Lime scooters in Seattle are going to start out policing their very own riders, utilizing cameras and AI to catch — and name out — dangerous conduct in actual time.
The San Francisco-based micromobility firm’s newly developed “Lime Imaginative and prescient” system will make its nationwide debut in Seattle this summer season, utilizing a front-mounted digital camera and a educated AI mannequin to detect whether or not a rider is within the highway, a motorcycle lane, or on the sidewalk.
When dangerous conduct is detected, the scooter emits an audible alert and sends a real-time notification to the Lime app, warning the rider to maneuver to a safer location.
“The audible alert very clearly makes you and others round you conscious that the car will not be the place it’s imagined to be,” mentioned Parker Dawson, Lime’s senior regional lead of presidency relations for the Pacific Northwest.
The rollout is a part of a broader set of deliberate security options geared toward defending each riders and pedestrians, and can ultimately prolong to Lime’s e-bike fleet.
Reckless using could be a significant issue, particularly for riders who don’t put on a helmet. KUOW reported final yr that Seattle’s Harborview Medical Middle noticed 163 critical accidents in 2024 from e-scooter or e-bike mishaps, lots of them head accidents.
Half of Lime’s 7,000 standing scooters in Seattle shall be outfitted with the Lime Imaginative and prescient by June 1 — using a mixture of new gadgets and retrofits — simply in time for the large inflow of tourists anticipated for the FIFA World Cup. The rest of the fleet shall be accomplished within the following months.
It’s the most recent evolution of the Metropolis of Seattle’s e-bike and e-scooter share program, which presently consists of each Lime and Chicken.
Lime, which operates in additional than 280 cities throughout almost 30 international locations, arrived in Seattle in July 2017, and counts town as its oldest lively market and a worldwide testing floor for brand new {hardware}, together with throttled e-bikes and the “LimeGlider” sit-down scooter.
With 15,000 deployed gadgets, together with bikes, Lime riders recorded greater than 10 million journeys in Seattle in 2025, with Pike Place Market rating as the highest vacation spot in all of North America final yr.
To assist handle the amount, the Seattle Division of Transportation started including greater than 200 new parking “corrals” downtown and across the metropolis final fall to alleviate sidewalk muddle and encourage correct docking.
GeekWire is in contact with SDOT in regards to the Lime Imaginative and prescient know-how, and we’ll replace this put up when there’s extra data to share.
