Riders of rented e-bikes and e-scooters made more than 1.6 million trips in Baltimore last year. While the largest percentage of those rides occurred in the central part of the city, there was something new: considerable movement east and west, in and out of the Black Butterfly.

That trend lines up with a stated goal of city transportation officials and the main providers of dockless vehicles, Lime and Spin, to expand the distribution of battery-powered scooters and bikes and increase ridership beyond Baltimore’s ‘White L.’”

The White L appears in the racial geography of the city from its history of segregation. It refers to the central corridor that runs north to south, then southeast to Canton, inhabited mainly by white residents.

Research scientist Lawrence T. Brown, now at Morgan State University’s Center for Urban Health Equity, coined the term a decade ago. He described sprawling areas of the city’s majority Black population as the Black Butterfly, spreading its wings east and west from the White L.

The map that tracked and recorded e-scooter and e-bike routes in 2019, the first year the city officially permitted dockless vehicles, clearly showed the density of rides in the White L. A look at the 2024 map, however, shows wider use of Spin and Lime vehicles.

“Those corridors beyond downtown are seeing more daily trips,” said John Lankford, Spin’s senior director for policy and partnerships. “I think that’s really exciting because it reflects the trend of commuter behavior and not just recreational trips.”

Lankford and others in the local micro mobility ecosystem say a major reason for the wider use of scooters and bikes is the agreements Spin and Lime have with the Baltimore Department of Transportation to offer discounts to riders who receive some form of public assistance. Those programs are called Spin Access and Lime Access.

In addition, Spin offers four free rides of 30 minutes each, per day, to income-eligible riders and a 50% discount to anyone, no matter their income level, on any ride that begins in a low-income area of the city.

“There’s a number of ways we’ve tried to target expansion into those neighborhoods,” said Jed Weeks, interim executive director of Bikemore, which pushed for the incentives. “All of that is working, and it’s resulted in broader adoption of the scooters outside of downtown.”

Lime and Spin are required to offer discounts to riders reciving public assistance.

It also helps that Lime and Spin are required to deploy their vehicles to certain “equity priority areas” of the city.

“One of those is the Reisterstown Road Plaza Metro station,” said Weeks. “One of those is Pennsylvania and North [avenues]. One of those is over by the West Baltimore MARC station [and another] at the Cherry Hill Light Rail station. A certain amount of vehicles for both companies have to be deployed in those particular areas every day.

“So basically,” Weeks adds, “it’s setting up a system where you can’t just dump all of the scooters in Federal Hill or Fells Point.”

“I think Spin and Lime have been doing a pretty good job. They have been pretty responsive to both community concerns and really trying to target more disadvantaged areas of Baltimore.”

Spin has 2,800 e-scooters and 300 e-bikes in the city, according to Lankford. Lime added another 1,500 scooters and 500 bikes when it relaunched here last summer.

Both Spin and Lime riders are allowed to leave their vehicles at their destinations so that other riders can use them.

Because of the level of usage, especially in warmer months, few of the dockless vehicles are out of action for long. (Lankford says only about 1% of Spin’s orange scooters and bikes are idle for a few days at a time.)

Both providers can jeopardize their permits to operate in the city if they’re not diligent about unused vehicles left on sidewalks and street corners. In December, city officials announced that residents can report mis-parked rentable scooters and e-bikes to 311.

Once a misparked scooter or e-bike is reported to Lime or Spin through 311 these companies must correct the parking issue within 24 hours,” DOT said in a news release.

Relaunched Last Summer

Lime operated from 2018 until 2022 when the city did not renew its permit because of some permit violations. It has been back in service since July.

“In re-entering Baltimore, we wanted to make sure that we were much improved from the last time we were in Baltimore,” says Erika Duthely, the company’s director of government relations. “And so one of the things that we’ve worked on is both making sure we place our devices where demand is, but also working to encourage use where we weren’t seeing it before.”

Lime ridership has been brisk. The city’s data shows more than 597,000 rides on the green-and-white devices from July through December, surpassing Spin’s total of 571,787 for the same period.

“As people get used to the devices and see them as a reliable source of transportation and not necessarily a novelty, you have two things happen,” Duthely said. “You increase utilization, of course, but you also see that people mess with them less. There’s less vandalism because they’re gonna use them.”

Lankford says theft of batteries from the scooters and bikes is a concern that has required increased vigilance.

“The city continues to be a good partner in helping us find solutions to [the] ongoing challenge around vehicle theft,” he said. “We talk to the city every week so they know everything that’s going on.”

According to Duthely, theft has not been a significant problem for Lime.

Both Duthely and Lankford are pleased with the overall trends in Baltimore. “A fundamental goal that shared micro mobility systems are trying to achieve is mode shift,” said Lankford. “That’s providing a really easy, attractive, accessible means to take that short one-to-two-mile trip, with something other than a car.”

“What’s really kind of cool is ridership growth in Northwest Baltimore along the Metro,” Weeks said.

“It means people are probably taking the scooters to the Metro, or they’re getting off the Metro and riding the scooter a couple blocks to another destination. So it’s really pairing public transit with that first- and last-mile option on the scooter.”

Duthely expects ridership to continue to increase this year.

Safety and Subsidies

Weeks notes that e-scootering and e-biking have been particularly strong where the city created bike lanes, where Spin and Lime riders are not in traffic or on sidewalks.

“People are gravitating towards those protected facilities and ridership grows in those areas,” he said. “We want people to have a safe place in the street to ride so they’re not interacting with pedestrians [on sidewalks.]”

In the long term, Weeks said, public subsidy of the dockless vehicles should be considered.

“This program shows amazing success,” he said, “but we have to decide if we, as a city, value this as an equity program. If we want people to get out of cars, if we want this to be an affordable transportation solution, we really should think about subsidizing rides directly.”

• NOTE: Dan Rodricks, who left the Baltimore Sun after 46 years as a columnist, will be regularly contributing to The Brew. Find his stories at Dan Rodricks’ Baltimore.