Lyft gets into bike-sharing through partnership with Baltimore

Bike-sharing has become the hot new mode of transportation for startups. Today, Lyft is announcing a partnership with the Baltimore Bike Share program to support new transportation hubs for bikes, and designated pickup and drop-off spots for Lyft, The Baltimore Business Journal reports.

The partnership, which is also supported by Baltimore’s department of transportation, entails a $270,000 investment from Lyft to sponsor five of these new transportation hubs for three years, The Baltimore Sun reports. The plan is to locate these hubs at the Baltimore Visitor Center, National Aquarium, Harbor East, Hopkins Place and Shot Tower bike-share stations. The Lyft-sponsored stations will be reportedly rebranded.

Baltimore’s bike-share program, which first launched in October 2016 with 200 bikes at 20 stations, is supported by $2.36 million in state and federal grants.

“We’ve been talking with Bike Share and [the city transportation department] about this for a long time,” Lyft Baltimore Market Manager Mike Heslin told the Baltimore Sun. “We’re going in with clear eyes. We’ve had frank discussions with them as the partnership has come together.”

Lyft’s main competitor, Uber, also recently entered the bike-share space. In January, Uber partnered with bike-share service JUMP in San Francisco. Called Uber Bike, Uber customers in San Francisco are able to book JUMP’s pedal-assist bikes within the Uber app.

I’ve reached out to Lyft and will update this story when I hear back.