After pricing overhaul, 20-minute bike and scooter rides now cost the same as transit fare for LimePrime subscribers
Screenshot from the Lime App. Lime's newest pricing scheme makes it far more cost-effective for regular users to use their bikes and scooters for short trips, making the service much more useful as an everyday mode of transportation. The new scheme puts the cost of a 20-minute ride on par with a full-price adult transit single-ride fare of $3 while lowering the cost of rides under 5 minutes to $1.50. The pricing change comes as the number of bike and scooter rides in Seattle in the past year topped 10 million and continue to rise, according to data the company submits to SDOT.
Subscribers to the $6 per month LimePrime membership now pay a flat rate of $2.85 plus tax for rides up to 20 minutes with no unlock fee. That's about the price of a 4-minute ride under their regular pricing ($1 to unlock plus 47 per minute). LimePrime rides up to 5 minutes will be $1.50, and rides longer than 20 minutes are charged a reduced rate of 28 per minute. Under the default rate, a 20-minute ride would cost $10.40, 3.7 times higher than the LimePrime rate.
Let's say someone lives a 20-minute bike or scooter ride from a light rail station, the most favorable condition for the new pricing scheme. They could now spend $120 per month to take Lime to and from the station five days a week. That's not exactly cheap, but under the previous per-minute pricing scheme the same use would have cost $416.
The default per-minute rate is rarely the cheapest option anymore because the 47 per minute rate and $1 unlock fees add up very fast whether you're taking one longer ride or many shorter rides. At 17 minutes under the standard rate, a user has paid the equivalent of one month of LimePrime plus the $2.85 fee for the trip.
Trips under 5 minutes will cost $1.50 instead of $3.35 under regular pricing, which opens up some interesting use cases. I used to love taking the old $1 bike share bikes short little distances around the neighborhood, like going from north Broadway businesses to Pike/Pine businesses or from the Rainier Valley light rail stations on MLK Way to destinations along Rainier Ave. These aren't the longest walks, but it's a small joy to just hop on a bike to shrink the neighborhood. I wouldn't pay $3.35 to bike a half mile, but I might pay $1.50.
The math gets a little more complicated when comparing to the LimePass minute bundles. For example, a single 30-minute ride would cost $5.25 with LimePrime pricing but $7 with a 30-minute LimePass bundle. However, three 10-minute rides in one day would cost $8.55 with LimePrime compared to $7 with a LimePass bundle. So if you rarely take Lime, then the minute bundles are still probably the better option (and the 30-minute bundle is nearly always better than paying the default rate). Someone visiting town for a week who is planning to rely largely on biking to get around may also be better off buying the $34 bundle to get 3 hours of riding time and have no worries about forgetting to cancel the monthly subscription. If you really want to pay as little as possible on a long ride, I guess you could stop every 20 minutes to end your ride and then start it again since the effective rate on a 20-minute LimePrime ride is about 14 per minute.
Note that people who qualify for a reduced cost ORCA Lift card also qualify for Lime Access, which at 75 to unlock plus 1 per minute is much more affordable than any of these other pricing options. If transportation costs are a burden on your budget, definitely check to see if you qualify. The threshold is 200% of the federal poverty level, which is higher than many other assistance programs.
The monthly LimePrime subscription is another potential downside of the new pricing scheme. If you end up not really using Lime often, then that's $6 down the drain every month until you cancel it. The business model for gyms is for people to pay for memberships that they rarely use, and that's a risk for LimePrime, too. More people committing financially to a single provider could also further erode competition in the market. Currently, Bird is the only other company operating in Seattle, but that could feasibly change in the future. If enough of the user base has a monthly financial commitment with a single company, that could make it harder for another provider to enter the Seattle market. It's not usually a good thing for consumers when a single company has too much market share because they can then start hiking prices and reducing the quality of service if they no longer need to worry about losing customers. The situation is a little different with Lime since they are also competing with some heavy-hitting and well-established competitors like the bus and walking.
If Seattle gets to the point where Lime is the only viable provider (they are arguably already there considering they have reported carrying about 97% of bike and scooter share trips in Seattle in 2025), then perhaps an open permit system would no longer make the most sense for the city. Lime carries a massive number of trips around Seattle, and it is an important part of city's transportation system. If Lime were instead granted a contract or license as the sole provider, the change could open up options for the city to negotiate more public benefits such as investing in a public-private roadmap for shifting to corral-only parking. This could finally deal with the problem of bikes and scooters blocking walkways and curb ramps by only allowing users to end trips within designated parking areas. Such a concept would only work with a massive expansion of bike and scooter parking. I don't know the exact density required to make it work without significantly degrading the bike and scooter experience, but I imagine it could be on the scale of creating a bike and scooter parking corral at every single intersection in every business district. Residential parking is maybe even trickier due to the sheer scale of how many residential intersections there are in the city. However, there is an added safety benefit to physically restricting parking 20 feet before every street corner (30 if there's a stop light or sign) as is already state law (with very few exceptions, street corners are crosswalks whether marked with stripes or not). I know in my neighborhood this law is never followed, and cars parked too close to the intersection can create safety hazards by blocking sight lines (They darted out from behind a parked car!").
To deal with the overwhelming scale of the task, perhaps the city and Lime could partner on a progressive roll-out concept to go neighborhood-by-neighborhood implementing new parking areas and intersection daylighting improvements along with new scooter and bike share parking restrictions. It might take a while to get the whole city, but work could be phased according to the need and resources available.