Layoffs happened at Lyft and Boston wasn’t spared.
The San Francisco-based on-demand transportation company, which at the beginning of March filed the regulatory documents to go public, reportedly laid off around 50 people in its bike and scooter division across a number of cities, including Boston, San Francisco and New York. The overall cuts show that the bike and scooter space is competitive, as the cuts mostly impacted people who had joined Lyft when it acquired the electric bike-sharing startup Motivate.
Lyft announced the acquisition of Motivate in July 2018, with early reports valuing the potential merger around $250 million, and finalized the deal in November last year. New York-based Motivate is one of the largest bike-share operators in the U.S., with programs including Boston’s Blue Bikes and New York’s Citi Bike.
Blue Bikes’ corporate membership program is the largest of all Motivate-operated systems, according to Motivate; launched in 2011, it operates over 215 stations and 2,000 bikes in Boston, Cambridge, Brookline and Somerville.
As of Monday morning, on its site Lyft has a single job posting in Boston for a special operations manager. In its bikes and scooter division, the company has over 70 openings across a variety of locations including New York and San Francisco.
Separately, Lyft is working with MIT-born startup nuTonomy in Boston to give members of the public rides in self-driving cars. The city is also planning to pilot pickups and drop-offs spots for Lyft and Uber riders, with the first one blocks away from Fenway Park.
