Photo by Bill Dossett
Nice Ride Green Bikes
The Fallout
Early this year, Nice Ride Minnesota hit Minneapolis with a breakup. The bike-share service, which had placed docks full of convenient—albeit clunky—bicycles around the city since 2010 (and in St. Paul from 2010 to 2018), had lost its sponsor Blue Cross Blue Shield. Nice Ride’s parent company, Lyft, couldn’t find a replacement to fill the $2 million funding deficit, despite a “rigorous search,” Lyft told us, and the corporation was “not in a position to ramp up operations of the program this spring without the support of partners.”
The History
Although ridership dwindled in recent years, partially thanks to the rise of scooters (Nice Ride reported that of the 840,000 trips taken in 2022 on Minneapolis’s shared micromobility options—bikes, e-bikes, and scooters—71 percent were on scooters), Nice Ride did make history. It was the first bike-share service to take off in the U.S., and many cities followed suit, including New York and its Citi Bike program. “We were created to prove concept—to answer the question of whether bike shares would work in North America,” executive director Bill Dossett says. “We were involved in creating a national industry that’s still doing really well”—that is, everywhere except in the city where it was born. Dossett hopes other bike-share cities will purchase the leftover bikes so they can be reused.
The Future
Even though this slice of shared micromobility is over, it doesn’t mean the Twin Cities will see the end of the concept. Minneapolis officials confirmed scooters and e-bikes will return this season, and St. Paul will host e-scooters and seated scooters (the latter for the first time). At press time, there were no plans for a new pedal-bike service. But Tiffany Orth, executive director of Move Minneapolis, remains optimistic. “People see the value in it,” she says. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and maybe this will help people galvanize around new opportunities.”
