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Metro Bike Share

Lyft doesn’t care

Lyft is failing other cities already. The New York City Comptroller recently reported significant concerns with Lyft’s performance as the operator of Citi Bike, including:

More unusable stations, longer periods of station unavailability, and more broken bikes

• Disproportionately affecting low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

• In June and July 2023, there were 11,600 instances where stations were left completely empty or full for an hour or more.

• In 2018, only 57% of bikes were available to riders due to repair needs, though the contract requires 90% availability.

• Rebalancing (the relocation of bikes to keep them available everywhere) decreased by 80% from 2014 to 2022.

Lyft Bikes and Scooters is for sale. It is widely reported that Lyft is interested in selling Lyft Bikes and Scooters.

• Lyft Bikes and Scooters does not undertake operations. Rather, Lyft subcontracts Motivate or Shift for all of the field operations. Over the past year, Lyft has replaced Motivate with Shift in Portland and Chicago. Subcontracting drives staff wages down.

• Lyft has a record of abandoning markets: Instead of carefully entering markets and working with jurisdictions if they are not going well to ensure continuity of service, Lyft has abandoned markets with little notice to these jurisdictions. These markets include Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Minneapolis. Lyft Inc., or a new buyer, may look at an unprofitable contract and abandon the LA Metro contract.

• After 13 years, Nice Ride closed shortly after Lyft acquisition

• Lyft withdraws bikes/scooters from Los Angeles

Save union jobs!

Lyft does not create equitable and inclusive workplaces.

• Lyft was part of a $328 million wage theft settlement in New York, the largest in the state’s history.

• Lyft has recruited a large number of low-income, POC and immigrant drivers with the promise of high pay and stable living, but instead has consistently underpaid them and used them as a source of cheap labor. Lyft has treated its workers poorly, including unfairly and arbitrarily firing a disproportionate amount of people of color and immigrants for unfair customer complaints and reviews.

• Last year, the new Lyft CEO laid off 26% of the workforce to cut costs and be more efficient, which included bikeshare workers. He has even stated his skill at “doing more with less.”

• Lyft put in $49 million to lobby for the most expensive ballot measure in CA history that would prevent workers from being classified as employees under the guise of greater freedom and flexibility. This prevented worker protections like health insurance and minimum wage, as well as the ability to unionize and collectively bargain. They went so far as to threaten to shut down their operations in CA after being ordered to classify their drivers as employees. As recently as the fall of 2023, Lyft was part of yet another lawsuit for misclassifying drivers and denying them wages and benefits they’re owed.

• City Attorney for San Fransisco stated “Uber and Lyft have gone to great lengths to avoid paying workers what they are owed. We are glad the Court saw through Uber and Lyft’s flawed argument and shut down yet another attempt to shirk accountability. This victory will allow us to get to the heart of this case, which is the inconvenient fact that, for years, Uber and Lyft denied their drivers basic workplace protections, such as minimum wage and sick leave, and illegally shifted that burden onto taxpayers.”

Protect biking interests

• Los Angeles has a sordid history of surrendering public transit infrastructure to automotive interests and pushing lopsided, autocentric urban policy.

• Automobile and oil companies played a part in dismantling Los Angeles mass transit infrastructure, and the city is still recovering from this.

• Now, LA Metro is making the same mistake, handing over our bike share system to a car company whose CEO recently stated the goal of bike share is to get more people in rideshare.

Keep bike share growing

The current operator, Bicycle Transit Systems, has operated the bike share program for 7 years and just completed a record shattering year:

• 52% increase in ridership in 2023 over 2022.
• A proven track record of exceptional service.