Update: Investing in Bikeshare in the Bay Area and Bringing Ebikes Back!

We’re excited to share an update on our continued investment in bikeshare in the Bay Area and the return of ebikes to our system: we’ve reached an agreement with SFMTA that lays out a clear path for the city’s bikeshare system to serve more people with more, better bikes. And beyond San Francisco, the regional network will soon see the return of ebikes and continued expansion.

While we’ve been in discussions with City partners, we have simultaneously been hard at work on getting our ebikes back in service. After identifying the root cause of the battery issues, we made the decision to work with a different battery supplier. We’re now receiving new batteries, testing them and reassembling ebikes. Ebikes will return to the Bay Wheels system in the coming weeks and months (see below for more details).

Through this public-private partnership, Lyft will continue to make long-term investments in expanding bikeshare equitably and in developing world-class ebikes. Here are the details across the region:

In San Francisco:

• Over the next six months, we will deploy 4,000 ebikes, in addition to our network of classic, docked bikes. Beginning in mid-December, we’ll add hundreds of ebikes each week, so that the Bay Wheels fleet will be majority ebikes by the beginning of next year.
• We will provide better service and increased reliability for our riders. Specifically, we will deploy multiple models of ebikes, so that the impact of potential hardware issues is mitigated. We’ll comply with more stringent Key Performance Indicators that will measure bike availability and fleet size to provide better service and increased reliability for our riders. If we can’t meet the requirements, riders may have access to ebikes from different operators. In addition, we will maintain a standalone bikeshare app, which will include access to ebikes by the end of the year.

In San Jose:

• We will redeploy ebikes the week of November 18th, under the same agreement we came to with the City of San Jose prior to removing the ebikes from service.

In the East Bay:

• We are working individually with the Cities of Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville to reach agreements that reflect the needs of their communities and will allow us to continue our long-term investment. We hope to complete those agreements as soon as possible so that we can reintroduce ebikes.

We appreciate our riders’ patience while we have worked to bring ebikes back to Bay Area streets as quickly and safely as possible, and we can’t wait to see you zooming up hills. Thanks for being part of our community.