Lyft’s Wednesday move to pull all its black and pink electric bikes from the East Bay, San Francisco and San Jose came after flammable battery packs or vandalism caused at least four bikes to catch fire, two more than the company earlier acknowledged.
San Jose city officials are encouraged by the fact no one was injured when a bike caught fire there on Tuesday, said Colin Heyne, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation. Representatives from Lyft reached out to the city on Wednesday after two fires were reported in San Francisco over the past week, he said, and told them it would deactivate the e-bikes until it could remove them from its fleet.
“They have no intention of re-introducing the bikes until they know what the problem is and have fixed it,” Heyne said. “We’ll work with them to get a full picture of what they are doing to investigate these batteries and what they will go through for safety testing before they relaunch the bikes.”
Lyft spokeswoman Julie Wood declined to answer questions about the incidents, other than to say no one was injured.
“We have been proactive and transparent with our city partners and will continue to provide them with up-to-date information as we work to return the e-bikes to service,” she said Friday via email.
This is the second time Lyft has had to remove e-bikes from the streets after a braking problem prompted the first recall. Lyft on Wednesday disabled its newest e-bikes, making them unavailable to rent, after the San Francisco Examiner and other outlets reported two had caught fire in San Francisco within the past week.
Wood on Thursday didn’t respond to repeated questions from this news organization about whether there were any fires involving the e-bikes outside of San Francisco. By that time the company had been notified of two additional fires in Berkeley and San Jose.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s inquiry into the fires in that city revealed the two other cases: one in Berkeley on July 22 and another in San Jose this past Tuesday, said Jamie Parks, the Livable Streets Director at the SFMTA. Details about the exact times and locations of those incidents were not immediately available, he said.
Lyft on Friday said the fire in San Jose was caused by vandalism and not a malfunctioning battery pack. On Thursday, company representatives said they weren’t sure whether tampering caused the two fires in San Francisco, as well.
Disabling the e-bike fleet leaves Lyft with only 2,500 pedal-powered bikes throughout the Bay Area cities it serves.
For riders who use the bikes often, the sudden rollback has been frustrating. San Francisco resident Parker Day uses the bikes as his primary mode of commuting to work, he said.
“I understand the safety concern and I don’t want there to be a battery exploding between my legs when I’m riding the bike around,” Day said, adding that he wished the company would replace e-bikes with pedal-powered bikes.so there are enough to fill demand. “Just pulling the bikes really impacts the availability and my ability to use them.”
Oakland resident and regular rider Chris Riederer is hoping to see some more oversight of the bikes before he jumps back on. He’s a big supporter of the concept, he said, and wants to see more pedal-powered and electric bikes around the Bay Area.
“I just don’t know how credible I would find Lyft,” he said. “I would like some reassurance from the government at this point.”
A spokesman for the city of Berkeley didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Sean Maher, a spokesman for the city of Oakland’s Department of Public Works, said officials there also were concerned. Lyft reached out to the city after the fire in Berkeley on July 22, he said.
“(They) let us know that they were sending the bike to their engineering department to do a full assessment … to determine the cause of the fire,” Maher said. “No fires occurred in Oakland to our knowledge.”
Officials in the city will be looking to Lyft to demonstrate that the issues with the bikes have been resolved, he said.
Lyft operates the Bay Area’s only publicly-sponsored shared bicycle company in the region and has bikes in Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, San Francisco and San Jose. Last year, it acquired Motivate, which operates bike-share programs across the country. In the Bay Area, Motivate was operating Ford GoBike, which Lyft recently rebranded as Bay Wheels.
Lyft manufactures its own electric bikes, Wood told this news organization on Thursday. The company pulled its black electric assist bikes in April after problems with the brakes caused some riders to careen over the handlebars. It debuted the new black and pink bikes in San Jose in June and in the East Bay and San Francisco in July.
There was a lot of excitement about the new bikes, Heyne said, which feature locking devices customers can use so they don’t have to return the bikes to a docking station.
“That was definitely the direction we wanted to see bike share going,” he said, “but we want to make sure the technology is safe.”
