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Lime carried record 57,000 trips the day of the Seahawks parade, on par with daily traffic over the Aurora Bridge

Lime riders took more than 57,000 trips February 11, the day of the Seahawks parade downtown. After adding Bird’s 2,100 rides, the 59,300 total of shared bike and scooter rides was on par with the average daily traffic across the Aurora Bridge.

The only pieces of roadway infrastructure in Seattle that carry more than 60,000 trips per day are I-5 (250,000), I-90 (137,000), the West Seattle Bridge (73,000), the Aurora Bridge (61,000), and Mercer Street (61,000). Link Light Rail carried more than 200,000 trips, and Washington State Ferries carried 46,000. It’s amazing that shared bikes and scooters are carrying trip counts comparable to such massive pieces of transportation infrastructure, especially when you consider that these companies actually pay the city for the privilege. The shared bikes and scooters are also complimentary to our transit services, often helping people access transit stops that would require too long of a walk otherwise. They help further actualize the public transit investments we are already making, expanding their reach to more homes and destinations.

There’s no comprehensive way to measure how many people rode their personal bikes and scooters to the parade, but the number was far above normal. Fremont Bridge bike and scooter trips were up about 40% over other days the same week. We have even less data about the number of people who simply walked to the parade.

The parade gave Seattle a rare opportunity to stress test our transportation network, and it’s clear that walking, biking and transit are the resilient options to keep our city moving under unusual circumstances. The parade was a celebration, but you could also imagine it as a disaster simulation in which we need to move a lot of people amid a significant disruption to our city’s infrastructure (in this case, 4th Avenue through downtown became impassible). Whether we are planning for major events, future increases in daily commuting or responding to a disaster, it’s important to prioritize our resilient modes of transportation.

Lime is the big winner from the parade, aside from the Seahawks of course. The company showed that its service thrives in the most difficult transportation conditions. The numbers, which are also impressive on non-parade days, further support expanding the availability of designated bike and scooter parking areas such as SDOT’s bike corral plan for Pioneer Square. On-street corrals fit perfectly near street corners where car parking is already illegal, improving crosswalk safety by keeping sight lines clear while also providing space for parking bikes and scooters away from crowded sidewalks. SDOT plans to use the special Pioneer Square Preservation Board-approved bike rack design in the corrals, but the board is still pushing back on the plan.

Bike and scooter share is a serious part of Seattle’s transportation system, and it will play a significant role in getting people to and from World Cup events.

Despite all the attention and investments, Uber, Lyft and robo taxis collapse under the same conditions that snarl roadways for personal cars. Robo taxis, which get so much attention and investment, actually block roadways during disaster scenarios. If a Lime fails to unlock, then the user needs to walk or take transit instead. If a robo taxi stops working, it becomes a giant roadblock. If the robo taxi network stops working, they become a fleet of roadblocks across the city. Imagine that happening after a major earthquake, blocking buses, emergency vehicles and people driving private cars. Even outside a disaster scenario, robo taxis also snarl roadways near venues following major events as many people all call them to the same area at the same time. It’s not a solution that scales well in a dense city.

It’s so odd to watch so much attention and money pour into concepts that keep failing to address our transportation issues while we have this other solution that is succeeding beyond anyone’s imagination but keeps getting ignored. Pronto bike share carried 278,000 rides during its two and a half years of operation a decade ago, and Lime just carried 20% of that total in a single day. This is worth celebrating.

#SEAbikes #Seattle

The Lime + transit hack explained: How to get a Lime ride and 3 transit tickets for $1.66*

Yesterday, I took a Lime scooter to U District Station, then took light rail to Mountlake Terrace, then back to the U District several hours later, and it only cost $1.66 total.* I did not cheat or dodge any fares, and I did not use any low-income discount transit programs such as ORCA Lift. Instead I used the confusing Transit GO app and jumped through some oddly specific hoops to activate a pair of in-app promotions that turned my $1.66 Lime ride into rewards worth $10 in transit tickets. Users can activate these promotions up to five times per week.

The catch is that you are going to have to deal with some headaches getting it all set up, and using the Transit GO app is not nearly as convenient as beeping an ORCA card. Here’s how it works:

• Download the Transit GO app for iOS or Android and create an account.
• Download the Lime app (Bird should also work, though I have not tested it) and create or log into your account.
• In the Transit GO app, go to the Rewards tab and connect your Lime account. This process may be annoying.
• Ride a Lime bike or scooter at least 0.25 miles to one of these specific parking areas and end your trip like normal. This only works in those exact designated parking spots. To get the $1.66 price, you must subscribe to Lime Prime ($6/mo) and your ride must also be shorter than 5 minutes. The promotions also work with regular Lime or Bird pricing.
• If you have parked correctly, you will receive 300 points in the Transit GO app. There is no notification that anything has happened, but you should see your reward balance increase by 300. You must then redeem your points for a transit ticket from within the Rewards tab of the app (light rail costs 300 points, King County Metro costs 275) and activate it within 24 hours of your eligible bike/scooter ride.
• If you don’t see your ticket in the Use tab, tap “refresh screen.” Activate the ticket before riding.
• After activating your ticket, you will get another 700 points added to your rewards balance. The app says you can use this for a Lime or Bird trip, though you can also just keep buying transit tickets with it.

A light rail day pass is 600 points so if you are going to be traveling up and down the 1 and 2 lines a lot you can just get one of those. You can also use points for tickets on the King County Water Taxi, Kitsap Transit and Fast Ferries, the Sounder, or even the Seattle Streetcar. It appears that Bird users can maybe stockpile their reward points as account credit (I have not tried this yet, so comment below if you have) while Lime only offers $7 discounts on a ride for 700 points, which should be good for about a half hour of ride time. However, when I tried to paste the promo code into the Lime app, it said the code had already expired even though I had just redeemed it moments earlier. Maybe this function is broken? I’ll update if I learn more, but for now I’ll just use the reward points on transit tickets.

This is all possible due to some kind of partnership between the transit agencies, the bike and scooter companies, and a company called Velocia that specializes in transit reward programs. A quote attributed to King County Metro on the Velocia website states, “Velocia has provided King County Metro with a unique opportunity to deliver personalized incentive to riders, with the flexibility to test various incentives and determine which campaigns most effectively increase ridership.”

Using the Transit GO app is a horrible experience up to the point that you get free transit, which is obviously great. Nearly every review from recent years on the iOS app store is 1 star, with people complaining of bugs, difficultly making payments and general confusion. I ran into several bugs trying to log in with an existing Transit GO account and linking my Lime account, but I persisted and got them working after repeat attempts. Then once you redeem a transit ticket, it doesn’t include transfers between agencies. You must redeem separate tickets if you are going from light rail to a bus or vice versa. If you are simply looking for a way to buy transit fare, I highly recommend getting an ORCA card and using the myORCA app to add money or set-up autopay. But if you are looking for a cheap transit hack, well, Transit GO has got you covered in this highly specific scenario.

The hack, and “hack” really does feel like the right word here even though it is all working as designed, is not even new. The reward promotions I used have been offered off and on for several years. I wrote a story about a similar promo back in 2022 but when I went to test it out for a follow-up story I found the Transit GO app so buggy that I just gave up and never wrote it. But with Lime’s new subscription-based pricing scheme, the prospect of getting multiple transit rides and a Lime ride for $1.66 inspired me to give it another try. Even paying the more common $3.14 (after tax) for a Lime ride up to 20 minutes is still on par with a single adult transit fare. Had I used my standard adult fare ORCA card yesterday like I usually do, the journey would have cost me $7.66 ($1.66 for Lime + $6 for two $3 adult fares). If I had not subscribed to Lime Prime ($6/mo), the trip would have cost about $8.88. Not only did my trip cost a fraction of full price, but I was left with a surplus of 400 reward points to use later.

Do I recommend trying this yourself? If you have the patience to deal with a buggy app, then yes. Get in on it while it lasts. Combining bike/scooter share with transit is amazing, and this promo somehow makes it cheaper to take Lime or Bird to transit than it is to walk there. Does any of this make sense? Not a lick. I would much prefer if the pricing were somewhere in the middle of full price and the promo price but the user process was easy and straight-forward. It would be amazing to be able to beep my ORCA card to start a bike ride, and then maybe some fare transfer could occur behind the scenes. The idea of bike/scooter fares and transit fares having some kind of transfer synergy is great, and the bike/scooter companies and transit agencies all have incentives to encourage linking the two modes (in many places around the world, transit agencies run the bike share system). Tying the reward to using a designated parking space is also a decent idea to encourage better parking, though I think they could ease up the restrictions a bit and give the reward for any ride that ends with a properly parked bike or scooter near a transit station. It’s not obvious to users which specific spots count, and I was stymied on my first attempt after ending my ride at a bike rack across the street from the station that did not count and gave no reward points.

* The $1.66 price is what it cost me on that day for that trip, but I also paid $6 for a monthly Lime Prime subscription. To get a final price, I would have to take that $6 and factor a portion of it into the cost of every ride I take during the month. So the actual cost of the ride is $1.66 plus some variable amount. If a user used the promo the maximum number of 5 times per week, then each ride would cost about $1.93.

#SEAbikes #Seattle

After pricing overhaul, 20-minute bike and scooter rides now cost the same as transit fare for LimePrime subscribers

Lime’s newest pricing scheme makes it far more cost-effective for regular users to use their bikes and scooters for short trips, making the service much more useful as an everyday mode of transportation. The new scheme puts the cost of a 20-minute ride on par with a full-price adult transit single-ride fare of $3 while lowering the cost of rides under 5 minutes to $1.50. The pricing change comes as the number of bike and scooter rides in Seattle in the past year topped 10 million and continue to rise, according to data the company submits to SDOT.

Subscribers to the $6 per month LimePrime membership now pay a flat rate of $2.85 plus tax for rides up to 20 minutes with no unlock fee. That’s about the price of a 4-minute ride under their regular pricing ($1 to unlock plus 47¢ per minute). LimePrime rides up to 5 minutes will be $1.50, and rides longer than 20 minutes are charged a reduced rate of 28¢ per minute. Under the default rate, a 20-minute ride would cost $10.40, 3.7 times higher than the LimePrime rate.

Let’s say someone lives a 20-minute bike or scooter ride from a light rail station, the most favorable condition for the new pricing scheme. They could now spend $120 per month to take Lime to and from the station five days a week. That’s not exactly cheap, but under the previous per-minute pricing scheme the same use would have cost $416.

The default per-minute rate is rarely the cheapest option anymore because the 47¢ per minute rate and $1 unlock fees add up very fast whether you’re taking one longer ride or many shorter rides. At 17 minutes under the standard rate, a user has paid the equivalent of one month of LimePrime plus the $2.85 fee for the trip.

Trips under 5 minutes will cost $1.50 instead of $3.35 under regular pricing, which opens up some interesting use cases. I used to love taking the old $1 bike share bikes short little distances around the neighborhood, like going from north Broadway businesses to Pike/Pine businesses or from the Rainier Valley light rail stations on MLK Way to destinations along Rainier Ave. These aren’t the longest walks, but it’s a small joy to just hop on a bike to shrink the neighborhood. I wouldn’t pay $3.35 to bike a half mile, but I might pay $1.50.

The math gets a little more complicated when comparing to the LimePass minute bundles. For example, a single 30-minute ride would cost $5.25 with LimePrime pricing but $7 with a 30-minute LimePass bundle. However, three 10-minute rides in one day would cost $8.55 with LimePrime compared to $7 with a LimePass bundle. So if you rarely take Lime, then the minute bundles are still probably the better option (and the 30-minute bundle is nearly always better than paying the default rate). Someone visiting town for a week who is planning to rely largely on biking to get around may also be better off buying the $34 bundle to get 3 hours of riding time and have no worries about forgetting to cancel the monthly subscription. If you really want to pay as little as possible on a long ride, I guess you could stop every 20 minutes to end your ride and then start it again since the effective rate on a 20-minute LimePrime ride is about 14¢ per minute.

Note that people who qualify for a reduced cost ORCA Lift card also qualify for Lime Access, which at 75¢ to unlock plus 1¢ per minute is much more affordable than any of these other pricing options. If transportation costs are a burden on your budget, definitely check to see if you qualify. The threshold is 200% of the federal poverty level, which is higher than many other assistance programs.

The monthly LimePrime subscription is another potential downside of the new pricing scheme. If you end up not really using Lime often, then that’s $6 down the drain every month until you cancel it. The business model for gyms is for people to pay for memberships that they rarely use, and that’s a risk for LimePrime, too. More people committing financially to a single provider could also further erode competition in the market. Currently, Bird is the only other company operating in Seattle, but that could feasibly change in the future. If enough of the user base has a monthly financial commitment with a single company, that could make it harder for another provider to enter the Seattle market. It’s not usually a good thing for consumers when a single company has too much market share because they can then start hiking prices and reducing the quality of service if they no longer need to worry about losing customers. The situation is a little different with Lime since they are also competing with some heavy-hitting and well-established competitors like the bus and walking.

If Seattle gets to the point where Lime is the only viable provider (they are arguably already there considering they have reported carrying about 97% of bike and scooter share trips in Seattle in 2025), then perhaps an open permit system would no longer make the most sense for the city. Lime carries a massive number of trips around Seattle, and it is an important part of city’s transportation system. If Lime were instead granted a contract or license as the sole provider, the change could open up options for the city to negotiate more public benefits such as investing in a public-private roadmap for shifting to corral-only parking. This could finally deal with the problem of bikes and scooters blocking walkways and curb ramps by only allowing users to end trips within designated parking areas. Such a concept would only work with a massive expansion of bike and scooter parking. I don’t know the exact density required to make it work without significantly degrading the bike and scooter experience, but I imagine it could be on the scale of creating a bike and scooter parking corral at every single intersection in every business district. Residential parking is maybe even trickier due to the sheer scale of how many residential intersections there are in the city. However, there is an added safety benefit to physically restricting parking 20 feet before every street corner (30 if there’s a stop light or sign) as is already state law (with very few exceptions, street corners are crosswalks whether marked with stripes or not). I know in my neighborhood this law is never followed, and cars parked too close to the intersection can create safety hazards by blocking sight lines (“They darted out from behind a parked car!”).

To deal with the overwhelming scale of the task, perhaps the city and Lime could partner on a progressive roll-out concept to go neighborhood-by-neighborhood implementing new parking areas and intersection daylighting improvements along with new scooter and bike share parking restrictions. It might take a while to get the whole city, but work could be phased according to the need and resources available.

#SEAbikes #Seattle

Catalog update for Mosey Parker: 919 #bikeshare systems, Veo (US) added.

#micromobility #urbanmobility

https://moseyparker.com