Start date set for Lime bikeshare program in Spokane

If you see 200 lime green bikes and 100 similarly hued scooters suddenly appear on the streets of downtown Spokane, don’t be alarmed. It’s just a sign that 21st century bikesharing has arrived in the Lilac City.

Lime electric bikes and scooters will be available in Spokane on Sept. 4, the beginning of a two-month trial for a high-tech bikeshare program.

The pilot project will be done exclusively with Lime, a Silicon Valley-based bicycle and scooter sharing company. The bikes and scooters are electric, giving some assist to riders. And they’re dockless, meaning they can be parked anywhere and have electronic “frame locks” that release only after users register on a smartphone app with a credit card.

During the pilot, the city will evaluate the program, solicit and review public feedback and determine regulations for bike sharing in Spokane, rules that are expected to be in place by spring 2019.

Brandon Blankenagel, a city engineer who worked to bring the program to Spokane, said the city will release an online survey about the bikeshare after the program launches.

While Spokane experimented with shared bikes in the 1990s, the new “smart” generation of bikeshares is far more sophisticated. In dockless programs like Lime’s, the bikes and scooters are not secured in a central kiosk, but can be locked anywhere around town.

To use Lime’s bikes and scooters, users must install the Lime app on their phone and register their credit card. The app will show a map of available bikes. At the bike, users will open the app, scan the QR code on the bike and the lock will automatically release. When done riding, cyclists or scooter-users manually lock the vehicle and they’re done. Their phone logs the time spent on the bike, and users are charged accordingly. For Lime, that means $1 for every half hour.

The city of Portland recently launched a shared electric scooter program. According to BikePortland.org, there were 47,836 trips taken on the e-scooters during the first two weeks of the city’s program. Considering there were only 500 scooters available, that equates to nearly seven rides per scooter per day. Portland now has 2,000 scooters and three companies – Lime, Bird and Skip – operating citywide.