“Dear Lime Access Member,
As we move into Fall, we wanted to connect with our valued riders with some important updates. Every ride you take helps transform how people move throughout our cities, connecting communities and creating more livable urban spaces for everyone.
To continue growing the Lime Access program and provide more value to our community, we will be updating the monthly fee to $30 starting October 30, 2025. This fee unlocks unlimited free Lime Access trips all month long.”
“Dear PoPville,
When the scooter/bikeshare company Lime first set up operations in D.C., it was required (alongside other micromobility companies) to make various affordances in order to earn the right to park its vehicles on city sidewalks, including operating a low-income program offering affordable rides to people who make 200% or less of the federal poverty line.
For many years, that program was free to all who qualified, but this year Lime has been aggressively degrading it. First, in May, it began charging $5/month for the program, and required users to sign up for it every month (without an option to auto-renew), rather than once a year as had been the case previously. Now, per the email below from this afternoon, it has announced that, starting next week, it plans to increase the cost to $30/month. At this price, which equates to $360 per year, the program is three times as expensive as the non-low-income annual pass for Capital Bikeshare (even after its own recent price hike). Basically, Lime appears to be trying to effectively kill (or at least severely curtail) the program by making it unaffordable to its intended audience.
D.C. micromobility regulations require Lime to have a certain percentage of its rides made through the low-income program (see section E starting on page 13 of the Permit Operator Agreement and section 3319 starting on page 32 of the Shared Fleet Device Final Rulemaking document), so it’s not immediately clear to me whether this change will cause them to become directly out of compliance with D.C.’s rules, but regardless they are most certainly violating the spirit of the regulations. And Lime has shown a willingness to flout city rules around low-income programs, as they did in Denver when they curtailed the program there earlier this year.”