Another dockless scooter company is leaving the city of Atlanta, nearly a year and a half after officially launching its vehicles on local streets.
San Francisco scooter startup Lime has confirmed with Atlanta Inno that it is leaving the city. Axios reports the company is laying off 100 employees, or about 14% of its workforce and exiting 12 markets around the world in an attempt to make 2020 a profitable year.
Atlanta is just one of the number of cities on the Lime chopping block. Lime sites "underperforming" as the reason for ceasing operations in 12 markets. In addition to exiting Atlanta, Lime will end operations in Phoenix, San Diego and San Antonio in the U.S. Latin America will experience the largest number of Lime exits, including the cities of Bogota, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Lima, Puerto Vallarta, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Linz, Austria is the only European market on the exit list.
“As part of our path to profitability, Lime has made the difficult decision to exit Atlanta and focus our resources on markets that allow us to meet our ambitious goals for 2020," a Lime spokesperson told Atlanta Inno. "We’re grateful to our team members, riders, Juicers and communities who supported us throughout this journey. We appreciate the partnership we’ve enjoyed with Atlanta and remain hopeful we can reintroduce Lime back into the community when the time is right.”
Lime President Joe Kraus told Axios the company is gearing up to be "the first next-generation mobility company to be profitable," which begs the question: is the dockless mobility movement a profitable endeavor?
Bird, Lyft, Scoot and Skip have all reported layoffs or market exits in recent months, some despite new funding like Bird's $278 million round in October.
What started as a flood of dockless options in Atlanta from the summer of 2018 to the winter of 2019 has now become an outlaw town for scooter companies, with a number of exits, a nighttime ban, a freeze on new permits in the city and a few total bans of dockless vehicles in suburbs around the metro.
In the months since Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms imposed a nighttime ban on all dockless vehicles in response to four scooter-related deaths during the summer of 2019, Lyft scooters, Gotcha scooters, JUMP Bikes have left the city.
According to Lime, these restrictions and regulations did not create a profitable environment. After city officials allowed the scooter market to over-saturate by permitting nine dockless companies without proper regulation implemented, they also implemented significant impound fees and curtailed operating hours that rendered business in Atlanta futile, the company said.
To date, 15 cities in the Atlanta metro 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.
The news comes just before the General Assembly 2020 session will begin on Jan. 13. A state Senate study committee recently released a repot on scooter policies and developments that lawmakers plan to use as a launching pad for discussions on dockless vehicle regulation, according to the Marietta Daily Journal.
