Transportation

Lime uses sensor data to keep scooters off sidewalks


While there are many advantages to the burgeoning urban micromobility movement, the the unbridled proliferation of electric bikes and scooters also comes with major downsides — such as cluttered and hazardous sidewalks.

And it’s against that backdrop that VC-backed Lime today announced a new approach to keeping riders off the sidewalk, using a mixture of sensors and an AI-based statistical model that predicts the likelihood that a user was riding on the sidewalk and for how long.

For the pilot initiative, Lime is partnering with San José, a city that has been trying to crack down on rogue scooters through regulating the companies behind them. This includes controlling the number of scooters that are deployed, ensuring sufficient safety protocols are in place, and requiring scooter companies to prevent riders from using the sidewalks. And that is basically what today’s announcement is setting out to achieve.

“Lime has been working on sidewalk riding detection since hearing concerns from some city and community partners, and we believe we may have finally cracked the code on this issue and developed a technology that is effective, safe and scalable,” noted Lime’s northern California general manager EV Ellington.

How it works

Lime scooters already have onboard speedometers, and combining this with accelerometer data the company said that it can figure out the vibration of the underlying surface using a “sophisticated statistical model” that it designed in-house. And thus, whether it is on a sidewalk or a road.

“With this functionality, Lime is able to discern with up to 95% accuracy when a rider is riding on a sidewalk instead of the street,” the company said.

From the rider’s perspective, they won’t be locked out or kicked off their scooter — they’ll merely receive a warning through a push notification if more than half of the ride occurred on the sidewalk. They may also receive an image mapping exactly where the sidewalk riding took place, alongside an email with the same warning.

Above: Lime is rolling out sidewalk detection

At first, Lime will monitor every ride in downtown San José, though this is likely to be expanded to other regions in the future.

Interestingly, Lime also hinted at another use-case for the data it gathers, given that it will show exactly how many people are riding on sidewalks, at which locations, and for how long. Indeed, cities could use this data to inform infrastructure needs, such as creating dedicated bike / scooter lanes.

“We are excited to leverage the data we collect to better understand when and where people are riding on sidewalks,” Ellington added. “Once we have that data in hand, we can share it with the City of San José and work on potential infrastructure improvements, such as protected bike lanes, to make riders and pedestrians feel safe.”

Back in 2018, Lime announced a $3 million commitment to educate users about scooter safety, and this has involved informing users in advance about where they should and shouldn’t ride. Armed with street-level data, Lime can now go the whole nine yards and issue proactive warnings after the ride.



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