Two years after the last company to offer rentable electric scooters fled the city, Aurora is considering an application that would expand the reach of Lime’s Denver scooter fleet.
With a stable of more than 3,600 e-scooters in Denver, Lime has become the largest operator in what Denver says is the nation’s largest market for shared scooters and bikes.
“Our ridership across the Front Range has been through the roof,” said Zach Williams, the company’s senior director of government relations. “Extending our highly successful program in Denver into Aurora will be a win for so many residents who already rely on the service to supplement their other transportation options.”
The size of Lime’s Aurora e-scooter fleet initially would be capped at a few hundred devices. If the company successfully attracts riders, the city may opt to increase the cap.
Despite Aurora’s low density relative to Denver and other obstacles to e-scootering — according to Aurora city staff, the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus has prohibited companies from using its right of way — Williams said Lime is committed to making it work in a place where it and other companies have struggled to make inroads.
“If we were given the opportunity to serve Aurora, we will work as a partner to the city and its residents and build a program focused on their needs,” Williams wrote in an email.
Scooter and bike rentals have soared in Denver, growing from about 3.9 million trips in 2021 to 6 million trips from January through October 2024, according to Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.
Meanwhile, in Aurora, operators have come and gone. Lime, OFO and Spin were all given permits to field rentable bicycles in 2017. By the end of 2018, Spin’s fleet had yet to materialize, while OFO and Lime had officially ceased operations in the city. Another operator, Bird, started renting out scooters in 2021 but pulled out of the city a year later.
Aurora’s parking manager, Scott Bauman, attributed the companies’ struggles attracting riders to the city’s layout and the historical lack of access to CU’s campus in a presentation to Aurora’s City Council.
“I don’t think Aurora is the perfect market for them,” Bauman said Oct. 28. “We don’t have that downtown environment.”
Some residents are also jaded after finding bikes left on front lawns and in the middle of narrow sidewalks.
Aurora may fine operators for devices that aren’t removed from inappropriate locations, such as a homeowner’s lawn, within 24 hours and can also revoke an operator’s permit after repeated violations.
Cyndi Karvaski, a spokeswoman for DOTI, said Lime had conducted in-person outreach and education after violating city regulations in the past.
Lime spokesman Jacob Tugendrajch said the company has continued to improve its service in response to the concerns raised by Denver.
Denver Streets Partnership executive director Jill Locantore said the lack of reliable transit across much of the metro area, including Aurora, means shared scooters and bikes have the potential to fill an important mobility gap. Bird’s operations in Aurora peaked in June 2021, when the company reported more than 3,000 scooter rentals.
For lower-income residents and the homeless especially, Denver’s shared bikes and scooters are often used to satisfy riders’ basic needs, like traveling to and from work, Locantore said.
She also said cities can address the problem of bicycles and scooters ditched in inappropriate spots by building racks along corridors frequented by riders.
Related Articles
New company taking over Lyft’s dockless e-bikes, e-scooters in Denver
Lyft says it will pull bikes and scooters from Denver’s streets, suggesting its future includes docking stations
“We build parking spaces,” Locantore said. “If we did the same thing for scooters and bikes, more people would park those there.”
Williams said Lime is working on dedicated parking corrals for the company’s devices in Denver. He also said the company drafts unique operations and parking plans for each of its host cities and shares cities’ expectations for where scooters ought to be parked with riders.
Aurora spokesperson Matt Brown said that, as of Nov. 15, updates to e-scooter and e-bike regulations that were accepted by Aurora’s City Council last month were being finalized, and discussions with Lime were “expected to resume shortly.”
While there is no set timeline for when those discussions would conclude, if Lime’s proposal is accepted, Brown said it would likely be at least several months until scooters are deployed.
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.