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Johnny Mula lifts up a bright green LimeBike and throws it in the back of a white van.
He’s not stealing it, though. He’s working.
LimeBikes are part of a bike-rental program that partnered with UCF this fall to bring 500 bikes to campus for students to rent in half-hour intervals. Customers are allowed to park their bike anywhere on campus except for no-parking zones, which are set up in certain places such as Spectrum Stadium on game days, fire lanes or outside Millican Hall.
Lime employs people behind the scenes to bring the bikes back to their rightful places. Ops specialists at LimeBike act like wranglers, riding around on their horse — or in this case, their van — to round up the stray LimeBikes.
Mula is a lead mechanic at LimeBike Orlando. He finds bikes that need repairs and fixes them, either on site or by taking them off campus to Lime’s repair facility in downtown Orlando.
Mula also works as an ops specialist and said the responsibilities of this title include finding bikes outside of the UCF designated zone, putting them in the van and “rebalancing” them.
Lime has a specific way the company wants bikes set up on campus, Mula said. The bikes should be presented in an organized way in places where they are likely to be used, which is where the ops specialists step in to “rebalance” the LimeBikes.
These ops specialists will drop bikes off in “hot spots,” areas where students are most likely to rent a bike or drop one off, and arrange them neatly in a line. Some examples of hot spots are in front of parking garages, across from the CFE Arena or outside the Student Union.
Without wranglers like Mula behind the scenes, LimeBikes would be stuck on top of roofs, ditched with cans of Bud Light in the basket or left in places where students might not come across them. Mula said that although bikes have been found in interesting places, most of the time it’s just for social media attention.
“Most of those are actually ‘for the Gram’ photos,” Mula said. “Most of the people are taking them down after they take the photo. There was one that got left on top of the Pollo Tropical building the other day, and the [UCF] administration was not happy with that.”
Lime employs people to service the bikes in each city the company is stationed in, from Seattle to Paris.
Lime has two vans in Orlando — a larger one that Mula said he can fit about 16 LimeBikes into and a smaller one that fits about 10. Once the bikes are rounded up from off campus and loaded into the van, the bikes are then relocated.
Students can take bikes as far as they can ride them, so Mula said he will end up picking up bikes miles away from campus.
Students can access the bike-rental program by downloading the Lime app, which offers a first ride for free. UCF students are charged 50 cents per half hour once they rent the bike.
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