I noticed on the evening of Friday, November 10, that there were no bike-share bikes available on the Lime app, anywhere in the Sacramento region. This is still true on the morning of Thursday, November 16. The red-orange Lime/JUMP bikes had been available throughout the center of Sacramento and West Sacramento. Where have they gone? I don’t know. I’ve received no communication from Lime about the issue, and no one has shared any information with me.

Since there were no Lime/JUMP bikes on the 10th, I looked at the Bird app for their blue bike-share bikes. There were none. As of this morning, there are a few Bird bikes available in the app, but far fewer than there used to be.

I don’t know if the disappearance of bikes from these two vendors was related, or just happenstance.

Bike-share from Lime and Bird are privately owned and operated, under permit from the City of Sacramento and City of West Sacramento. But the permits apparently do not require notification to the cities of major service interruptions or issues. JUMP pulled its bikes from the entire region, without notice to any of the agencies, or the users, at the beginning of the pandemic. Users were left in the lurch, with fewer transportation options that before. The withdrawal, which was not necessitated by the pandemic, was probably a business decision. It killed off the most successful bike-share system in the United States (in terms of rides per bike per day). Sacramento continues to be a second class bike-share market to this day.

I believe that bike-share must be controlled in some way by the transportation or transit agencies. The systems might be contracted out to vendors such as Lime and Bird, but control would be with the agencies. Again, we see the flaws in the privately owned and operated model.