Lime pursues car sharing in Seattle, where rentable electric scooters are banned, and says it plans to add electric vehicles as another option to its app “soon”
Monica Nickelsburg / GeekWire :
Context & Ripple Effects
Seattle's ban on rentable electric scooters has shut Lime out of the fastest-growing micromobility format in one of its home markets, so the company is routing around the restriction with cars instead — a fleet of 50 vehicles ramping toward 1,500 cars by early 2019. The move lands mid-race: Lyft had just entered shared scooters itself with its Denver launch, and Uber and Lyft were both lining up applications for San Francisco's scooter pilot.
First-order effects
- Lime gets a revenue-generating presence in Seattle despite the scooter ban, and its app becomes multi-modal on the company's own terms rather than waiting on city permission for two-wheelers.
Second-order effects
- Lyft and Uber, already competing head-to-head in scooters in Denver and San Francisco pilot bids, now face Lime as a car-sharing rival too — pushing both to treat car sharing as part of the same mobility bundle rather than a separate business.
Third-order effects
- If cities keep banning dockless scooters while allowing cars, micromobility operators will standardize on whatever vehicle class each regulator permits, making the app — not the vehicle — the durable product and city-by-city permitting the binding constraint.
The trend: Micromobility operators are becoming multi-vehicle platforms that swap product mix market by market based on local regulation, with Lime's UK bike expansion (Milton Keynes) showing the same playbook abroad.