Lyft Urban Solutions at Smart City Expo 2024: A New Identity and Renewed Commitment
November 13, 2024 — Events & awardsEvents & awards
Lyft Urban Solutions Wins Best Eco-Friendly Urban Travel System Award
Bike Share has been growing in popularity across major international cities, promoting accessible, affordable, and environmentally friendly transportation to commuters.
Active people, dynamic cities, and a healthy planet.
At Lyft Urban Solutions, we embrace the vision of sustainable cities through the collective power of bike sharing. We’re especially excited about some of our recent environmentally friendly achievements in bicycle sharing systems. For instance, Lyft Urban Solutions was awarded Best Eco-Friendly Urban Travel System by Corporate Vision’s Technology Innovator Awards, for our proven track record of implementing long-standing and successful bike share systems in cities such as Montreal, London, Toronto, Barcelona, and many more smart cities.
Certainly, for citizens, cities, and our planet, the advantages of sustainable transportation are many. This is particularly true of bike sharing, which has a significant positive impact on individual and socio-economic health and helps solve a city's urban transit challenges. Let’s examine some eco-friendly virtues of bike share, specifically, Lyft Urban Solutions’s newest environmentally friendly innovations — already deployed and operational within some of our best-in-class bicycle sharing systems. Indeed, Lyft Urban Solutions’s sustainable bicycle sharing systems are in many ways in sync with important global trends in micromobility, sustainability, and urban planning.
Read on for some eco-friendly ways Lyft Urban Solutions is changing the world, one city at a time, including developing ways to incorporate solar-power into our charging stations for our e-bikes.
Micromobility is Essential Towards Sustainable City Transport
Whether we’re creating and deploying a brand-new bicycle sharing system or modernizing and expanding an existing one, Lyft Urban Solutions’s bike share systems fit seamlessly into existing public transport networks, which can improve city infrastructure, reduce traffic and pollution, and help keep city-dwellers active and healthy.
For more insights about the potential impact of bike-share systems within the present-day infrastructure shift to sustainable transportation, let’s revisit some highlights from CoMoUK’s recent Annual Bike Share report, which focuses on bicycle share systems in the UK. As you can see in the report, 53 percent of those who responded said that when it came to their last trip, if it wasn’t for bike share, they would have ended up traveling by cab or car!
Lyft Urban Solutions’s Eco-Friendly Rollouts
Another example of Lyft Urban Solutions’s eco-friendly innovations is our Multimodal docking and charging solution. These welcoming stations not only secure and charge Lyft Urban Solutions’s e-bikes, but can host e-scooters from partner operators! The secret? Our patented multifunctional locking device can be placed on another vehicle to make it instantly compatible with our docking points.
By strategically positioning multimodal stations throughout a city (near public transit routes or popular bike paths, for example), operators can offer urbanites convenient access to a wider range of eco-friendly transportation options, which can improve mobility infrastructure and reduce traffic, particularly during those busy commute hours.
How Does Bike Share Tie Into the Vision for 15 Minute Cities?
As global providers of eco-friendly bike share, we’re inspired and intrigued by the concept of 15 minute city. 15 minute city is a vision of urban planning and living credited to Carlos Moreno and other authors in their article published in the Smart Cities journal in which they reference the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 11, which includes sustainable transport.
When we talk about this increasingly popular concept towards sustainable urban planning and living, we're essentially talking about infrastructure planning for major cities that allow for commuters to get around and have access to most of their needs in 15 minutes or less. If urban infrastructure is planned around accessibility, most trips from work to groceries, the gym, etc, can be reduced to 5 km or less. Thus, active commuters would no longer need to rely on personal cars. This encourages walking, cycling and public transit for daily trips, having a powerful lasting impact on the city's environmental and public health, promoting an active and eco-friendly culture.
From E-Bikes to Solar Charging
Lyft Urban Solutions is constantly innovating and researching new and improved ways to make micromobility and bike sharing even more eco-friendly. Take, for example, recent initiatives for our popular electric bike share systems. We’re delighted to see our lively fleets of pedal assist e-bikes in such demand. Did you know that 8000 of our E-FIT and BOOST electric bicycles are circulating in 15 cities throughout the world? And out of the 500 million trips taken worldwide on Lyft Urban Solutions bikes until today, 14 million of them were on our e-bikes, in cities such as Dubai, Quebec City, and Monaco, to name a few.
What’s even more eco-friendly than electric bike share? Solar-powered electric bike share! Indeed, solar-powered charging makes an e-bike system even more eco-friendly. In partnership with WE-cycle (the system’s operator) and SkyHook Solar, we recently completed a successful pilot project in Aspen, Colorado that featured solar-powered charging for 25 of our E-FIT bikes.
Outfitted with best-in-class bikes, equipment, engineering, and technology, Lyft Urban Solutions’s customized bicycle sharing systems promote active, healthy urbanites; improve mobility for happy, organized cities; and contribute to less pollution and a joyous planet. The best is yet to come!
To learn more about Lyft Urban Solutions’s global impact, Smart Cities, industry news, updates on technologies and events, sign up to the Lyft Urban Solutions Newsletter today.
Are you looking to become a local operator or bring Bike Share to your city?
Contact us at info@lyfturbansolutions.com