San Francisco-based dockless electric scooter company
Lime says its ridership in Milwaukee is booming this year, while also rolling out a plan to encourage its customers to engage in safe riding and proper parking practices.
Lime says its scooter ridership in Milwaukee is up 80% this year compared to a year ago. Since May 15, Milwaukee residents and visitors have taken more than 426,000 trips on Lime scooters, averaging more than 4,000 rides per day, the company says.
Since launching in Milwaukee in July 2019, over 325,000 residents and visitors have taken nearly 1.4 million rides on Lime vehicles, the company says.
While the scooters are popular for some users, others have complained about them being discarded haphazardly around the city and safety concerns have been raised about the scooters.
“Lime is proud to provide safe, affordable, and sustainable transportation options to Milwaukee residents and visitors,” said
Calvin Elmore, Lime operations manager for Milwaukee. “As ridership booms we know it is our responsibility to keep our riders and other road users safe as well as ensure the streets stay nice and tidy. We are investing heavily in staff and technological solutions to improve parking and we’re launching a multifaceted campaign to educate riders on how to ride safely and park properly, especially in key areas like downtown and the Lower East Side. We look forward to continued ridership strength and to work with the city and our local partners to ensure our service is always improving.”
Lime said its parking strategy in Milwaukee is built around three key pillars: tightly operated designated virtual parking zones in high density areas, rider education, and strategic Foot Patrol and Presentation Specialist work correcting mis-parked vehicles daily. To address parking concerns, Lime says it has:
- Established mandatory parking zones in key locations like The Historic Third Ward, Brady Street, North Avenue, and South Shore Park.
- Hired a full time presentation specialist whose sole task is to patrol the city and fix any improperly parked vehicles.
- Assigned an employee to review end trip parking photos and send warnings to riders if their parking needs improvement. These warnings can lead to fines if repeated and riders can potentially even be banned for repeated offenses, the company says.
- Is sponsoring educational posters on Bublr Bike stations around the city.
- Has teams on foot patrol to observe parking throughout the city and rebalance, redeploy, and repark any vehicles in need of such work.
- Is communicating with its riders via in-app and email messages as well as on social media.
- Will be hosting in-person events and activations on safe riding and proper parking as well.
Lime is a brand of
Neutron Holdings Inc.
[caption id="attachment_596196" align="aligncenter" width="1280"]
A Lime employee in Milwaukee.[/caption]
