Ride-hailing startup Lyft Inc. has completed its acquisition of the core assets of Motivate International Inc., becoming the largest bike-sharing company in the U.S.

The deal, first announced in July, saw Lyft acquire the bike-sharing business of Motivate for $250 million while the remainder of the business it didn’t acquire remains as a standalone bike maintenance and servicing operations company.

Motivate operates bike-sharing businesses in multiple locations under different names. Locations include Citi Bike in New York, Ford GoBike in the San Francisco Bay area, Divvy in Chicago, Blue Bikes in the Boston metro area, Capital Bikeshare in the Washington, D.C. metro area, BIKETOWN in Portland, CoGo in Columbus, Ohio, and Nice Ride in Minneapolis. Lyft claims that the business holds an 80 percent market share in bike-sharing in the U.S.

“Bikeshare is a natural extension of Lyft’s vision to improve transportation access, sustainability and affordability,” Lyft said in a blog post today. “With this acquisition, we are poised to help take bikeshare to the next level: adding thousands of bikes and stations in communities that haven’t had access to transportation; making bikeshare membership more convenient and affordable than ever; and deploying new electric bikes, on a major scale.”

Hitting the ground running post-acquisition, Lyft has committed $100 million to expand Citi Bike. The deal, announced by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, sees Lyft doubling Citi Bike’s service area and tripling the number of bikes in the next five years, “making it one of the largest bike share systems in the world.”

“New York City is one of the world’s great biking cities – and it’s about to get even better,” Mayor de Blasio said. “This expansion means tens of thousands more New Yorkers are going to have a fast and inexpensive way to get around their city.”

Bike and electric scooter sharing have become a sort of proxy war among the main players in the ride-hailing business.

Uber Technologies Inc. is a major investor in electric scooter startup LimeBike Inc. and acquired bike-sharing startup Jump Bikes Inc. for $400 million in April. The third player in the market is the Sequoia Capital-backed Bird Rides Inc., which earlier this week launched a franchising model for its e-scooter business.

Photo: City of New York