A company that already rents e-scooters across Long Beach has just debuted a new rental e-bike.
It’s the latest city to receive roughly 100 of the newly designed electric bikes from Lime, the company announced.
The LimeGlider e-bikes, which began appearing Monday, have foot rests instead of pedals and are “designed for riders who may have difficulty pedaling for extended periods” and those “looking to replace car trips with a more comfortable, two-wheeled option,” the company wrote in a news release.
The LimeGliders feature a green and black color scheme, while the company’s other e-bikes are white and green. The new e-bike also has smaller wheels, wider front baskets, ergonomic hand grips and “sliding clamp” style phone holders.
Each LimeGlider ride costs $0.41 per minute, and the bikes have a range of roughly 12 miles when fully charged.
To ride, users scan the bike’s QR code using the Lime app, provide a payment method and pull the lever on the handlebars to accelerate.
State law prohibits riding electric scooters on the sidewalk or roadways with posted speeds faster than 25 mph, forcing riders to either stick to bike lanes or routinely run afoul of the law.
In 2024, Long Beach logged 11,683 scooter violations through its online app, but it has been increasingly supportive of them.
In May, the Long Beach City Council approved the use of e-scooters on the city’s 3.5-mile stretch of bike path along the beach. But a lack of enforcement of the rules of the road has frustrated some neighbors.
The speed limit is 15 mph for scooters along the path and 20 mph for electric bikes and conventional bicycles.
Lime ran pilot programs with its new bikes in Seattle and Zurich, Switzerland, before debuting the e-bikes in Denver, Austin and San Francisco earlier this summer.
Since Lime first deployed scooters in Long Beach in 2018, about 600,000 riders have taken over 2.4 million trips, the company said. The 100 LimeGlider bikes join about 2,000 rental e-scooters citywide.
With the launch of the LimeGliders, the company is “continuing to mindfully grow our program with more mobility options while maintaining our focus on rider safety and tidy streets,” Hayden Harvey, director of government relations, said in a statement.