Lyft Removes Bikes from Transit App

Mobility app Transit is calling out Lyft after the latter removed its bikesharing abilities from the Transit app.

In 2018, Lyft bought Motivate, which ran Citi Bike in New York and Divvy in Chicago, among other ventures. Motivate incorporated multimodal forms of transportation on its app, and worked to get the forms on other apps, like Google Maps, Transit, Uber, and Lyft.

According to a blog post, since Lyft purchased Motivate, it has since cut off this cross-app sharing ability, forcing people to download the Lyft app to use its bikesharing feature.

"Instead of making bikeshare more interoperable, Lyft purchased Motivate to make bikeshare inoperable," Transit wrote. "Not only is Lyft reneging on old Motivate agreements… they’re reneging on old Motivate values. They’re making bikeshares harder to find, harder to purchase, and harder to connect with public transit."