April 19, 2023

Source: Grist

Excerpt:

Geoff Coats still remembers how he felt when, in May 2020, all 1,350 bicycles in New Orleans’s popular bike-share program vanished.

“It was horrible,” says Coats, who managed the service, called Blue Bikes, for its owner, Uber. “For a lot of people, it was a little bit of PTSD from Hurricane Katrina, when the national chains could have reopened weeks after the storm but stayed away. It felt like, once again, when we’re down, we get kicked.”

Blue Bikes, which New Orleans launched in 2017 to reduce emissions and offer reliable transportation to low-income residents, was flourishing before COVID shut down the city. It had recently converted all its pedal bikes to electric and was in the process of doubling its fleet. But Uber paused the program when the pandemic hit, then spun it off to the micromobility company Lime as part of its investment in that company. Lime wanted to bring electric scooters to New Orleans. The city wasn’t interested in scooters and eventually canceled the contract. Seemingly overnight, the bikes were gone.

Read more: How to build a better bike-share program