Shared vehicles are just a Lime, Skip, and a Jump away
It was a two-wheeled, electric, ridin’ purple people mover! What in the world are we talking about? Bikes, e-bikes, scooters! Docked, dockless! Pedal, ride, or stand! So many new options, and so many new rules to go along with them. Today, we’re introducing our comprehensive Shared Vehicles API which enables software developers to search for availability across 85 systems for docked and dockless bikes, e-bikes, and scooters! Here’s how we think about the space and the tech.
Things are moving…
The news continues to be full of stories about how bike-share and shared mobility are growing in the US and globally. Bikeshare/scooter operators Lime and Bird were respectively valued at $1 billion and $2 billion after less than 2 years of operations. Uber acquired Jump Bikes (formerly Social Bicycles) for about $200 million, while Lyft is acquiring Motivate for $250 million; not only are there a lot of bikes and scooters moving around, but a lot of money too!
According to industry stats, people are getting onboard. In 2017, 35 million bike-share trips were taken in the US, and over 57 thousand new bikes were added to systems, more than doubling the number available the previous year. Three-quarters of the new bikes were dockless, bringing the total number of dockless bikes in the US to 44% of total shared bikes, though dockless bikes make up only 4% of total rides. Even with the recent churn in providers and city permits, the rise of scooters means 2018 looks to be another great year for shared mobility.
One API for all the options
One challenge of integrating with these new systems is in just how new they really are; the technical standard for the industry, General Bike Feed Specification (GBFS), was designed around docked bikes. Its excellent representation of docks full (or devoid) of the same exact bike can’t easily accommodate all of the new types of systems — a mix of manual and differently-charged e-bikes, dockless bikes, and scooters on the street, don’t fit neatly into the standard.
To address the overall standardization problem, we launched our Bike-Share API covering over 85 docked and dockless bike systems across the US. Now, we’re adding scooters and renaming it the Shared Vehicles API, fulfilling your desire for a single API to find available two-wheeled options to move your users to their next destination. The expanded coverage includes:
- Scooter systems in DC
- Scooters for Lime in Seattle, New York City and DC
- E-bikes for Jump, Citi Bike (NYC) and Ford GoBike (SF)
In addition to the new systems and new vehicle types, this API offers 3 main features:
- Ability to find bikes, e-bikes, and scooters across systems with a single API endpoint
- Associated pricing for each shared vehicle depending on the system
- Digitized service areas for all systems (read more about that here)
You can find a quickstart and documentation for this API on our site. We always love to hear from developers, so please feel free to chat with us to report a bug, ask a question, or make a suggestion. Happy riding!
