The Lime + transit hack explained: How to get a Lime ride and 3 transit tickets for $1.66*

Screenshot of my Lime ride summary.The points history from the Transit GO app shows that I earned a total of 1,000 points and used only 600 of them buying two light rail tickets.

Yesterday, I took a Lime scooter to U District Station, then took light rail to Mountlake Terrace, then back to the U District several hours later, and it only cost $1.66 total.* I did not cheat or dodge any fares, and I did not use any low-income discount transit programs such as ORCA Lift. Instead I used the confusing Transit GO app and jumped through some oddly specific hoops to activate a pair of in-app promotions that turned my $1.66 Lime ride into rewards worth $10 in transit tickets. Users can activate these promotions up to five times per week.

The catch is that you are going to have to deal with some headaches getting it all set up, and using the Transit GO app is not nearly as convenient as beeping an ORCA card. Here's how it works:

• Download the Transit GO app for iOS or Android and create an account.
• Download the Lime app (Bird should also work, though I have not tested it) and create or log into your account.
• In the Transit GO app, go to the Rewards tab and connect your Lime account. This process may be annoying.
• Ride a Lime bike or scooter at least 0.25 miles to one of these specific parking areas and end your trip like normal. This only works in those exact designated parking spots. To get the $1.66 price, you must subscribe to Lime Prime ($6/mo) and your ride must also be shorter than 5 minutes. The promotions also work with regular Lime or Bird pricing.
• If you have parked correctly, you will receive 300 points in the Transit GO app. There is no notification that anything has happened, but you should see your reward balance increase by 300. You must then redeem your points for a transit ticket from within the Rewards tab of the app (light rail costs 300 points, King County Metro costs 275) and activate it within 24 hours of your eligible bike/scooter ride.
• If you don't see your ticket in the Use tab, tap refresh screen." Activate the ticket before riding.
• After activating your ticket, you will get another 700 points added to your rewards balance. The app says you can use this for a Lime or Bird trip, though you can also just keep buying transit tickets with it.

A light rail day pass is 600 points so if you are going to be traveling up and down the 1 and 2 lines a lot you can just get one of those. You can also use points for tickets on the King County Water Taxi, Kitsap Transit and Fast Ferries, the Sounder, or even the Seattle Streetcar. It appears that Bird users can maybe stockpile their reward points as account credit (I have not tried this yet, so comment below if you have) while Lime only offers $7 discounts on a ride for 700 points, which should be good for about a half hour of ride time. However, when I tried to paste the promo code into the Lime app, it said the code had already expired even though I had just redeemed it moments earlier. Maybe this function is broken? I'll update if I learn more, but for now I'll just use the reward points on transit tickets.

This is all possible due to some kind of partnership between the transit agencies, the bike and scooter companies, and a company called Velocia that specializes in transit reward programs. A quote attributed to King County Metro on the Velocia website states, Velocia has provided King County Metro with a unique opportunity to deliver personalized incentive to riders, with the flexibility to test various incentives and determine which campaigns most effectively increase ridership."

Using the Transit GO app is a horrible experience up to the point that you get free transit, which is obviously great. Nearly every review from recent years on the iOS app store is 1 star, with people complaining of bugs, difficultly making payments and general confusion. I ran into several bugs trying to log in with an existing Transit GO account and linking my Lime account, but I persisted and got them working after repeat attempts. Then once you redeem a transit ticket, it doesn't include transfers between agencies. You must redeem separate tickets if you are going from light rail to a bus or vice versa. If you are simply looking for a way to buy transit fare, I highly recommend getting an ORCA card and using the myORCA app to add money or set-up autopay. But if you are looking for a cheap transit hack, well, Transit GO has got you covered in this highly specific scenario.

The hack, and hack" really does feel like the right word here even though it is all working as designed, is not even new. The reward promotions I used have been offered off and on for several years. I wrote a story about a similar promo back in 2022 but when I went to test it out for a follow-up story I found the Transit GO app so buggy that I just gave up and never wrote it. But with Lime's new subscription-based pricing scheme, the prospect of getting multiple transit rides and a Lime ride for $1.66 inspired me to give it another try. Even paying the more common $3.14 (after tax) for a Lime ride up to 20 minutes is still on par with a single adult transit fare. Had I used my standard adult fare ORCA card yesterday like I usually do, the journey would have cost me $7.66 ($1.66 for Lime + $6 for two $3 adult fares). If I had not subscribed to Lime Prime ($6/mo), the trip would have cost about $8.88. Not only did my trip cost a fraction of full price, but I was left with a surplus of 400 reward points to use later.

Do I recommend trying this yourself? If you have the patience to deal with a buggy app, then yes. Get in on it while it lasts. Combining bike/scooter share with transit is amazing, and this promo somehow makes it cheaper to take Lime or Bird to transit than it is to walk there. Does any of this make sense? Not a lick. I would much prefer if the pricing were somewhere in the middle of full price and the promo price but the user process was easy and straight-forward. It would be amazing to be able to beep my ORCA card to start a bike ride, and then maybe some fare transfer could occur behind the scenes. The idea of bike/scooter fares and transit fares having some kind of transfer synergy is great, and the bike/scooter companies and transit agencies all have incentives to encourage linking the two modes (in many places around the world, transit agencies run the bike share system). Tying the reward to using a designated parking space is also a decent idea to encourage better parking, though I think they could ease up the restrictions a bit and give the reward for any ride that ends with a properly parked bike or scooter near a transit station. It's not obvious to users which specific spots count, and I was stymied on my first attempt after ending my ride at a bike rack across the street from the station that did not count and gave no reward points.

* The $1.66 price is what it cost me on that day for that trip, but I also paid $6 for a monthly Lime Prime subscription. To get a final price, I would have to take that $6 and factor a portion of it into the cost of every ride I take during the month. So the actual cost of the ride is $1.66 plus some variable amount. If a user used the promo the maximum number of 5 times per week, then each ride would cost about $1.93.