<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jul/12/whats-next-for-australia-share-e-bike-revolution>
"It all started with 100 blue bicycles. Fifteen years ago, Australia’s first
public bike hire scheme launched in Melbourne to considerable fanfare.
Four months later, Brisbane followed suit, partnering with multinational
advertising company JCDecaux and a fleet of 2,000 yellow bikes emblazoned with
Lipton Ice Tea logos.
Since then, various iterations of bike shares have come and gone across the
country. They’ve been electrified, Uber-fied, vandalised, beloved and reviled.
They’ve been flung into gutters, thrown into waterways, taken people to work,
and carried others home.
Now Lime, the world’s biggest shared-electric-vehicle company and Australia’s
largest micromobility provider, is preparing to go public. Eight years after it
launched in Australia with a trial of e-bikes in a handful of inner-city
suburbs, the San Francisco-based startup , which receives funding from Uber and
Google, is planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange next year.
At the same time, it is plotting an expansion of its Australian empire, with
bikes in western Sydney and the potential for more bikes in inner Melbourne.
The company also operates in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast, and says it wants
to expand to every capital city.
As of last week, there were 3,140 shared e-bikes in use across Australia,
according to the micromobility tracker Ride Report. Industry sources estimate
Lime owns and operates half of those, although the company won’t confirm this.
Shared e-bikes had been used for more than 8.9m trips as of last week, covering
more than 17.6m kilometres in total. Where are they going? And how did we get
here?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
