Ride-hailing firm Lyft highlights new bike-share service

The company has completed its acquisition of US bike-share giant Motivate, which was announced in the summer, and will branch into two-wheel journeys soon. The company says this represents a “natural extension of Lyft’s vision to improve transportation access, sustainability and affordability”.

Lyft says that 80% of all bike-share rides in the US were completed on Motivate systems last year. New York mayor Bill de Blasio announced this week that the city and Lyft will be tripling the size of the Citi Bike initiative to 40,000 bikes.

Motivate is behind a number of other bike-share systems, including: Ford GoBike (San Francisco), Divvy (Chicago), Bluebikes (Boston), Capital Bikeshare (Washington, DC), BIKETOWN (Portland), CoGo (Columbus, Ohio) and Nice Ride (Minneapolis).

The bikes will be added to Lyft’s transit app. In a statement, the firm said: “We’ve only started to scratch the surface of what’s possible in shifting as a society from car trips to bike trips. With this acquisition, we are poised to help take bikeshare to the next level: adding thousands of bikes and stations in communities that haven’t had access to transportation; making bikeshare membership more convenient and affordable than ever; and deploying new electric bikes, on a major scale.”