The ride-hailing company Lyft will offer electric scooter service in Washington, D.C., starting Thursday, the company announced, making it the fifth company to operate scooters in the District.
Lyft Scooters, as the company is branding them, will deploy gradually around the District in all eight wards, joining options from Bird, Lime, Skip and Spin, which are limited by the D.C. Department of Transportation to operate no more than 400 scooters each.
Scooters will be in service from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. They are black with purple and pink stripes on the steering column.
“By bringing Lyft Scooters to D.C., Lyft is one step closer to providing a full end-to-end experience with multi-modal transportation trips on the Lyft platform, and reducing the dependency on personal vehicles for good,” Lyft Bikes & Scooters' D.C. market manager Chris Dattaro said in a statement.
Lyft previously launched scooter service in Denver and Santa Monica, California, last month, with the D.C. launch being the first East Coast operation for the ride-hailing giant.
D.C. was selected because the findings of the Lyft Economic Impact Report found that Lyft users were using personal cars less, Dattaro said. A third of Lyft users in D.C. said owning a personal vehicle is less important to them now, and 48 percent said they use their cars less because of Lyft.
“Lyft has worked closely with the District of Columbia and DDOT to make this the first scooter launch on the East Coast, believing that cities should be built around people, not cars,” Dattaro said.
