Lime Goes Beyond Scooters to Transit Pods for Streamlining Urban Mobility
Skift Take
This sounds like a good idea, an electricity-powered car-like vehicle that shuttles people about town that's one-third the size of a parking space. And yet those parking spaces are paved with the skeletons of failed urban transit experiments.
Over the last several months a handful of startups have dropped hundreds or thousands of electric scooters on the sidewalks in cities like San Francisco, Austin, and San Diego, allowing anyone who downloads an app to unlock and ride them across town for a small fee. It’s a radical – and controversial – experiment in urban mobility. But scooters could be just the beginning.
Lime, a company that runs sharing services for scooters, pedal bikes and e-bikes, is developing a new type of vehicle known internally as a “transit pod.” The concept is in early stages and the design is still in flux. But Lime’s plan is to build an enclosed, electric vehicle that could hold one or two people, resembling a smart car or a deluxe golf cart. The vehicle wouldn’t be a car, exactly; it’s not even clear whether it would have three or four wheels. But it would drive in normal street traffic, and could hit a top speed of about 40 miles an hour, said Brad Bao, Lime’s co-founder
