Having sealed a deal to expand New York City’s Citi Bike, Lyft announced Thursday that it is now the largest bike-share service in the United States.
Although the ride-hailing company agreed in July to buy Motivate, an operator that reportedly dominates 80% of bike rentals in America, the deal didn’t become official until Thursday morning when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced New York City’s agreement for Lyft to dramatically expand Citi Bike. Motivate is Citi Bike’s parent company.
Techcrunch reporter Kate Clark tweeted photos of forthcoming Lyft-branded bikes and scooters. (Lyft scooters are currently available in Denver, Colorado and Santa Monica, California.)
https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/1068185964219002880
“New York City is one of the world’s great biking cities—and it’s about to get even better,” said Mayor de Blasio in a statement. “This expansion means tens of thousands more New Yorkers are going to have a fast and inexpensive way to get around their city. It also means much more reliable service for all the riders who already use Citi Bike.”
Lyft’s newly inked deal promises to invest $100 million in the city’s biking infrastructure, doubling its service area and tripling its number of available bikes to 40,000 in the next five years.
But N.Y.C. isn’t the only city that will be impacted by the Motivate acquisition. According to Lyft’s blog post, it will also be providing rides for “Ford GoBike (San Francisco Bay area), Divvy (Chicago), Bluebikes (Boston Metro area), Capital Bikeshare (Washington, D.C. metro area), Biketown (Portland), CoGo (Columbus, Ohio), and Nice Ride (Minneapolis).”
A Lyft spokesperson told The Verge that a “significant portion” of the new fleet of bikes will be electric bikes and indicated that it won’t be dock-less, noting, “Citi Bike has been successful as a dock-based system and we want to build on that success.”
Last April, Uber bought competing electric bike-sharing company Jump, which is dock-less.
