For two of those issues, the changes appear to have largely been successful.
Residents may have noticed the increasingly common electric scooters, which were used more than 550,000 times in 2023, were absent at the start of their operational season last year.
They were frequently tossed into the Spokane River and other sensitive waterways, and with little clarity about whether Lime or a government agency was responsible for removing them, the task largely fell to hobbyist magnet fishermen, The Spokesman-Review reported in 2023.
It is by no means a problem specific to Spokane or to Lime: Seemingly anywhere, e-scooters that are near a body of water will get tossed into it, just as was the case in the late 1990s when Spokane implemented the short-lived lilac bike program. Fifty free bikes painted purple were dumped into the river in short order.
Last June, an agreement was struck: Lime would still get to be the only electric scooter ride-sharing service to operate in Spokane, and in return it committed to removing scooters from the river within 24 hours. The company also vowed to issue fines to riders who improperly parked and blocked sidewalks and to find a way to prevent the scooters from being driven on downtown sidewalks, the only area in the city where it is illegal to do so.
Lime has been quick to remove scooters from the river, where they had sat for months at a time, said Jule Schultz, the Spokane Riverkeeper's cleanup director, among other duties.
People haven't stopped tossing them into the river, Schultz clarified, but they are being removed quickly.
"It hasn't changed the public's ... well, the public's still throwing them in the river, it seems," Schultz said. "But the response has changed. I called one in the other day and floated the river the next day and it was gone."
The company has also tried to be preventive, said Hayden Harvey, director of government affairs for Lime, creating zones around the river where scooters can't be parked or a parked scooter is flagged for quick relocation.
The company also implemented, at the city's request, fines for those who park them across the sidewalk and block the already tenuous path for pedestrians, particularly those with mobility issues. The fines, which Lime keeps, are relatively nominal, ranging from a warning for the first violation to $40 for the fourth, though the fifth violation is supposed to lock a rider out of using Lime scooters.
Lime was not able to provide data before press time on how many fines the company has issued, but Ryan Shea, a planning department employee and the city's primary point of contact with Lime, says it appears to have been effective.
"There have been more complaints, probably because people now know where to send complaints, but in terms of the actual environment, I think things have looked significantly better than in years past," Shea said.
One of the most frequent complaints hasn't seen much improvement yet, however: Users are still riding Lime scooters on crowded downtown sidewalks.
Riding on the sidewalk is permitted in almost all of the city, with the notable exception of the downtown retail area where the scooters see the heaviest use.
Under the new contract, Lime is supposed to implement a sidewalk detection technology that would either audibly alert a rider that they are illegally using the scooter on the sidewalk or forcibly slow the scooter.
Lime made its first attempts at the technology in 2020 with software that tried to predict if a rider was on a sidewalk using vibration detection and an accelerometer, which the company claimed was 95% accurate. This experiment appears to have proven insufficient, however, as the company began piloting a camera-based system in a few markets in 2022 that uses machine learning to visually detect when a rider is on the sidewalk.
A year into the contract, and Spokane's scooters have not fully implemented any technological solution. But it likely will by next year, Harvey said.
"We're currently in a pilot phase for data collection," he said. "We have (cameras) on certain vehicles in the city that do evaluate the road surface they're on ... most likely by the end of this season, we will collate all the data and start synthesizing and working with the city on our findings."
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