Anyone who steps outside in Seattle will likely come across a yellow, orange or green bicycle quietly sitting along the sidewalk, waiting for them to pull out their phone and unlock a rideshare bike via an app, pedaling off to their chosen destination.
There’s potentially 12,000 of these bikes spread out across town, the City of Seattle has issued contracts to all three bike sharing companies--Ofo, Spin, and LimeBike--that allow them up to 4,000 station-free bikes on the street at any given time.
Somehow the shared idea of bikes among the community sometimes brings out the worst in people though.
You might find them parked in inopportune places by hurried riders creating an impediment to passing pedestrians or motorists, other times they’re ditched by mischievous citizens in local waterways, on busy roundabouts, or could even be found hanging from a street sign with or without the saddle they once had for comfortable riding.
Late last month bikeshare users also received alerts that some bikes had been vandalized, rendering them a safety risk for people in a downtown area filled with hills. The brakes were cut on two of the three bikeshare companies, Spin and LimeBike, as reported by Geekwire.
LimeBike, one of the companies taking Seattle’s bike share market for a test ride, employs a team of 45 operations members who help ensure their fleet of regular and electronic bikes people are using are in good condition.
From inside their unassuming north Seattle warehouse, skilled mechanics perform the bigger fixes on the bikes, like replacing cut brake cables. Two other separate versions of field operations specialists are out in the city on company bikes or in cargo vans dropping off fresh bikes while collecting damaged ones. They are performing spot checks on the fleet while continually trying to move them into locations that will be most conducive for riders, as well as respectful to pedestrians, business owners, and residents who might find them in their way.
“We see some level of problem with vandalism and theft,” says, Gabriel Scheer, Director of Strategic Development at LimeBike. “Most people are really great, they take care of these shared assets, but then some don’t. Our business model accommodates for that.”
Overall LimeBike is the youngest of the companies competing for the city’s business with their first bikes on the road last year. In other cities, their competitor Ofo has been around since 2014, and Spin since 2016. Despite being the newcomer they’ve already grown fast since entering the bike share industry.
“We formed the company in January, and our first bikes were hitting the pavement by June last year,” says Scheer, who was a founding member of Pronto Cycle Share, Seattle’s now-defunct docked bike share program, a non-profit turned Seattle Department of Transportation owned program under Mayor Ed Murray. “It’s been a crazy incredible growth curve with the dockless bike share model, we’re now in 50 markets globally.”
Despite their early success, they are grappling with some social issues.
Their bikes have turned up in various homeless encampments around Seattle taken by individuals, which is leading the company to ponder a solution that will help address the homelessness crisis in its own way. "We're working on a solution, the Lime Community Program for low-income populations, although it's not quite where it needs to be yet," says Scheer, who explaining the company isn't actively addressing the return or reporting them stolen to local law enforcement. "It's a bigger mobility issue for these folks, it needs to be addressed as part of the bigger issue at hand for the city."
Looking at an ever-growing city with some of the worst traffic in the nation, only to get worse when demolishment of the viaduct gets underway, their mission is to change Seattle transportation. Once the current contract with the city terminates they will be rolling out a new fleet of scooters for pedestrians to zip around downtown streets, dispersed and collected on a daily basis for maintenance by the team.
Only time will tell if bike (and eventually scooter) share will change the way we move about the city.
