SOUTH BEND —As the year winds down, city and LimeBike officials said the dockless bike sharing system launched here this summer has been a success so far, and the company doesn’t plan on storing any bikes for the winter.
Since July, about 27,000 unique users have taken nearly 200,000 trips in South Bend, LimeBike’s third U.S. market, following launches at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and Key Biscayne, Fla., according to statistics the San Mateo, Calif.-based company released Friday.
“From our perspective, everything has gone swimmingly” in South Bend, said Jason Wilde, who spent three weeks here overseeing an initial deployment of 800 bikes, which grew to about 1,500 in the fall. “The early statistics stack up side by side against some very big cities.”
For example, in Indianapolis, the Indiana Pacers Bikeshare system, in which users must dock the bikes at designated stations, has recorded about 330,000 trips but has been operating since 2013, Wilde said.
“South Bend is doing amazing,” he said.
University of Notre Dame students, faculty and staff have taken about half the trips, with an average riding time of nearly six minutes, covering 0.8 miles.
Tim Corcoran, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s director of planning, said he was under the impression that LimeBike planned to reduce the number of bikes this winter but leave some on campus and downtown because sidewalks there are more likely to be cleared of snow.