Another scooter company has announced its exit from the Atlanta market, the third to do so since the nighttime ban was placed on dockless vehicles in the metro.
Ride-hailing giant Lyft will be pulling its scooters from Atlanta and five other markets, including Nashville, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix and Columbus, according to TechCrunch.
“We’re grateful to our scooter riders in Atlanta as well as our partners in Atlanta city government," a Lyft spokesperson told Atlanta Inno. "We’re shifting resources and will be ending scooter operations on November 22. We look forward to continuing to provide riders with other modes of reliable transportation.”
A Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch the decision was made to focus on the markets where Lyft "can have the biggest impact."
The company said cities with the greatest population density are the best for micromobility, whereas the markets it's pulling out of are not.
Lyft will continue to operate scooters in Austin, Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Arlington, Minneapolis, Denver, Miami, Los Angeles, Montgomery County, Oakland, San Diego, San Jose and Santa Monica.
About 20 employees from its bikes and scooters team, which consists of about 400 people total, in these markets will lose their jobs. Contractors who pick up and charge Lyft scooters around the cities will also be out of work.
The company has not said whether the City of Atlanta's regulations on dockless vehicles were part of its decision to leave the city. Over the summer, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ordered a nighttime ban on all dockless vehicles within the city limits amid a number of deaths involving scooters. Riders cannot operate dockless bikes and scooters between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. Curbed Atlanta reports the city has the highest number of e-scooter-related fatalities in the nation.
The city also has put a hold on accepting any new permits for dockless vehicles and scooters indefinitely. Boaz Bikes was the last scooter company to launch dockless vehicles since the freeze went into effect.
Since the rulings against scooter companies came down from city hall, Atlanta has lost three different dockless options: Gotcha, JUMP Bikes and now, Lyft.
In September, Bottoms announced a $5 million-plus plan to make safer streets for scooters, e-bikes and other vehicles. In October, witnesses appeared in front of Georgia lawmakers to discuss the difficulty of imposing statewide regulations on electric scooters, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported.
Tortoise, a Mountain View, Calif.-based startup working with scooter companies to autonomously move their vehicles across a city and reposition themselves without the need of a physical rider, began working out of Peachtree Corners in October.
To date, 15 cities have passed ordinances to regulate e-scooters and other dockless vehicles since they came to the state in 2018. The City of Tucker was the latest to ban scooters from its streets. At least 12 of those municipalities have announced a temporary moratorium on the e-scooters or banned them outright. No county governments in Georgia have adopted e-scooter regulations. Some of the primary concerns about the e-scooters are safety, blocking access and oversaturation.
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