Lime's Electric Scooters Have Come to Chicago

One of the most popular and expanding forms of transportation has made its debut in Chicago.

Lime, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company that provides dockless bike and electric scooter transportation, introduced its scooters to the Windy City over the weekend. Forty of Lime’s electric scooters were available at the city’s Sheffield Music Fest and Gardens Walk event in Lincoln Park.

The scooters at the event are part of a larger pop-up demo series that Lime is doing as it introduces Chicagoans to its transportation tech, according to company spokesperson Becky Carroll.

Carroll said the scooter rollout last weekend was separate from the city’s dockless bike-sharing pilot, which Lime is participating in, adding that the pop-up demos are being done in partnerships with private event and festival operators, not city government. However, Lime did inform the city it was launching its scooters in Chicago last weekend.

Lime, which has raised $467 million in venture capital funding, will continue to bring its scooters to neighborhood events that take place on weekends for the rest of the summer, with events being decided on a weekend-to-weekend basis. Carroll said the best way to locate a scooter is to check the Lime smartphone app on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday.

The scooters, which reach 20 mph and are designed to be ridden in bike lanes, can be found and unlocked for $1 using Lime's app. Each minute the scooter is in use costs 15 cents. When a ride is over, users park the scooters on a sidewalk near a curb and end the ride on the app, which automatically locks its wheels.

Lime’s electric scooter launch in Chicago comes as the city is in the middle of its dockless bike-sharing pilot, which launched in May. Dockless bikes have been a difficult method of transportation to introduce in cities since riders can leave them virtually anywhere, cluttering public spaces and being subjected to damage or theft.

To combat it, the city has begun regulating how the bikes should be stored when they’re not in use. The policies now require that dockless bike-sharing companies operating more than 50 bikes have to equip with their bikes with locks so they can be secured to a bike rack. As a result, Beijing-based Ofo dropped out of the pilot earlier this month, citing the city’s stringent policies.

The controversy around dockless bikes could extend to electric scooters since they also operate in a dockless fashion. Cities like Milwaukee, Nashville and San Francisco have all had problems with e-scooter tech and have cracked down on it in different ways, either trying to heavily regulate it or ban it entirely. Lime slowly introducing their scooters in conjunction with private events could be its way of avoiding strict regulations the city might try to impose.

Regardless of what happens next, Carroll said riders over the weekend seemed to be receptive to the e-scooters.

“Each scooter was used multiple times throughout each day and lots of folks asked where else they could find them in the city,” Carroll said in a statement to Chicago Inno.