Lyft and Uber Want To Scoot You Around San Francisco
Let the race begin.
The SF electric scooter craze just got crazier, with 12 companies vying for a spot in the city’s permit program.
Uber and Lyft are among the 12 companies that applied to operate an electric scooter-sharing service within San Francisco city limits. The city, however, will only offer up to five companies permits to operate as part of a one-year test program.
Game on.
Lyft also confirmed to TechCrunch that the company applied for a permit, but declined to share any further details. Here’s the full list of companies that applied, via the SFMTA:
- Bird
- CycleHop
- JUMP via Uber
- Lime
- Lyft
- Ofo
- Razor (yes, *that* Razor)
- Ridecell
- Scoot
- . Skip
- Spin
- USSCooter
This comes as no surprise. Uber is definitely serious about geting a permit to operate e-scooters in San Francisco, the company confirmed to The Verge. Scooters would be added to the Uber fleet alongside ride-sharing cars and bikes supplied by the bike-sharing startup Jump, which Uber acquired in April.
Under terms of the program, shared-scooter operators were to have had their scooters off the streets by Monday, June 4, and then apply for one of the city’s permits starting on Thursday, June 7. The city says it will begin issuing permits under the pilot program by the end of June. The program will allocate 1,250 permits for the first six months of the 12-month pilot period. The number of permits could double in the program’s remaining six months.
