Doug Allen had just taken a quick shower to wipe the sleep off his face before rushing out the door of his home in Temescal. It was almost 9 a.m., and it was starting to get warm, with the sun beating down on his head. He was running late to his job downtown. Waiting for the bus would take too long and riding a bike might leave him a sweaty mess.
But he realized he had another option—an e-bike. He took out his phone, opened the Lyft app, pulled an e-bike from a station, and was on his way. After steering around some cars that were parked in the bike lane, forcing him to get on the car lane, “which is always a little scary,” he was at work in nine minutes.
“In months past I would have hopped on a bike and it would not save much time relative to the bus. This morning there was an e-bike available and I was at work [quickly], not having ruined the shower I just took.”
Allen said he paid $1.64 for the ride because he has a $199-a-year Lyft Pink membership. He also said that the e-bikes feel easier to handle than the regular bikes.
“Mostly I was just enjoying a quick, not too sweaty ride to work on a beautiful day,” he said.
Years after San Francisco residents got access to e-bikes through the Bay Wheels bike rental program, Oaklanders are finally getting a chance to ride too. And it looks like East Bay residents are already preferring the e-bikes over the old classic pedal-powered two-wheelers.
Lyft, the mobility company known for its ride-hailing app but which has run bicycle-sharing programs for years in multiple cities, including San Francisco and Chicago, manages the program in Oakland. According to John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which partners with Lyft on the program, Oakland residents are already using the city’s new e-bikes more than the regular bikes, based on initial data.
OakDOT spokesperson Sean Maher told The Oaklandside that “E-bikes were ridden about 20 times each in April and the classic bikes about 10 times.” The overall number of trips was larger for classic bike trips over e-bike trips, 6,237 to 2,542, but that’s because there are about three times as many classic bikes available at the moment.
Lyft, Oakland, and the MTC recently announced they will add 510 e-bikes onto city streets and 19 new shared docking stations. This is in addition to the existing 83 stations and 650 or so regular bicycles.
E-bikes are becoming popular everywhere because of their ability to power up hills and for long distances without pedaling. This makes it easier for people who may have a harder time using regular bikes or may simply want to commute to work without getting drenched with sweat.
Last fall, former OakDOT director Fred Kelley wrote in a report that the addition of the new e-bikes would “grow the bike share network, expand mobility options, and increase equitable access to the network for Oakland residents.”
The only previously available public rental for e-bikes in Oakland were the Veo Cosmo scooters. Those, however, were not technically e-bikes but scooters, even though they work like class II e-bikes without pedals and go up to 15 mph.
According to Lyft’s app, there are about 220 new e-bikes deployed in Oakland as of May 2. The majority are in downtown, North Oakland, West Oakland, and just east of Lake Merritt.
Last year, Lyft agreed to place at least 20% of all new bike stations available in the city’s most underserved neighborhoods. OakDOT personnel will choose the new docking stations based on “community outreach results and an analysis of areas with a high density of jobs, housing, and population,” according to a report late last year. This work by Oakland planners is in process and will be paid for by a $150,000 grant from the MTC.
Based on our review, there are still very few bikes available to people in East Oakland compared to other areas. We counted 16 e-bikes East of San Antonio Park.
The expansion of the Bay Wheels program in Oakland is part of a larger service expansion agreement between Lyft and the MTC. That deal funded the $14 million Bay Wheels program for Lyft to expand and manage it and add new stations and 2,700 new e-bikes in Oakland, San Francisco, and other Bay Area cities. Lyft is also expected to add five new docking stations and 55 new e-bikes to its batch of bikes in Emeryville, and Berkeley is expected to receive new e-bikes soon.
Prices are higher for e-bikes
The new bikes signify a growing effort by Bay Area cities and Lyft to get people to consider using bikes as a form of affordable, environmentally-friendly transportation ahead of the summer season and on top of a renewed focus on the slowly improving roads. Starting last November, Lyft reduced the cost of the annual Bay Wheels membership from $169 to $150 while reducing the cost-per-minute charge for members to 15 cents from 20 cents.
People who want to ride the bikes without paying for a Bay Wheels membership can do so by paying higher per-ride rates.
Renting an electric bike is more expensive than renting a classic bike. Without a Lyft Bay Wheels or Pink Lyft membership, it costs 30 cents per minute to ride an electric bike, $3.99 to unlock the bike to ride it, and 30 cents per minute to reserve it. For a 30-minute e-bike ride that you reserve five minutes ahead of time, the cost is $14.49. The same amount of time with a classic bike will cost you $3.99.
People who are eligible for Pacific Gas & Electric’s California Alternate Rates for Energy Program (CARE) program or the CalFresh low-income food program can get discounted fares.
This pricing scheme is more expensive than other rental bike programs around the country because of its private-public partnership which Lyft has admitted is run on a deficit. The Metro Bike system in Los Angeles, for example, is owned entirely by a public agency and people can use their bikes an unlimited amount of time for a $150 monthly fee.
The new Oakland e-bikes are noticeable on the street by their gray color. People who use them have told The Oaklandside that they’re easier to ride than older Lyft e-bikes available in other cities because they have a small LCD screen that lets riders know their range and tend to have a more reliable e-assist feature. Lyft claims these bikes can travel 60 miles on a single charge.
Bryan Culbertson, from the Traffic Violence Rapid Response group, told us he tends to choose e-bikes over regular bikes, especially because he has a monthly Bay Wheels subscription that makes them affordable. But he also said they’re not as convenient as the old e-bikes available in San Francisco because they don’t have gears that are better for riding on hills. Culbertson said the new gray e-bikes also need to be docked at stations to end the rental. Otherwise, someone else could pick up the bike and he would get charged.
The minute-by-minute pricing model could also lead to other unexpected consequences.
“I wish there was more of a flat rate instead of a per-minute rate because I feel the need to rush to save money and that can lead to unsafe biking,” he said.
George Spies, also from Traffic Violence Rapid Response, said the lack of docks and bikes in East Oakland is “problematic,” because people are losing out on a “new, important, and beneficial mode of travel.” Spies and other advocates want the MTC to take over Lyft’s contract when it ends in 2027 to make it into a large public system that is easier and cheaper to use in combination with other transit options, including using a Clipper card to pay for rides.
People tend to choose e-bikes over regular bikes, according to Lyft data
An analysis of Lyft Bike ridership data from March 2024 by The Oaklandside found that electric bikes are by far more popular with riders than classic bikes when both are available. In San Francisco, nearly 80% of bike rentals in March were e-bikes. In San Jose, it was 73%.
The data also suggested that the busiest days and times for Lyft bike use across all cities are during commuting hours, including in Oakland. Tuesday through Thursday usage at 8 a.m. and from 4-6 p.m are high, with the system’s highest count of rides across all cities coming at 5 p.m. with 26,697 rides. For comparison, 8 AM has 17,489 rides.
Lyft has not yet released the data for ridership from April. We will use that data when it’s available to compare overall e-bike usage to previous months.
This July, it will be a full nine years since the city first approved the bike-sharing program and policy. At that time the deal was with a company named Motivate, which led to the first bikes getting rented in the Bay Area starting in 2017. The program was then known as Ford GoBike and all the bikes available were non-electric. By April 2018, 80 stations full of bikes were added on Oakland roads and later that year, Lyft bought Motivate, leading to its rebranding as Bay Wheels in 2019.
Allen, the bike commuter from Temescal, said the increased presence of e-bikes in Oakland gives him hope for a future where cities are built less around “metal-death-machines flying around on shared roads.”
“The more people we enable to bike, e-bike, scoot, and use anything that isn’t a car, the more I feel optimistic that we can start to redesign cities around an array of transportation options, which can then have pretty profound impacts on both livability and climate.”
March 2024 Bay Wheels data
Top Lyft Bay Wheels stations where rides start for March 2024, according to Oaklandside analysis
Oakland (no-e-bikes in March)
- MacArthur BART Station: 473 rides
- 19th Street BART Station: 331 rides
- Lake Merritt BART Station: 300 rides
- West Oakland BART Station: 300 rides
- Rockridge BART Station: 290 rides
Berkeley (no-e-bikes in March)
- Bancroft Way at Telegraph Ave: 317 rides
- Downtown Berkeley BART: 297 rides
- Oregon Street at Adeline Street: 215 rides
- Ashby BART Station: 197 rides
- Telegraph Avenue at Ashby Avenue: 159 rides
San Francisco
- Market Street at Steuart Street: 3019 rides
- San Francisco Caltrain (Townsend St at 4th St): 2556 rides
- Powell BART Station (Market St at 4th St): 2404 rides
- Market Street at 10th St: 2209 rides
- Montgomery BART Station (Market St at 2nd St): 2089 rides
San Jose
- San Pedro Square: 382 rides
- San Fernando Street at 4th Street: 340 rides
- San Fernando Street at 7th Street: 311 rides
- 5th Street at Virginia Street: 261 rides
- Ryland Park: 252 rides
Ride counts by hour and membership type
- Non-member riders:
- Peak times: 5 p.m. (7,073 rides), 4 p.m. (6,255 rides), and 3 p.m. (5,864 rides).
- Lowest usage: Early morning hours (4 a.m. – 5 a.m.).
- Members:
- Peak times: 5 p.m. (19,624 rides), 6 p.m. (16,524 rides), and 4 p.m. (14,675 rides).
- Lowest usage: Early morning hours (3 a.m. – 5 a.m.).
Average ride durations
- Non-member riders: Average ride duration is approximately 19.4 minutes.
- Members: Average ride duration is about 10.7 minutes.
Number of unique bike stations available in each city
- Berkeley: 36 stations
- Oakland: 83 stations
- San Francisco: 334 stations
- San Jose: 83 stations
