Electric scooter company Lime announced Sunday that it’s reducing areas where their scooters can be ridden in Portland largely to parts of downtown, Northwest Portland, the innermost Eastside and east of Interstate 205.

The San Francisco-based firm said in an email to its users that scooters will slow to 3 mph if taken out of the new service area and a user’s trip won’t officially end until the device is brought back to its operating area.

The service change comes after the Portland Bureau of Transportation announced Friday that a pilot program involving Lime and four other e-scooter vendors would be extended to the end of 2020.

Lime is allowed to operate up to 782 scooters in Portland, the second-most of the vendors operating in Portland, the transportation bureau said.

Lime’s service reduction is allowable under its permit with the city, said Hannah Schafer, a transportation bureau spokesperson. She said it’s because they’re a private business and because the company plans to uphold a transportation bureau requirement that companies deploy 15% of their scooter fleet each day in East Portland.

She said Lime’s prior service zone was “essentially all of Portland.”

A Lime spokesperson told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Monday that the company has been reducing its service zones around the country because data shows rider demand lowers during the winter. Service in some areas, such as Tacoma in Washington, has been suspended entirely for at least the season.

Portland’s service area was reduced to focus on spots where the majority of trips in the city occur, the spokesperson said. Company data shows about 85% of rides this year and last year occurred in Lime’s new service zone in the city.

Bird, Razor, Shared and Spin are the other four vendors currently allowed to operate in Portland.

The companies are allowed to have more than 2,800 e-scooters on the streets between them, with the most being 833 permitted for Spin and the least at 200 for Shared.

-- Everton Bailey Jr; ebailey@oregonian.com | 503-221-8343 | @EvertonBailey

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