Solution

Item Windsor Staff Recommend ation Lime Comment
Fleet Composit ion E-scooters, pedal-assistE-bikes and/or Standard Bicycles (at least 20% of Fleet will be comprised of either pedal- assist E-bikes and/or Standard Bicycles). Windsor staff recommendation with respect to Fleet Composition is concerning. It appears staff is recommending that a vendor applying to the RFP has to offer both bike share (ebike or standard bike) AND scooter share.
No other City in Canada has mandated that an operator offer both bike share (e-bike or standard) and scooter share. While Lime started as a dockless standard bike share company and then morphed into a dockless e-bike share provider, it is now exclusively in the e-scooter space in Canada (Lime no longer offers dockless e-bikes in Calgary or anywhere in Canada).
In fact, if Windsor goes this direction, there will be only one small company eligible to participate in the RFP, assuming they are interested (see table below). Every other micro- mobility operator to date in Canada is either exclusively in the bike share space or scooter share space. Having multiple vendors (minimum of 2 to a maximum of 4) is ideal for consumers to create competitive prices and offerings.
It should also be noted that it appears that both Ubike and Dropbike no longer offer bike share services in Canada (or are withdrawing their services). This leaves very few bike share providers in Canada (JUMP operates a bike share in Montreal but Windsor may not be their next target City before larger cities).
Moreover, given the challenging developments related to COVID-19 for the micromobility industry right now, I would expect further consolidation and potential bankruptcy of smaller less well capitalized players in this space, which may further reduce the number of current bike share and/or scooter share operators in Canada and globally.