Lime asks City Council to delay Divvy contract vote, warning of a Lyft monopoly

Scooter company Lime is asking the Chicago City Council to slow down Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to extend and expand Lyft’s contract to run Divvy, warning that the deal would give Lyft a monopoly and could force Lime out of the city. The council’s Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety is scheduled to take up the ordinance at 10:30 a.m. Friday, October 9, at City Hall.

Lime laid out those objections in a draft letter to the committee’s chair, Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st), the Chicago Sun-Times reported Monday. The company asked the committee to put off its vote and asked the city to rework the terms to answer the company’s competition concerns. Lime spokesman Jacob Tugendrajch told the Sun-Times the proposal as written “would actually create a monopoly for Lyft.”

These are the basic facts of the dispute as of Tuesday, October 6, 2026.

• The ordinance, record O2026-0028871, would extend Lyft’s agreement to operate the city-owned Divvy system from January 2028 to January 23, 2033.
• Johnson introduced the ordinance at the September 23, 2026, City Council meeting, and the council referred it to the Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety.
• Lime says the company’s scooters logged 6.1 million rides last year, while Divvy bikes and scooters together logged 6.8 million.
• Lime and Divvy are the only two shared scooter services left in Chicago, according to the Sun-Times.
• The committee vote is set for 10:30 a.m. Friday, October 9, in Room 201A of City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St.

What the ordinance would change

The ordinance is two pages long. It authorizes the city’s transportation commissioner to sign an amendment with Lyft Bikes and Scooters LLC, labeled Amendment No. 10, which is attached with maps and a payment schedule to the City Clerk’s record of the ordinance. Johnson sent the measure to the council at the request of the Commissioner of Transportation, according to his September 23 transmittal letter. The ordinance text says the amendment would “provide pricing stability and improved system reliability for all riders.”

Under the amendment filed with the clerk, these are the main changes.

• Lyft’s term would run to January 23, 2033, five years past the current January 2028 end date.
• Single rides that start and end in the city’s Equity Priority Areas would carry no unlock fee and half-price per-minute charges on every vehicle type, scooters included.
• The Core Area, where Divvy concentrates docks, bikes and scooters, would grow in two phases beyond today’s zone bounded by North Avenue, Ashland Avenue and I-55.
• Lyft would add 4,000 devices in the Core Area, at least 2,500 of them scooters, and replace half of the classic bikes with a new model that can be cable-locked outside a station.
• Annual memberships would stay at $143.90 for renewing riders and $99 for new riders through 2027, and member scooter rates could not exceed member e-bike rates by more than 20%.
• Lyft’s payments to the city for 2028 through 2032 would total $15 million, half in annual payments the city would turn back into Divvy equipment and half in a guaranteed minimum from advertising and sponsorship sales.

Maps attached to the amendment label the first expansion phase by its boundary streets: Western Avenue, Cermak Road, Martin Luther King Drive, 67th Street, Jeffery Boulevard and 79th Street. On the map, the shaded area runs along the lakefront from Rogers Park to South Shore. A second phase would move the western edge to Kedzie Avenue and reach south to Pershing Road on the West Side, once the city and Lyft agree on a utilization threshold for fleet size.

The discount details differ slightly between the announcement and the contract. The city’s September 23 announcement, as the Sun-Times reported it, described half-off non-member rides that start or end on the South and West sides. The amendment’s text applies the half-price per-minute rate to single rides that start and end in an Equity Priority Area, and waives unlock fees for trips that begin or end in one. Divvy already drops the unlock fee for non-members on trips that start in those areas, Fox 32 reported in March.

The amendment also limits fare increases. A yearly increase larger than inflation plus 2% would need city approval. That limit loosens if Lyft has the extra devices ready and the city has not expanded the Core Area within nine months of the amendment taking effect, or if the city later shrinks the Core Area. In either case, Lyft could raise prices by up to 10% a year without city sign-off. Starting in 2028, Lyft would also share 10% of yearly ridership revenue between $20 million and $40 million, 7% of the next $20 million and 5% of anything above $60 million.

Lime’s argument

Lime is already barred from the Central Business District, where only Divvy can operate, the Sun-Times reported. The Core Area that the amendment would expand is the one defined in the city’s scooter-sharing rules. Under the version of those rules the city published in February 2023, private operators could keep no more than 4% of their fleets in the Core Area and no more than 1% in the Central Business District. The amendment says the city will take enforcement action against any third-party operator that exceeds the Core Area caps, from warnings and citations up to license suspension or revocation. In a separate statement, Lime said the deal could wipe out competition from the last private scooter company in Chicago and force Lime to leave the city.

Lime also made a price argument. The company said Lyft’s current low-income pricing is 34% higher than Lime’s own access program, and that Divvy charges 19% more than Lime on the South and West sides. Lime’s website does not list the company’s Chicago per-minute rates. Lime also pointed to New York City, where Lyft runs the bike-share system, as a place where, in Lime’s view, a geographic monopoly has pushed prices up.

Lime’s ridership figure matches city data. The city’s E-Scooter Trips dataset, which covers trips from May 2022 through December 31, 2025, lists 6,087,691 Lime trips in calendar 2025, up about 43% from 4,255,196 in 2024. The same data lists 3,232,394 scooter trips in 2025 under Lyft, which runs the Divvy scooters. Divvy’s total of 6.8 million rides for 2025 also includes classic bikes and e-bikes, and the two systems combined for 12.9 million trips that year, WTTW reported in January.

The city’s case for the deal

In a statement to the Sun-Times, the mayor’s office said the administration wants to build on its progress toward an equitable micromobility system and will keep working with industry partners and council members as the ordinance moves through the council. La Spata and Lyft did not immediately respond to the Sun-Times’ requests for comment.

When the city announced the extension on September 23, Johnson said in a news release that the extension would keep rides affordable and update the system, the Sun-Times reported. La Spata said then that the South and West side discount would help the system serve riders in more parts of the city. Better Streets Chicago and the Active Transportation Alliance, two transportation advocacy groups, praised the renewal in a joint statement for its affordability and its oversight by the Chicago Department of Transportation. The city’s release said the Core Area expansion would add more than 100 union jobs, according to the Sun-Times.

Divvy is a public system. The city’s scooter-sharing page describes Divvy as city-owned and operated under contract by Lyft. The ordinance traces the arrangement to a 2012 council vote and a January 2013 operator agreement under which the city paid the operator to buy, install and run the system. A 2019 change known as Amendment 8 moved expansion and operating costs to the operator, created payments to the city and gave the operator exclusive rights to bike sharing on the public way. Lyft took over the contract in late 2018, when the previous operator was acquired and renamed Lyft Bikes and Scooters, according to the ordinance.

The new amendment keeps that bike-share exclusivity and leaves it to the transportation commissioner to decide whether other two-wheeled devices count as bikes under the contract. The amendment would also let Lyft put about $6.6 million of the company’s 2027 payment toward 4,000 new docks in the Core Area. The city’s Divvy station dataset listed 1,210 stations in service across Chicago on October 6, 2026, with 19,926 docks in service at those stations.

How the scooter market shrank to two

The city’s permanent scooter program started in 2022, when Lime, Spin and Superpedestrian won two-year licenses and Divvy added docked scooters downtown, Smart Cities Dive reported that April. Private operators had to keep at least half of their scooters in equity priority areas on the South and West sides. Superpedestrian pulled out of Chicago in 2023, citing stiff competition with Lyft, according to the Sun-Times. The city’s trip data shows Spin’s last recorded Chicago ride on December 28, 2024.

The council reworked the program in April 2024, removing the limit on how many companies can hold licenses at once and allowing rentals after midnight, Fox 32 reported. Licenses now run two years and are issued every other June, WBEZ reported. The 2024 plan set a $250,000 license fee plus $16 a month per scooter and 16 cents per trip, according to WTTW. The Lyft amendment also restates a clause tied to scooter competition: if the city raises the overall scooter fleet cap in its municipal code, either side can reopen the deal’s financial terms.

What riders pay now

Divvy’s pricing page lists these rates, and Lime’s website describes the company’s discount program.

• A Divvy classic bike single ride costs $1 to unlock plus 20 cents a minute.
• A Divvy e-bike or scooter single ride costs $1 to unlock plus 44 cents a minute.
• An annual Divvy membership costs $143.90, with a $99 offer for new members, and members pay 20 cents a minute on e-bikes and 34 cents a minute on scooters with no unlock fee.
• A Divvy day pass costs $19.90, up from $18.10 before this year’s rate change, according to Fox 32.
• Divvy for Everyone, the income-based program, costs $5 a year for qualifying residents.
• Lime Access gives reduced fares to riders enrolled in programs such as SNAP or Medicaid, and Lime’s terms say discount levels vary by city.

The amendment’s 20% rule would cut the member scooter rate if the member e-bike rate stays at 20 cents a minute. In that case, members would pay no more than 24 cents a minute on a Divvy scooter, down from 34 cents.

What happens next

The ordinance has several steps ahead before any of the new terms take effect.

• The Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety meets at 10:30 a.m. Friday, October 9, in Room 201A at City Hall, with the Divvy ordinance listed as item 3 on the committee agenda.
• Lime has asked the committee to delay that vote and the city to rewrite the deal.
• If the committee recommends passage, the full City Council could take up the ordinance, and the clerk’s calendar shows the next regular council meeting on October 14 at 10 a.m.
• Once passed, the ordinance would let the transportation commissioner sign the amendment on substantially the filed terms, with any changes the commissioner approves.
• The first Core Area expansion would follow 30 days’ notice from Lyft that the 4,000 extra devices and replacement bikes are ready to deploy.

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