Bird and Lime hit 20m rides as e-scooter market heats up
Bird and Lime have together racked up more than 20m rides to date, demonstrating consumers’ rapid adoption of new bike- and scooter-sharing services.
Lime’s customers have taken 11.5m bike and electric scooter rides since it launched 14 months ago, the San Francisco-based company said.
Its biggest rival Bird, which focuses only on e-scooters, topped 10m rides in its first 12 months on the streets.
The two companies announced the milestones in almost simultaneous press releases on Thursday morning.
Each service is also now available in 100 markets, they both said. After racing across North America, they are now expanding into European cities such as Paris and Brussels too. Lime said that it was planning to launch in another 50 more cities around the world before the end of the year.
Together, Bird and Lime have raised almost $1bn in venture funding in little more than a year, ranking them among the fastest-growing “unicorn” start-ups.
Bird also revealed that it has 2.1m unique “riders” who travel an average of 1.4 miles with each scooter trip.
Bird chief executive Travis VanderZanden, who previously worked at both Uber and Lyft, said that car-hailing apps facilitated about 1m rides in their first year. Bird hit the 1m rides point in April.
Scooters’ more accelerated expansion has rattled lawmakers in some cities, with critics arguing that they present a safety hazard.
“In our second year, we’re doubling down on our efforts to collaborate and partner with cities so that they can knit e-scooters into their transportation infrastructure,” Mr VanderZanden said in a letter on Thursday.
While Lime and Bird have a sizeable head start, competition is looming on all sides.
Uber and Lyft are launching their own scooter rental services, while rival start-ups are popping up around the world too. Last week, Brazil-based Yellow raised $63m to expand its bike and scooter rentals service around Latin America.