Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect it. If this happens to every bike, that's maybe $20 per week? $1k a year per scooter? And I would guess a scooter itself costs a few hundred, as well?
Can you rent out a scooter for a sensible amount? My guess would be that the scooters are not at 100% capacity, otherwise it would be hard to find one. Kinda like the Boris Bikes in London. There's also infrastructure costs involved with maintaining the fleet, making sure they're where rides are likely to originate, marketing, and so on.
So best case seems like $78 revenue per charge.
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/8l12oj/electric...
280Wh. They have nowhere near 6h range either, the machine is advertised for a range of 18.6 miles and a top speed of 15.5, though it has regenerative braking which can improve the range a bit.
It's a pretty standard Xiaomi M365: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076KKX4BC/
I reckon the bicycle ride rental (no it's not "sharing"!) companies would be less hated here if they had a crew of teenagers making good pocket money returning all the out-of-the-way (mostly at-the-bottom-of-hills) bikes to locations where people expected/wanted to rent them...
It costs $1 to 'unlock' and $0.15/minute after that. So a $5 payment requires: 1 unlock $1 and $4.00@0.15/min = 26.7 minutes of "usage" (note, not ride, usage, the 0.15 is paid per minute that a user has the scooter "unlocked") before the $5 "finders fee" is repaid by one scooter and one rider.
The numbers shift of course if the same scooter is "unlocked" by plural individuals during the day, due to the $1 unlock fee. Five usages of a few minutes each for a single scooter in a single day repays the $5 "finders fee" just with the $1 unlock fees alone.
To be picky, since these chargers/gathererers are largely teens living with their parents, the cost for recharge comes from the household utility bill (not paid by the kid).
Surely it is a trifling amount, but to it you must sum the miles with the car/minivan used for the search and pickup (which costs is as well at least partially subsidized by the parents).
I suspect the cost of driving easily overshadows the cost of electricity, considering that even inflated California electricity rates price a kWh (of which these scooter batteries hold about one quarter) about the same as the incremental cost of driving one mile.
Whether it's trifling depends on how far they have to drive for each scooter. That cost is sunk if they "recover" it or not, unlike with the electricity. According to the article, the company has made it a bounty-hunting model, so even if the total area is only a few miles across, just getting there is no guarantee.
This means that, while there is no business riding and reloading (aside from, essentially, having rides at 40% off), it is profitable to empty a scooter and reload it yourself, provided you can trigger the increased fee.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076KKX4BC/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Ah, someone complaining online how some random person's back of the napkin calculations are off.
Let's see if the nitpicker has a case.
> 150 min * 0.15 $/min = $22.50.
So, let's actually do the math:
* $24/0.15 = 160 minutes
Wow. Completely off.
The Xiaomi M365 that is used as a base for many of these e-scooters has a real-life range of around 20km and a top speed of 25km/h (a 280Wh battery and a 250W motor with 500W peak performance).
So the battery can be drained in one hour if you're moving quickly.
Anecdotally, working/charged/available scooters are hard to find in downtown San Francisco.
the top 1-2% have very large cash hoards they absolutely must invest. and they can't just go around opening laundromats, liquor stores and flipping houses. that's chicken feed. it requires too much attention. too much work.
there are challenges investing in the really big global growth stories (e.g. China): state ownership has the upper hand. they can be forced into a loss position by the state.
yet, vanishingly few are smart enough to predict the rise of Facebook or Google. so what can they do? take shots in the dark in the US tech economy until they hit something large.
Besides the obvious strife between fellow "chargers" it won't be long before cities get into the act and pass ordinances or enforce them to take them off the streets until they get their share as well. Figure that a whole licensing scheme will pop up and eventually be used to squeeze out smaller competitors who try to get into this arena
I don't think there's a large profit margin in that price given the price of a 280Wh battery and the other components.
These companies also have to add some parts to the scooters such as GPS.
They have even more expenses and infra to support. They need to install and dismantle docking stations every season, which requires cranes and trucks in 100s of locations. They have staff that drives around and picks up bikes for repairs. They have stuff driving around and re-distributing bikes when they end up in one location (eg metro after rush hour). All of the staff gets salary, of course. Many trucks and specialized trailers had to be purchased. Lots of capital needed to run something like this.
And for scooters all they had to buy was the scooters and build an app.
If that's true it raises the interesting question about why it works in some cities and not in others, since presumably the operations by Bixi are equally competent in the various places they open.
This model is an inversion of tool or car rental, where the renter returns the device or pays a late fee. Here, Bird chases after you to get their devices back. When scooters are difficult to recover, Bird pays more to the finder for recovering them.
Bird almost certainly plans to sell themselves at some point through some sort of offering in the future. Renting scooters today is just an incidental.
(edit: another comment in this thread mentions the current batteries only last one hour, so that probably limits daily usage.... taking the long view that's ok I think, because at this point it seems a safe bet that batteries will be a lot cheaper in a few years time.)
It's really an amazing experience. For a new user, it takes less than a minute to get started. The first time, as an engineer, I just was shocked that it was actually working so well!
I feel like it unlocks a whole new way to see the city for a lot of people.
The only thing that sucks is the battery only lasts about an hour, so it's not great for tourists who want to go on tour for a long time. Presumably a better battery would be more expensive and people would be more likely to steal it.
You sure that Ford Bike (or whatever it's called) I'd wny different?
I guess the can discourage this by making you drop it off at the nest before it can be checked out instead of letting you immediately check it out again the next day for the ride back to work or wherever.
If your house is near a nest you could still make it work I think. The only caveat being that the bird will probably disappear during the day while you are at work unless you hide it in your office.
I don't know, it seems kind of easy to game.
Wait until the food delivery guys get on electric longboards. YT from Snow Crash might be a relatable character for my kids...
https://www.reddit.com/r/boostedboards/comments/8jzokl/11_an...
A modern version of Rip Van Winkle would only have to be asleep for 2 months to be just as clueless and out-of-touch as the original Van Winkle was when he took a 20-year nap.
The webarchive supports that this has always been the title.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
In the online version, the story's title is "The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration", and the subhed (which is also the <meta> description) contains proper nouns: "For John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama, moral failings at home seemed to compound tactical failings abroad"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/the-diplomat-w...
For most content this sort of optimization would be a bit much, but for a piece like this it could definitely work.
Same reason why heating/farming oil doesn't have this tax, even though it's technically just diesel and your diesel car would happily run on it. Yes, the electricity used in your car is the same as the one used in your washing machine, but it should be taxed more because of its use, exactly the same as we do with oil already.
Petrol and VED raises £33b a year, but total road spending (including local councils) is under £10b.
The solution to rationing road usage and paying for their use is road charging (with heavier vehicles paying proportionally more based on axel weight, and different charges depending how congested the roads are) which should pay for the maintenance of the roads, new road building, and renting the land to have the roads on.
- Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes
- Occurrence of that thing goes down
- Complain about falling of tax revenue
I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only indirectly related to harm. It might be more effective to tax fossil fuels, both for transport and electricity generation, due to their environmental problems; and tax ownership of vehicles to cover expenses (infrastructure, medical care, ...) and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? (Although it's currently perfectly legal to alter odometers, as long as it's not used to defraud someone when selling the vehicle)
If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions.
>>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT?
The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad.
Why? The law could just charge based on miles regardless.
However if you did choose to allow people to exempt overseas mileage you could read the odometers at ports (say charge them £10 for the privilege, so it only makes sense if you're doing a lot of mileage)
Clearly Northern Ireland would have to be exempt.
However mileage is very different, the externalities of a smart car driving 50miles from Lancaster to Carlise at 3AM is far different to that of a 13 ton lorry driving from Luton to Oxford Circus at 8AM -- in pollution generated (locally and globally), in damage to the road, congestion
Instead of taxing gasoline to help fill in the road budget, why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight? Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates. An electric car uses just as much (if not more, due to weight) of the road as a gasoline car, while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.
You could do this based on odometer, or based on automatic toll collection devices, or whatever. Automatic toll collection devices are probably better, because you could also include congestion charges for places where roadway real estate is low and congestion is high, like big cities.
The main reason to have taxes on something like fossil fuels would be for emissions reasons, as there is an external cost being imposed on everyone else by their emissions, and that money could go towards paying for health care costs, providing tax breaks for HVAC systems with air purification, carbon offsetting, and the like. But such a tax should be imposed regardless of use, as any use is going to wind up with the same or similar emissions.
And I would also like to point out that the main reason to tax fuel isn't to cover emissions, it's to help pay for the incredibly expensive roads that we all use (regardless of mode of transport). Sure, it is a good side effect that inefficient vehicles are taxed higher than more efficient ones, but that is a side effect, not the goal. Your proposed solution is far more complicated than just metering EV charging separately and taxing a portion of it.
An F-350 is 3.7 tons.
Two problems with this 1) It's unlikely to be proportional to road damage - if a 1 ton vehicle that costs $100 to register, a 2 ton vehicle should cost $1600, and a 4 ton vehicle should cost $25k. 2) It doesn't take into account mileage. Own a heavy truck that you use on your own land, and do about 1,000 miles a year on the road, and you pay the same as someone that has the same truck but does 50,000 miles a year commuting.
The odometer idea elsewhere in the thread probably works well for the U.S, just have a website to post your mileage when you drive into mexico/canada, and again on the way back, with spotchecks at the border. People who do significant mileage on their own land will be annoyed, but they currently pay gas tax on that mileage
Registration fees and taxes are frequently based on weight; and tolls are frequently based on number of axles.
But the relationship between weight or axles and fees is generally linear, while the actual wear and tear on roads is quartic (to the power of 4) in the weight per axle, times the number of axles. If taxes and fees were properly proportional, there would be a much bigger difference in price between a motorcycle and 1 ton pickup truck, let alone an 18 wheeler.
> Do you really want to have to log every mile driven, and submit it to the IRS?
You can use odometer readings that you collect at annual inspections. I realize that not every state does this, but every state I have ever lived in does; you have an annual vehicle safety and emissions inspection, and at that point they can check your odometer too and include that in the calculation.
You could also use the current automated toll collection systems, which are based on transponder or license plate for those who don't have transponders, for highways and congestion charges for cities, if you want to be able to charge different rates in different areas, and just subtract those numbers from the odometer readings afterwards.
Metering EV charging separately does't really solve the problem. Gas taxes are not in proportion to actual maintenance costs of the roads, and are currently a fixed amount, not tied to the price of gas or inflation, so they don't cover the full costs. If you just applied the same kinds of laws to EV charging, you'd be left with the same kinds of problems.
By not charging proportional to road wear and tear, there is an effective subsidy of those who drive larger vehicles, and in particular commercial cargo transport on the highways, by those who drive smaller vehicles. If you were to change the way vehicles were taxed, the larger vehicles would pay more of the burden, which would mean they might switch to alternatives like train transport, or moving production closer to consumption, or the like.
A similar problem exists in cities and on busy highways used by commuters, where congestion is a substantial externality. There it's the square footage of vehicle footprint that makes the biggest difference.
It is, however if you tax people based on congestion they cause, shouldn't you refund them based on congestion they receive?
In the UK we don't. We tax gasoline because it has negative externalities (same as us taxing cigarettes and alcohol). It goes into the central budget that's run by Phillip Hammond in the UK. Out of that, and income tax, national insurance, VAT, alcohol tax, etc, he funds the national road network, trident renewal, the state pension, the nhs, etc. Some of that money goes to councils to spend on what they want.
Electric cars don't have those externalities of burning gasoline in the middle of our cities.
While we don't tax fossil fuels used to generate electricity, we do subsidise non-fossil-fuels used to generate electricity. It probably should be the other way round, however in any case burning gas (not oil) in a power plant out of town and charging an electric car is better than burning oil in an ICE in the middle of a city and thus should attract far less tax. Currently 42% of UK electricity is being generated by Gas - no other fossil fuels.
The councils then take the money from central government, and the local council tax (about £1500 a household), into a local pot, and fund things like bin collections, maintaining parks, operating libraries, and maintaining the local roads.
> why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight?
Until relatively recently that's not really been possible (ANPR makes it possible), hence taxing fuel as a proxy.
> Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates.
Given that the cost of a road is wear and tear (which a pedestrian or bike causes pretty much zero)
Charging more than £5 a year for even the most extreme cyclist wouldn't make any sense. Because damage increases at 2^4, 1 mile car does about 1/100,000th of the damage of a lorry. A bike and car is a similar ratio - therefore if you charged a bike 1p per mile, you should charge a car £1000 a mile and a lorry £100 million a mile.
This is contradicted by the difference in taxation for diesel fuel and heating oil (which is also the case in the US as well). Or used for generating electricity, as you point out.
I think that like many things in government, there are multiple reasons for taxing gasoline; negative externalities is one of them, but acting as a proxy for usage fees is another.
In the US at least, the federal gas tax is specifically earmarked for transportation expenses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund), which indicates that it's explicitly intended as a proxy for usage fees.
> Until relatively recently that's not really been possible (ANPR makes it possible), hence taxing fuel as a proxy.
Yes, but times change, and it is possible now. Lots of people bring up the problem of not collecting gas taxes to fund roads when electric cars usage grows. So every time someone brings that up, I suggest a fairly simple solution. Electric cars also weren't previously possible, but they are now, so rather than complaining about how we won't be able to fund the roads, how about charging more effectively for road usage.
> Given that the cost of a road is wear and tear (which a pedestrian or bike causes pretty much zero) > > Charging more than £5 a year for even the most extreme cyclist wouldn't make any sense.
I addressed this in my comment, indicating that it doesn't make sense to charge usage based amounts for cyclists:
> while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.
There is the cost of constructing the roads in the first place, and wear and tear from weather, but that can be adequately accounted for out of the general fund; and when I say that, I mean the taxes collected at whatever level of government is responsible for paying for road maintenance that are not based on road usage at all, such as income tax, sales tax, VAT, property tax, or the like.
As someone who lives in the Northeastern US, I know very well that it isn't just vehicle weight that leads to road wear and tear; I've ridden on dedicated bike paths that were unmaintained, and frost heaves and roots of trees cause quite a lot of trouble, though it does take a lot longer for it to become unusable than roads used by cars and trucks.
Anyhow, I think we're mostly in agreement here. It is absolutely possible to do more effective taxation of vehicles based on their direct costs to infrastructure as well as other externalities.
> Because damage increases at 2^4, 1 mile car does about 1/100,000th of the damage of a lorry. A bike and car is a similar ratio - therefore if you charged a bike 1p per mile, you should charge a car £1000 a mile and a lorry £100 million a mile.
The damage per axle is proportional to the weight per axle to the fourth power. You multiply that by the number of axles to get the total amount of damage. Also, tandem axles do substantially less damage than single axles. This ends up at being a factor of about 5,000 between a passenger car and a truck, not 100,000.
It's still a big difference, and it's not accounted for by gas taxes, tolls, or vehicle registration fees, at least in the jurisdictions I've checked. Most of them seem to just go up proportional to the weight or the number of axles, not the fourth power of the weight per axle.
If you want to do it right, you'd charge fees based on equivalent single axle load times mileage, plus a congestion factor in congested areas based on the area taken up by the vehicle, times the amount of time it's within the congested area, times a time-varying congestion factor. And of course a carbon tax which covers all forms of carbon emission, and possibly a particulate emission tax that varies with density.
But despite how obvious it all sounds, it would be somewhat expensive to implement, and would face huge political opposition from industries and individuals who are effectively subsidized by paying into the highway systems way less relative to their usage than other users.
Because this relies on either odometer readings, which, at least here in the US, you wouldn't be able to say how many miles were driven in one state vs the next. Or it would rely on tracking the location of the vehicle, which is downright creepy and sets off all kinds of alarm bells in people.
There are no more toll booths in the state of Massachusetts.
If you travel on a toll road in Massachusetts, your car will be tracked either by E-ZPass transponder, if you opt in to that system (at a substantial discount), or via photographing the license plate and sending you a bill in the mail.
Also, pretty much everyone I know, even the most privacy conscious, carry a tracking device in their pockets at all times. I think that rms may be the only person I've met who I know does not.
Tax the fuel to cover the externalities of that (pollution) Tax the road use to cover the externalities of that (cost of using the road)
That's a massive subsidy
No different to someone mining bitcoin using their parent's electricity, or someone delivering pizzas using their parents car
Similarly one van making grocery deliveries to 20 people is generally a _lot_ better than 20 people driving to the grocery store.
...and will this land, if it even exists, be larger than the amount of sidewalk space that Bird has repurposed into scooter parking spaces?
These companies have existed for how long? The point is that if more and more people switch from using cars to using alternative transportation options we may move away from being a car centric society.
It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade.
I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? The answer isn't clear, but I'm worried because of the excessive waste generated by the cycle hire companies like Mobike and Ofo. I expect we'll see the same problems with the scooter hire companies too.
Isn't the, well, _whole point_ of the sharing economy to reduce waste by not having everyone own things they only use some of the time?
1) Person sits in traffic getting to work
2) Person notices Bird scooters zipping by them
3) Person ALSO notices that their company has to pay them the cost of their parking space if they don't use it (in California at least - see parking cashout law)
4) Person starts taking Bird, and enjoying the cash from their company
5) Person's office now has an extra parking space
6) Person tells coworkers about how great it is getting to work 20 minutes faster and making a couple extra grand a year
.... (wait a year or two)
7) 20 of person's coworkers are now doing the same
8) Office building has more open parking spaces
9) Business leasing office space says "I actually don't care if my office has loads of parking, most of our employees take scooters/walk/transit/whatever"
10) Office building developer says "wow we can make more money if we build the office with more units instead of more parking"
11) Office building development petitions city to reduce legal minimum requirement of parking spaces
12) (couple years later) FINALLY gets the parking minimum reduced after overcoming the screams of NIMBYs who think only a few weirdos are the ones riding scooters "because the scooter/bike lanes are empty". (Related - this is a problem with people thinking bike lanes are unused - turns out a bike lane with 500 bikes an hour will LOOK emptier than a road with 500 cars an hour because, well, bikes are faster (in congestion) and smaller)
13) More of that space can be used for offices, homes, or just not built on, etc.
So if we can design an experiment that can track all of that, awesome, but in the meantime it's messy.
If nothing else, just making parking compete like any other land use reveals that there are people who would happily repurpose the land for other things. You can park your car in the absolute most prime land in downtown Santa Monica for $525 a month. That is CRAZY. I would pay ~$1600 a month for a few of those spots and build a studio in an INSTANT because you could rent that out to a human for about $5,000 a month.
But instead we use taxpayer money to subsidize sleeping spaces for cars, even though there are humans who would happily pay to sleep there instead. It must really suck for the person who can barely afford their $3400 rent at 16th and Santa Monica blvd that their taxes are helping provide affordable housing for cars right on the beach.
Now, some of them may have switched from walking; in which case the small amount of sidewalk space taken up by a scooter not in use is an increase in use of space over the status quo; but not a very big one.
But many of them may have changed from driving. A car takes up far more space than a scooter. For each person who switches, you free up that much more space both on the streets while they're driving, and in parking at their final destination.
Having scooters available won't generally mean people will give up their cars. But a combination of scooters, bike facilities, car shares, buses, trolleys, commuter rail, and so on can make it possible to live in a city without a car, or by reducing a family from two cars to one.
One thing that bike and scooter share systems can help do is solve the "last mile" (or more likely "last quarter mile" or so) problem of public transportation. Walking to the nearest bus stop or train stop, coupled with the wait and then time to reach your destination, is a big factor in how efficient public transit is. Having options for being able to get to and from these places more quickly and conveniently can be a big benefit.
And parking spaces are being reclaimed, especially in cities with high levels of foot, bicycle, and public transportation travel: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/business/when-the-parking...
Anything that reduces the number of people who haul around a couple of tons of metal wherever they go, while burning black gold that funds crazy religious monarchies and failed democracies to do so, seems like a good tradeoff to me.
People might steal them but the article already mentions that some people steal them already.
So, sure, a scooter which was used and left on a main street can just stay there and get its battery swapped, but maybe it's not worth trying to figure out which scooters need moved and which battery-swapped, and to get the chargers to do the right thing in each case.
The fact that they pay different prices per scooter might invalidate this, but just a guess.
https://blog.atherenergy.com/ev-adoption-made-easy-with-athe...
Beijing (and other cities) have proven that bike sharing can become a major transport type if the city will allow bike sharing companies to just dump bikes all over the sidewalk. It's crude, but it at least let's us see how far bike sharing can go if/when stations are a non-problem.
Besides the mess (I could not imagine buttoned down European city like Vienna or even a messy one like Amsterdam allowing it), there's a problem of space. Scooters are space saving.
In my ideal world, there are "public" scooter stations that can be used by any bike sharing enterprise. These provide efficient, space saving storage and power. With the same footprint we currently use for city bikes, we could probably store 2X-4X as many scooters. One parking space could be converted into a unit. Scooters everywhere!
I don't really see benefit over a bike. Except that bikes don't require charging.
Also, less skill to ride and less risk.
I can believe that it works great in American cities with very large roads and mostly deserted sidewalks but that wouldn't translate well everywhere I think.
I'll stick with my bicycle but I'm happy for anyone who uses an electric scooter, rather than a car.
- Getting it ready for the ride.
- Taking it inside your appartment/home/office, if necessary. No need to leave it outside.
- Easier to take along inside public transport, and then used as a means of traveling the last mile.
- Defenitely more comfortable if you don't want to excercise.
Beijing (one example) has bike sharing without stations. Just dump the bike wherever and the bike sharing guys will deal with it. This is an interesting data point, because it removes the infrastructure bottleneck entirely (but makes a mess). What we learn from it is that bike sharing is bottlenecked and that it can grow a lot by widening that bottleneck, by adding more "stations."
European cities ( early to the bike sharing game) are really unlikely to allow such mess. Scooters may be another way of achieving the same thing, because they can be extremely space saving.
In my European city (Dublin) bike stations usually take up about 4-6 parallel parking spaces and a little bit of road and sidewalk. We don't have enough of them because that amount is space is hard to come by. I think a scooter sharing station could half or quarter the required space, with the same footprint. .. especially folding scooters.
At a pinch, I think you could get a station onto a single parking space. This makes finding room for them way easier. This means we can have more of them, maybe much more.
As to the benefit of powered scooters: cheap, small, fun, carriable, effective over short distances. Cons: need power, not as fast/stable as a bike and less suitable for longer journeys.
I doubt any of these are as important as the availablility of stations near where you want to start and end your trip. I think scooters>bikes in terms of space, and space is the right problem to solve.
- Do they [the parents] get a percentage of that money to pay for the bills?
- Is it even legal for these independent contractors to use home electricity to charge a 3rd-party business asset?
- Are damages to the house, in case of a fire, covered by their contracts?
- If the scooters are out of battery, how do these companies know where they are?
- Can these teenagers hold the scooters "hostage"?
- Can they charge extra money for dropping the scooters to places with some people can find it more convenient? Say, if I want to find one of them right in front of my house every morning, I would pay one of these teenagers some extra money for the arrangement.
- Are these houses in risk of over-charging their electricity net?
I have so many questions about all this, it seems so weird to me.
At worst they'll ask for compensation.
The article actually qualifies that for people in large apartment buildings with a "bike room" - so essentially these people are freeloading.
Charging a Bird doesn’t require a ton of electricity, so minus the labor cost, charging a few scooters overnight is essentially free—especially if you live in a large apartment building and can do so in your bike room
You're right, but that suggests it is a requirement. It's not Bird's fault the kid and his parents are lying about it.
Defining the heuristic now: the scooter market will truly be "mature" once Bird et al start incorporating commercial fire insurance add-ons into their charger programs, kinda like how Uber started providing commercial driver and liability insurance.
I've started to view the expensive Birds as a way for the company to have people try and find their lost scooters, in which case $25 is a pretty great deal...
http://goped.com/know-ped/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtn5kg3ZH3M
Or something like this: Micro PedalFlowhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfIzZo6ouDo
It would reduce the speed concerns too.
"""Bird pays Brandon, a contract worker, up to several hundred dollars a night. On one particularly successful night, Brandon brought home $600."""
The article does not have many specifics but roughly Brandon seems to get 10 or so scooters on each trip, two trips a night(?). so that's something between 10 bucks and 30 bucks per charged scooter cost to Bird. Even if it's just 10 bucks that becomes the cost of the bike every quarter or so - that kind of opex must be killing them?
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/8l12oj/electric....
At least in China, people don't respect the bikes. They trash them. They leave them everywhere. It sounds like a similar attitude exists with these Bird scooters. As societies/cities grow larger, people take less responsibility for things they use and spaces they exist in. I suspect it's partly a cultural thing (see Japan) but I'm pretty sure Japan has litter too. Bird has to incentivize the right behavior and disincentivize (i.e. even enforcement of charging policy) poor behavior.
This was probably inevitably going to happen as the hub motor is constantly in direct contact with the ground, which means that a bad impact can dislodge a magnet.
I wanted to fix it myself, and the cost of the part would have had been almost the same price as just scrapping the scooter and buying a new one. Additionally, I had trouble going beyond about 5 miles, with the lights off and with conservative battery use, before running out of power.
And fyi, something being against the contract is not automatically illegal.
Does that mean it doesn't allow 100% remote work (where you always work from home but are an employee)?
Obviously the liabilities vary, if you're doing prototyping of fireworks in your garage then it's a little more risky than coding!
Insurance isn't always priced solely by risk; work-from-home insurance probably reduces claims for many people but that doesn't mean you can't charge more for it.
It would be interesting to know how occupier presence varies with claims made.
Conversely, Uber is not very successful in South-East Asia, but not for the abundance of regulation but for the lack of it - Grab, a local copy-paste of Uber, has become so dominant that Uber had to leave most of the markets there
In Germany, it is still not possible to take an Uber ride, for example. Besides, if it started in Europe as a small start-up it would be killed right away with tons of regulations anyways. So the only reason that you have Uber in Europe is that it has become a giant company in the US, due fertile environment, and thus could afford all these legal battles to enter the market.
South-East Asia is a different story. It has nothing to do with regulations at all. It is just a completely different mindset there. The fact is though, businesses in those countries can easily flourish as well.
But they're not. They're a taxi company. There are tons of those around.
But Europe was an expansion market for them, after they spent a while working out early kinks in the US. I think the post you are commenting on meant success as a startup, which is very different from successfully expanding there.
The pain-in-the-ass regulations also save a lot of people's time and money (Theranos-style startups are much less likely to pop-up over this side of the Atlantic also).
It's a trade-off, like most things in life.
It’s not a good trade off at all.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-patients-hurt-by-theranos-1...
I think he overestimates the impact of regulation & "culture" (what does that even mean in a place as diverse as Europe?) and underestimates the effect of having a large market in the US where everyone speaks the same language and have more or less the same culture.
Is it legal in the US to use regular cars for taxi purposes? Operating a taxi without a taxi license? Operating a hotel without a hotel license? It's companies like these, and uber, and airb&b, etc that skirt around the laws.
Plus, an electric company might love this: more customers, with demand at off-peak hours that might even slightly reduce the need for energy storage.
Why’s that a problem for the companies though?
What sweetens the incentive is the "instant" cash transfer within 5 hours or so of drop-off. Mobile micro-work at scale is not only tenable. But may be the preferred operandus of labor market participants.