"Canada's micromobility potential is huge": Interview with Lime CEO

Lime CEO Wayne Ting in Vancouver. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Lime has quickly become synonymous globally with shared micro-mobility services, specifically public e-scooter services and more recently e-bike share.

In fact, earlier this year, the San Francisco-based company became the first micro-mobility company in the world to post a fully profitable year. It experienced its best year ever in the 2022 fiscal year with a record US$466 million in gross bookings, representing a 33% year-over-year increase.

It saw over 20% year-over-year growth in gross bookings in every quarter in 2022, and there were over 35 markets where it doubled in trips year-over-year.

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Lime added over 1.5 million new unique riders in 2022 and its monthly active riders passed the four million threshold for the first time.

About 120 million trips on their devices were made over the course of 2022, bringing Lime’s total number of rides to 400 million. And the company now expects to surpass 500 million rides before the end of 2023.

At the start of this year, Lime operated in 250 cities worldwide. Today, it is in 280 cities, with a 90% success rate in winning competitive bidding processes to launch public e-scooter and/or e-bike services in a community.

This includes being selected by the municipal governments of North Vancouver in 2021 to operate e-bike share, Richmond in 2022 to operate e-scooter share, and Coquitlam in 2023 to operate both e-scooter and e-bike share. The company benefits from economies of scale from its vast global network and the resulting ability to conduct its own research and development work.

Lime Bike Share at Lonsdale in North Vancouver (City of North Vancouver)

Lime’s current presence in Canada is currently focused in Metro Vancouver, Edmonton, and Red Deer. It is looking to expand into more Canadian markets, including the City of Vancouver. Lime was previously the City of Calgary’s major operator for a pilot project.

According to Wayne Ting, the CEO of Lime, the company is aiming to help reduce the need to own transportation.

“As you move out of ownership and into shared, and this is why our missions start with shared, you have to change your mindset. You don’t have to own it. You absolutely deserve to get the transportation you want for the 4% of the time you need it. But in the world of today’s technology, you can do it without owning it,” said Ting, who visited Vancouver earlier this week.

“We start renting what we need. We reduce the cost of average household. We reduce the parking on the street. We reduce congestion. This is why we advocate for this. Why do we need to own transportation instead of owning?”

Ting told Daily Hive Urbanized the Canadian market is amongst Lime’s best-performing markets worldwide, with high utilization rates.

Lime e-scooter in Richmond. (Lime)

Ting was previously the Senior Policy Advisor of the US National Economic Council for President Barrack Obama’s White House. He joined Lime in 2018, initially as its Global Head of Operations and Strategy, before becoming its CEO in May 2020 amidst the peak of the pandemic’s impacts, when Lime experienced a sudden 90% drop in revenue. Prior to joining Lime, he was the chief of staff for Uber.

Daily Hive Urbanized had a one-on-one, sit-down interview with Ting earlier this week. For brevity and clarity, this is an edited and condensed version of the questions and answers:

1. What do you say to municipal governments that are interested in exploring expanding micro-mobility opportunities, but are a bit more cautious with adopting shared services like Lime due to concerns relating to safety? Examples of common concerns are of course the clutter of devices in public spaces and the speed of e-bike and e-scooter devices in the same spaces used by pedestrians.

Well, first, I think every city has a right to decide their own regulations, their own schemes, and who gets have a right to be on the street. So I’m perfectly comfortable with different cities taking different speeds and creating their own regulations that make sense for that community. Our job as an operator is to create a product that meets the expectations of the city regulators. We try to build local products that meet local expectations so that we can be as local as possible everywhere we go.

When it comes to clutter, we invest a ton and technology to help with clutter. So we have geofencing that allows us to do digital corral parking, so we can have designated parking spots. You can only start and end trips where the city says that can be done. We ask every rider to take a picture at the end of every single trip, and we review every single picture through both AI and human verification methods. And if you are violating the parking rules, we warn you, we fine you, and we potentially ban you from the system.

There are ways to do this through technology, software, hardware, and rider education in order to get people to behave in a way that meets the city’s expectations.

But I also think it’s not super fair. Sometimes when we talk about clutter only in the sense of bikes and scooters, but bikes and scooters actually reduce clutter because every car parking stall could fit eight to 12 bikes into that space. If we actually reduce our reliance on cars and increase adoption of shared biking and scooters, we’ll have more space in a community for all sorts of other things.

2. Give us the rundown of Lime’s presence in Canada. Based on what you’ve seen in your existing operating markets here in this country, what more could be done by municipalities in terms of enhancing micro-mobility options?

We’re in jurisdictions like North Shore, Kelowna, Richmond, Coquitlam, and Edmonton. And you know, it’s been really amazing to serve Canada. I think one of the things that has been incredible to see is that Canadian markets are some of the best for us. You can only operate during the summer months in many of these places, but it has some of the highest utilization of any market out there.

People love micro-mobility and want to be outdoors, so Canadians are committed to improving their carbon emissions by changing their behaviour.

When I look at the potential in Canada, it’s huge. One of the things is that it is unique in that it’s the only major country in the Western world where many of the biggest cities don’t have shared micro-mobility, so we’re working with the municipalities. It’s up to them to decide if it makes sense for them, of course, but we know that for the cities we’re already in, we’re now part of the transportation ecosystem. We’re a great first-mile and last-mile complement to public transit, and we help reduce congestion, parking, and emissions.

3. You noted Lime only operates seasonally in the summer in many of its Canadian markets. There’s a fair bit of rain here in Vancouver, and to the east, there are prolonged periods of sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfall. Can you tell us more about Lime’s seasonal strategy?

So in winter markets where there’s heavy snow and potential ice on the road, we usually exit the market. For example in Edmonton, we close for the winter months. We come back in the spring after exiting in late October or early November. We want to ensure that people are safe when they ride us.

But one of the things Lime does differently is we’re the only operator that has its own hardware in-house. That means we have our own research and development team, and we do testing all the time.

We’re constantly innovating on mode. We have two major modes today, scooters and bikes, but we’re testing a kind of lightweight moped. One of the things that is on our product roadmap is a lightweight covered electric vehicle that can be used during the winter. I think the way we solve the winter issue is through innovation on modes that maybe don’t even exist today.

4. So on that note, how do Lime’s existing services fit in the range of transportation modes? Who do you mainly compete with?

We consider our sweet spot to be trips under five miles (eight km). The number one competition we have for trips under five miles is cars. The majority of car trips are under five miles, and it makes absolutely no sense with one passenger. People take these short trips to go to the grocery store, go to work… whatever it is, the vast majority of car trips are under five miles. These are the trips that create congestion, parking issues, and the bulk of the carbon emissions in our cities. In Vancouver, nearly 40% of the emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels associated with personal passenger vehicles.

Longer-distance trips are harder, right? I may not want to take an e-bike 35 miles (56 km) to the suburbs. We get that, it’s okay. But I think the best way to do that is through public transit, unless there isn’t public transit so maybe you need to drive. But for the short distance trips to take one person, that is a real cost to society. It’s quite expensive, and it drives a ton of our greenhouse gas emissions. And so, that’s what we compete with.

5. Can you expand a bit more on what kind of trips are being made on Lime?

It’s all of the above. If you look at your own transportation, the most common use is for commuting. During the pandemic, this changed. Now, people are not necessarily commuting every single day. Before the pandemic, and the long arc of life, the most common type of trip, five days a week, most people have to go back and forth from work, so that’s like 10 times a week. If you think about your own transportation, maybe you go to the grocery store and restaurant once a week… but the most common use for everybody is commuting.

6. What kind of partnerships does Lime currently have with public transit, ride-hailing, and taxi services?

For public transit, we try to partner with every public transit system in every market we’re in. That’s where micro-mobility comes to life. The most common use case is actually the first mile and last mile to public transit to get to work. Especially if you don’t live in a downtown centre, as you go out of the city, each public transit stop is further and further away from where people actually live. That first-mile and last-mile issue becomes more acute the further out you go. That’s actually where we see a ton of our trips.

So we work with public transit systems. There was actually a strike recently, and so we partnered with the public transit system to offer an alternative for people. Whenever I visit a city, I meet with the public transit authority to see how we can partner with them better. We often integrate their technology systems so that you can have a single trip. We work with them to create micro-mobility parking spots near public transit stops. It’s enormously important. I see Lime, micro-mobility, as a support role to great public transit systems.

7. From what you’ve seen so far in Vancouver, what are our strengths in micro-mobility compared to other markets?

We’re in about 280 cities around the world, so we track characteristics by city and look at what is popular.

Vancouver has almost every single one of the characteristics that make it a very popular micro-mobility city. You want cities that are warm year-round, have high density, and are near waterways. There are a lot of places where you can go around waterways. Then there are also investments in bike lanes and places with a lot of tourists. The number of post-secondary students is another characteristic. I think it can be one of the best micro-mobility cities out there.

8. Lime just tracked its first full profitable year, and it’s the first shared micro-mobility company using electric devices to achieve this milestone. How did Lime become an outlier in this regard amongst shared services?

We started a distant second. It was a different company that started before us that raised more money and was bigger than us for a long time. We have to earn the leadership position, Today, we’re by far the world’s largest micro-mobility company.

I think we have gotten here because we invested in the things that riders and cities care about. We have two customers. Certainly, the riders get to choose, but cities also get to choose as well.

It’s because we invested in the hardware. We have our own proprietary hardware that we designed for safety, rideability, and sustainability. We track the carbon emissions of every single piece of hardware we have, and we constantly reduce it.

If you get on a Lime fourth-generation e-bike or e-scooter, it feels different, it rides better, and it’s a different sense of safety. That has allowed us to gain more share.

Secondly, it’s our operations. We never outsource operations, we have our own warehouses and teams on the ground. Our teams are locals. What that means is we know the community, we know the community, we know where to deploy, we know when there’s an issue, we hear the feedback, and that means we have the best operations on the ground.

Third, we partner with cities. We really see ourselves as genuine partners with cities. So many of us at Lime come from government, worked in municipal governments, and came from public transit authorities. When we come from that perspective, we don’t go in and say, “Let me teach me about your city.” We go in by saying, “How do we help support your goals?” We bring a solution that is tailored for Vancouver so that we can make your transportation policies more successful.

Those are the three things that made us go from a distant second place to now the global market leader.

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