Inside Third Lane’s New Business Strategy

Bird is riding a hockey-stick era of growth.

The North American operator that once lost $300 million in 2019 has undergone an unprecedented turnaround.

Everybody wants to know how Bird did it. How Third Lane Mobility, the parent company merging Bird and Spin, achieved a $50 million swing in just one year. Crowds lined up at last week’s Micromobility Europe expo in Brussels eager to learn how the operator that once fell victim to the boom years of shared micromobility took its early mistakes and transformed them into growth.

Bird now launches a new strategy to continue scaling that growth. 

Three core verticals make up the mission: More People, More Places and More Ways.

More People

The first focus of Bird’s new strategy is making micromobility accessible and available to more people.

Hence the operator has just launched a fresh suite of vehicles to make this happen – two e-bike models and one e-scooter.

Each vehicle has been designed to serve a unique segment of society. Bird’s ‘Explorer’ e-bike is for casual, first-time riders and short trips, ideal for exploring neighbourhoods, travelling around campuses and visiting urban parks. 

The ‘Bird Journey’ e-bike comes with a refined frame and extended range for longer, commute-style journeys. It’s built for those who rely on micromobility to get where they’re going.

And the ‘Bird Dash’ e-scooter channels the operator’s historic e-scooter expertise into a robust yet agile model that aims to facilitate quick trips, first and last-mile connections, and navigating busy city centres.

“This investment in fleet diversification, and the introduction of two new e-bike models, is fundamentally about allowing more new riders to tap into the benefits of shared micromobility,” Stewart Lyons, Co-CEO of Bird and Spin, tells Zag Daily.

The latest batch of vehicles signals a shift in how Bird is offering micromobility to cities. The operator has predominantly operated e-scooters which made up around 85% of its fleet before this new release. Now, Bird doubles down on e-bikes to match their growth in cities across the globe, as more and more people embrace the e-bike as their chosen urban transportation solution.

As Bird diversifies its fleet to give more sustainable choice to riders, it also takes the definition of sustainability one step further. Its partnership with Bib Batteries – the French startup that won the Silver Micromobility Europe Startup Award last week – focuses on extending the lifetime of their vehicles and giving its batteries a second life to reduce the overall environmental footprint.

“We’re making it easier for people to ride sustainably, while doing our part through smarter vehicles,” says Stewart. 

Beyond its own operations, Bird is engaging in community partnerships to bring micromobility to more people. Its recent alliance with the Piedmont Park Conservancy aims to improve the transportation offering in and around Piedmont Park – a 200-acre green space in the heart of Atlanta that hosts six million people every year. 

Through safety programming and the deployment of bikes and scooters in and around the park, Bird is making it easier for people to access this urban oasis, whilst reducing the reliance of private cars and showcasing the power of micromobility to improve the experience of visitors.

More places 

Third Lane is now gearing up to enter 50 new cities in 2025 with the uncompromising goal of making them profitable.

First is a return to Germany. The official restart began in Munich where Bird has deployed 3,000 vehicles, followed by 200 vehicles in Würzburg and 150 vehicles in Reutlingen.

The operator is also scaling its European growth in the Iberia region with a five-year contract secured for Porto in Portugal, as well as operations launching in Spain’s Oviedo, Getafe, and Huelva.

Bird Canada, the company’s Canadian franchise, continues to expand its foothold across the country with its recent launch in Halifax – the operator’s 28th city and the first in the Nova Scotia region. Prioritising local staff to tailor operations to the unique needs of Halifax’s residents, 300 e-bikes and 300 e-scooters can now be found on city streets.

Elsewhere in North America, additional confirmed 2025 launches include Minneapolis, Fort Myers, and St. Petersburg. 

More ways

Bird believes that to truly scale micromobility, it must be embedded into the urban fabric of cities.

That’s why the operator is joining forces with transport and ticketing providers to actively integrate shared micromobility into the wider transport ecosystem. 

Its partnership with Seattle’s Transit GO ticket system, for instance, rewards users for connecting Bird rides with public transport. Riders who use Bird’s shared vehicles to get to transit hubs can then use these rewards to fund their next transit trip, serving as a financial incentive to see shared micromobility as a first and last-mile mobility choice.

A similar alliance with the European app Freenow integrates nearly 16,000 Bird e-bikes and e-scooters into the multi-modal platform across Italy, Spain and France. This enables users to locate their nearest Bird vehicle and rent it out using exactly the same app they’d use to book a taxi. Across the pond, Bird has partnered with shared mobility platform Lyft to integrate its vehicles into the Lyft app across 25 U.S. cities. 

These global integrations work towards a common purpose: making shared micromobility truly seamless and transforming its perception into a mobility mode that naturally complements the wider transport ecosystem.

“Micromobility is no longer standalone – it has matured and is now thriving as an integrated part of urban transit networks,” Bird Co-CEO Michael Washinushi says. “We’re investing now in a future in which shared micromobility functions as a seamless and integral part of urban transportation systems.” 

The operator has also launched an AI-powered Rider Score in a bid to improve safety and compliance.

Initially rolled out in Bird’s Denver and Atlanta programmes, the Rider Score uses AI to analyse and score rider behaviour based on vehicle telemetry and user data-points. Its capabilities include sidewalk riding detection, double riding detection, reckless riding detection, parking photo reviews, and detecting whether riders are adhering to zone-based restrictions through the use of geo-location.

Ultimately, Bird is working towards its global mission of ‘transforming the way the world moves, one ride at a time.’ 

Its latest strategy takes it further on this path. With More People, More Places and More Ways, Bird aims to expand access to shared micromobility, increase its convenience and reliability, and deepen community impact – integrating this mode of urban transport into the wider city landscape and making it a sustainable reality for more people across the globe.