Lime Coming To Canada Via Partnership With University Of Waterloo

Lime, the scooter sharing startup, is gearing up to expand into Canada, planning to release a small fleet of e-scooters in Waterloo, Ontario. According to news reports citing Lime, the startup is teaming up with the University of Waterloo to enable the launch in Canada.

“Over the past several months, we have spent time in Waterloo to understand how our Lime-S e-scooters can help this progressive city reach its smart transportation goals,” Lime’s Vice President of Strategic Development Andrew Savage said in a statement. “We are committed to meeting the unique needs of cities across Canada and are excited to continue expanding our global footprint.”

The expansion comes on the heels of the company announcing last week that it logged 11.5 million scooter and bike rides over the past few months, and after surpassing six million total rides. Lime rival Bird, which is focused on e-scooters, provided more than 10 million rides in its first 12 months of operation. Lime added that it is gearing up to launch in an additional 50 cities around the globe before the close of 2018.

The expansion also comes as a Lime scooter rider was killed on Friday (Sept. 21) by an SUV in a scooter accident around Washington, D.C.’s DuPont neighborhood. The adult man was taken to the hospital with critical, life-threatening injuries, and eventually succumbed to those injuries. The news comes as the San Francisco-based scooter sharing company launched a pilot program in Tacoma, Washington, on the same day, and less than one month after a 24-year-old Dallas, Texas man fell off the scooter he was riding and died from blunt force injuries to his head, according to reports.

As more scooters enter the market, the chances for accidents increase. For its part, Bird has initiated a “Save Our Sidewalks” campaign, urging other electric scooter companies to pledge to retrieve all vehicles from city streets every night; to refrain from increasing the number of vehicles in any given city unless they are being used, on average, at least three times per vehicle per day; and to offer to remit $1 per vehicle per day to city governments to fund the building of more bike lanes, promote safety and maintain the shared infrastructure.