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Business and Economic News
Tim Nelson
Edina

Lime and Edina part ways

A woman rides a green electric scooter on a bridge.
Emily Goldstein rides a Lime electric scooter on the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis in September 2019. Citing complaints and new restrictions, the city of Edina and the ride-share company are not renewing the agreement that’s had bikes and scooters in the city for the last two years.
Christine T. Nguyen | MPR News 2019

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Lime is out of juice in Edina.

Edina City Council members voted Tuesday night to end a cooperative agreement with the bike and scooter provider that’s been running the app-based ride-share service in the city since 2018.

The bikes and scooters got pulled off the streets for the winter last fall, but a two-year deal to bring them back was set to automatically renew in March. City Council members ended the deal in a 4-0 vote, in accordance with a staff recommendation. Council members cited safety as a primary concern.

It’s not a ban, said city manager Scott Neal.

“We know that we’re not going to be able to bar them from operating here,” he said, although the change brings a particularly onerous restriction. “It does not allow them to keep their stuff on our public right of ways anymore.”

A spokesperson for Lime said the company also sought to end the deal, given restrictions Edina demanded — including a “geofence” that barred the scooters around the Centennial Lakes. The changes would have made the service economically unviable, the company said.

Lime, which operates in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Rochester, Minn., will keep its operations elsewhere, but Edina is the first city in the state to move against the scooters after initially accommodating the systems. Lime is among at least four scooter companies that have operated in the Twin Cities in recent years — but the only company operating in Edina.

“In the first year of the experiment, we had very little public contact about it,” Neal said. “But in year two, we had a lot of public complaints about it.”

Data provided to Edina by Lime said scooters were getting as many as 800 trips a week during their peak use in August, with more than 3,400 users.

The council left the door open for the scooters to return some day, near commercial or transportation hubs or other high demand areas.