Jr. Way, Georgetown to South Park, Georgetown to Downtown, and Beacon Avenue S. However, SDOT has delayed each of those projects so they are not coming as quickly as initially promised.

Urbina says, however, that while Seattle has made great improvements in creating new separated bike lanes across the city, much more needs to be done. “Having e-bikes in traffic can create a false sense of security for both the cyclist and for the drivers around them,” he said. “It’s better to have separation.”

As usage increases, etiquette and rules for e-bikes are critically important, especially in places where they share with walkers and what Cisco refers to as “acoustic bikes” without motors.

According to SDOT, on mixed-use trails such as the Burke-Gilman, all cyclists – whether e-bike or acoustic – are limited to speeds of 15 miles per hour. In addition, all e-bike riders are required to ride in a “safe and prudent” manner. 

On top of that, there are limits on which class of e-bikes are allowed on mixed-use trails, Farrell said. In 2018, the legislature passed a bill defining three classes of e-bikes. Class 1 e-bikes have electric assist only while pedaling, and automatically stop power when reaching a speed of 20 mph. Class 2 e-bikes are allowed to have a throttle that can power the bike even when not pedaling, and speeds are also capped at 20 mph. Class 3 e-bikes have electric assist only when pedaling, but can reach speeds of 28 mph before the engine stops assisting.

According to Farrell, Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes are permitted on multi-use trails while Class 3 e-bikes are prohibited.  Pearson said there are no limits on e-bikes using bike lanes, but speed limits and the “safe and prudent” standard still apply.

In a quirk of municipal law, electric scooters are not allowed on sidewalks, but Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes, like their acoustic bike cousins, are technically allowed on sidewalks. Class 3 e-bikes are prohibited. As always, e-bikes and standard bicycles should be ridden prudently on sidewalks and riders should always yield to pedestrians.

“Oftentimes safety and etiquette go hand in hand,” said Urbina about general e-bikes on roads or paths. “Don’t pass someone in an unsafe manner, even if you have the ability to really ramp up the throttle and get around them faster than you would on an analog or acoustic bike.”

Urbina says that e-bikes are allowed on Cascade’s group rides, but the organization asks that riders act respectfully around those without power assist, and keep their speeds in line with other riders.

One other rule to consider: Metro’s bus bike racks. E-bikes must weigh 55 pounds or less to be put on any bus rack. Sometimes removing the battery can bring an e-bike under the limit. 

How to buy your first e-bike

Ken Cisco, with Seattle Electric Bike, says the company started about 14 years ago, and was purchased by its employees in 2022. The company, which provides both sales and service at three locations in Seattle, Bothell and Bellingham, stocks a wide variety of models from about a dozen brands. Prices range from around $1,200 to upwards of $8,000.

Cisco advises first-time buyers to avoid inexpensive e-bikes online from unestablished brands. “I get tons of calls from people all over Western Washington who bought something online or at Costco or a Sports Authority-type store. And when they experience a problem, there’s no one to take care of that problem.” 

When servicing established brands at his shop, Cisco says that his staff can plug into an e-bike’s electronics to run a diagnostic check and determine what’s wrong. 

When shopping for your first e-bike, Cisco suggests thinking about what you’ll be using the bike for: Hauling kids to school? Commuting to work or grocery shopping? Are you interested in riding on mountain trails, or keeping to city streets? What’s your budget?

For a solid commuting and hauling e-bike that can be adapted to carrying small children, Cisco recommends the Tern Quick Haul P9, which retails for $3,300 and includes hydraulic disc brakes, back cargo rack that can carry up to 110 pounds, a Bosch pedal motor with 65 newton-meters (Nm) of torque, and a low-set frame that makes getting on and of easy, especially for seniors. With telescoping handlebars, the bike fits people ranging in height from 4’10” to 6’4”. The bike weighs just over 50 pounds, making it suitable for bus racks. Plus, the bike stands on its own if tipped upright, so it can be vertically parked in a closet or other small space.

If you’re looking for a Class 3 bike that can do speeds of up to 28 mph, Cisco recommends checking out the Marin Sausalito E2. At $3,000, it’s another mid-priced e-bike with a 85 Nm motor, hydraulic brakes and a low step-through making it easy to get on and off. At 42 pounds, it will fit on a Metro bus rack.  

For a more affordable bike, Cisco suggests the IZIP Brio. At $1,499 you’ll get something that more closely resembles an acoustic bike, including mechanical disc brakes, larger wheels, but a low step-through frame. Like an analog bike it comes in different sizes. The motor offers 40 Nm of torque and is controlled by a throttle rather than pedal assist. “This one is no frills but a very nice bike,” Cisco said. “There’s nothing on it that’s not useful.”

Cisco recommends that if you do buy an e-bike online, check with a local service shop to determine if they can fix it when something goes wrong.

“That’s really important, regardless of how much you’re spending, he says. “Because even the cheapest of the cheap e-bikes is $800. And if it becomes an $800 brick, the fact you didn’t pay $1,200 doesn’t matter.”

In general, Tolmé at Cascade believes that e-bikes are helping get more people out of cars and pedaling, and that’s a good thing for bike advocacy and earth’s climate.

“As an organization, we have supported electric bikes since the outset. They really enable more people to ride bicycles,” he said. “Technologies on bikes have changed throughout the decades.  In a sense, they’re just another form of bicycle.”

The post E-Bikes Are Taking Off in Seattle first appeared on The Urbanist.

Recent discussion of a helmet law repeal was sparked by an article published in Crosscut in January of 2020, which brought attention to people struggling with homelessness who were targeted for helmet law enforcement by Seattle police. The article highlighted a video by Real Change in which one of their news vendors was insulted and ticketed by Seattle police for not wearing a helmet after being the victim of a hit-and-run incident. It also shared data from court records which found that 43% of helmet citations issued in King County since 2017 had been given to people struggling with homelessness.

Research indicates biased enforcement

Allegations of biased enforced have been further supported by research undertaken by Central Seattle Greenways (CSG) and Ethan Campbell, a doctoral student at the University of Washington. According to their research, which analyzed 1,667 helmet citations issued between 2003 and 2020 in Seattle, Black cyclists received helmet infractions at a rate nearly four times higher than White cyclists, while Native American/Alaska Native cyclists were cited at a rate more than two times higher than White riders.

To gather the demographic data used in the analysis, Campbell combined census demographic data with three Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) surveys to determine the demographics of Seattle cyclists. The study did note that data suggested an overrepresentation of White cyclists, meaning more people who identified as White in the surveys accounted for bike trips than their share of census demographics would predict. In an interview with the UW Daily, Campbell also acknowledged the difficulty of estimating each demographic group’s share of bike trips in Seattle without observational research to back up the surveys.

The greatest challenge, however, confronted by the study was related to understanding helmet use.

“A real problem is that we don’t know the demographics of who doesn’t wear a helmet,” Campbell said. “Without that information, we can only say that the racial disparities are strongly suggestive of biased policing.”

Notwithstanding research limitations, the study’s findings prompted CSG to call on the King County Board of Health to engage in a “thoughtful review of the helmet law that focuses on its unintended impacts and includes community voices.” The organization also participated in a helmet law working group alongside Real Change and Cascade Bicycle Club and distributed a survey in which community members could share their viewpoints and experiences. The data they collected resulted in a full suite of recommendations backed up by research related to the helmet law mandate and a letter submitted to the King County Board of Health advising a repeal of the law.

Helmet Law Letter to the King County Board of Health by Natalie Bicknell on Scribd

What about public health concerns?

Some medical professionals, however, have expressed alarm at a helmet law repeal. In response to the data published by CSG and Campbell, Dr. Frederick Rivara, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, stood by the current helmet policy.

“The data are very clear: helmets prevent brain injury. All should be protected,” he said in an email to The Seattle Times.

The working group also supports encouraging cyclists to wear helmets to prevent brain injury; however, rather than criminalize lack of compliance with helmet law, they are pressing for other solutions, such as promoting public health campaigns that share accurate information around cycling risk and helmet use, using the King County Department of Public Health to increase access to helmets to people who are low income or suffering from homelessness, and urging the prioritization of traffic calming measures to create safer road conditions for cyclists.

Studies evaluated in the working group’s paper cite helmet use as “valuable as a mode of injury prevention and should be encouraged, promoted, and incentivized for the safety of cyclists,” however, they also assert that “other strategies that prevent crashes from occurring in the first place should also be emphasized.”

Research included in the paper also found that while the connection between laws mandating helmet use is dubious, especially since use of helmets has become more widespread since the introduction of these laws in the 1990s, clear data points to safer bike facilities, for instance protected bike lanes and lower vehicle traffic speeds, as preventing injuries and saving lives.

Helmet requirements may deter people from cycling

One last point of criticism directed at helmet laws is that they deter people from cycling, either by creating an additional barrier to entry or by making the act appear dangerous. The working group’s paper draws on both published data suggesting that helmet laws “depressed rates of bicycle ridership in some locales” and anecdotal evidence shared in the feedback solicited by the survey.

Additionally, helmet laws can put a damper on the use of bike share programs, which often do not provide helmets to riders. The paper identifies King County’s helmet law as a “contributing factor in the demise of Seattle’s Pronto bike share system in 2017.” It also points out that “differential enforcement for bike share users creates a problematic legal double standard.”

Public health entities throughout the U.S. recommend the use of bicycle helmets, yet bike-shares, which are often public/private partnerships that have, at the very least, permission from local governments to operate, increase the number of cyclists on the streets without more than cursory attempts to ensure that they wear head protection. This, on the face of it, is quite at odds with policies that impose fines and even prison time for not wearing bike helmets.

 Bateman-House and Bachynski, “Putting local all-ages bicycle helmet ordinances in context,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (2019

Helmet laws came into vogue in the 1990s when there was less awareness around the consequences of traumatic brain injuries. While the laws appeared to have served a purpose in raising public awareness, in recent years research indicates mandates have become less associated with helmet use and injury prevention and more connected to policing that can unfairly impact certain community groups, namely Black and Indigenous people and people suffering from homelessness. Tacoma repealed its helmet law in 2020. Advocates are hoping that the King County Board of Health will consider the many factors surrounding the issue and follow Tacoma’s example.

This article was updated to reflect that it was Central Seattle Greenways (CSG), not Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, that participated in the helmet law working group. Additionally, the working group was convened by CSG, Cascade Bicycle Club, and Real Change, not by the King County Board of Health.

The post King County Board of Health to Vote on Repeal of Helmet Law first appeared on The Urbanist.

The company had a rocky start hoping to launch in April only to have the pandemic hit. That wound up delaying the start of service until the end of June, in time for the 4th of July holiday, but leaving a four-month gap in carsharing service since the last provider, Car2Go, folded. GIG Car Share began serving the central areas of Seattle with 250 vehicles, which exclusively consists of a Toyota Prius fleet equipped with rooftop bike racks.

The homearea did contract slightly around the University of Washington campus and it ostensibly excludes popular park areas, perhaps because some have seen parking lot closures and access road restrictions due to Covid. The homearea also comes with a spate of restricted zones where car trips cannot be ended in, such as Eastlake Ave E, Aurora Ave N, and many Downtown Seattle and Capitol Hill blocks.

Except where otherwise restricted by GIG Car Share, users are allowed to end vehicle trips anywhere within the homearea by parking on-street where legally permitted. That means users can park in paid on-street parking spaces, time-limited on-street parking spaces, and within restricted parking zones without extra charges. Of course, this does not apply to on-street parking spaces for deliveries, short-term unload, handicap, on-street parking spaces that turn into auxiliary lanes, and other special on-street parking designations. Consistent with other carsharing programs, users will be charged for use of a vehicle during stops outside the homearea.

The expansion to Southeast Seattle will certainly be a welcome change. Exclusion of these areas was a point of early concern when the company launched, at least in social justice and urbanism social media circles. Part of that is because predecessor carsharing companies made Southeast Seattle communities a lower priority for early coverage. However, the companies eventually expanded to reach all areas of the city. In July, GIG Car Share stated that the extent of the homearea is “based on market research, demand, population density and accessibility to transit and retail.”

The City’s free-floating carshare permit conditions require GIG Car Share–and any other future competitors–to provide homeareas that include the entire city within two years of starting operations. The permit conditions also place no limit on the number of cars. At the peak of its heyday, Car2Go operated 750 vehicles on city streets and covered the entire city within two years, which coincided with fleet expansion to the maximum allowed at that time.

Seattle has been fortunate amidst a gruelling pandemic to also have private bikeshare and scootershare companies launching services. In the summer, 500 Jump e-bikes were relaunched under new ownership by Lime and followed by 500 Lime standup e-scooters in mid-September. In October and November, two newcomer scootershare companies also joined the micromobility network with Link providing 150 standup e-scooters and Wheels offering 100 seated e-scooters.

Both companies plan to scale up to the 500 e-scooter cap per operator in the coming months and all four scootershare and bikeshare programs cover the entire city, though with some restrictions on where e-bikes and e-scooters can be parked to end a trip. However, e-scooters from Link and Wheels still seem to be heavily concentrated in areas like Capitol Hill, Downtown Seattle, and West Seattle, which may suggest an active rebalancing strategy being used by the companies to target prospective users.

Pricing somewhat varies between the competitors with Wheels being the least expensive despite having perhaps the most interesting product:

• Lime (both Jump bike and Lime scooters) is $1 to unlock and $0.36 per minute;
• Link is $1 to unlock and $0.35 per minute; and
• Wheels is $0.35 per minute.

As far as integration with trip planning tools goes, Jump and Lime are the only ones aggregated into services like the Transit app. Perhaps in time though the other micromobility competitors and GIG Car Share will join in with their live geolocation data to make decisions easier for users.

For now, the shared mobility market is growing again in Seattle after a chaotic two years that saw a boom and sharp contraction. With the pandemic greatly changing transportation habits, there is reason to believe that individualized community mobility options may be an appealing choice as people work closer to home and seek to avoid more congested alternatives. Widespread vaccination in 2021 and an end to the pandemic, of course, could change the equation a bit. So it is hard to predict exactly where things are headed, but the venture capitalists and boosters seem very confident in the services. Time will tell.

The post GIG Car Share Expands Homearea and Micromobility Options Grow in Seattle first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) also selected Wheels and LINK to participate in the pilot and seek permits for scootershare release. Once they get their permits, the two companies will also get to release up to 500 scooters each in Seattle in the next few weeks, with an upper limit of 2,000 scooters each if things go well. Lime received their permit first and is subsequently launching their scooters first. Wheels is expecting to launch in a month, according to a spokesperson, while LINK is targeting “mid-fall.”

In their press release, Lime positioned their e-scooters as “a reliable solution for short and medium-length trips, as well as for trips not served by public transit.” The company hopes that the scootershare pilot will help reduce car usage with an appealing mode of transportation, augment transit with another last-mile option, and allow for safer, socially distanced, and more sustainable travel.

Lime will price their fleet of scooters equally to their fleet of bicycles. With rates of $1 to unlock and 36 cents per minute. To increase financially accessibility of the scooter-share program, the company has a Lime Access program that gives those qualified five free rides per day–the rides will be free in they come under 30 minutes each.

The pilot requires that 10% of each provider’s fleet be dedicated to equity in access. Scooters with seats will also be featured to give people with mobility impairments a viable option. The program will also fund SDOT’s partnership with Outdoors for All Foundation and continue free adaptive cycle rentals for people with disabilities.

For safety, SDOT worked with medical experts at the University of Washington and Public Health—Seattle & King County to outline safety standards for the pilot. Companies will have to provide safe scooters, a plan to have riders access helmets, and speed limits of 8 mph for first time riders and 15 mph thereafter. SDOT is also continuing work to lower speed limits to 25 mph on major roads and constructing protected bike lanes around the city.

The parking situation for scootershare had been a concern for some Seattle City Councilmembers and stakeholders. To address a concern that e-scooters may end up just parking on and obstructing sideways, SDOT has built 3,000 parking spaces for bikes and scooters in the past four years and released an app and guidance. It remains to be seen if that will be enough.

While scootershare didn’t get up and running for the peak summer, fall may offer some pleasant months for the program to get its footing. If you see the scooter fleet multiply up to the 6,000 maximum allowed in second phase of the pilot, assume that the pilot is a success.

The featured image is courtesy of Lime’s Jonathan Hopkins.

The post Lime Rolls Out Scootershare in Seattle, LINK and Wheels a Month Away first appeared on The Urbanist.