Bird has officially raised a whopping $300M as the scooter wars heat up | Hacker News Reader

Bird has officially raised a whopping $300M as the scooter wars heat up

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28 pointsjohnomarkid23 comments

If every city had dedicated lanes and parking spots for scooters (like we do for cars) - electric scooters would be an obviously amazing compliment to city travel.

> scooters you’ll see pretty much all over the place in cities like Los Angeles.

have to laugh at this. The touristy areas are indeed packed with them. you can't even see the floor on 3rd street promenade because it is now covered in five companies' scooters. Maybe you see a couple in the silicon beach (which is not around snapchat house, and neither on the beach anymore). but actual places you'd call Los Angeles? none.

I live near Fairfax and Wilshire (near The Grove) and they’ve just started cropping up on the sidewalks up and down Fairfax. I moved there from SaMo and it’s definitely not nearly as bad yet, but I can see the wave coming.

I’m not a huge fan at this point, but I’m trying to not be too closed minded about them. They seem to serve a purpose, but I’m getting annoyed with people scootering on the sidewalks and it added to our already dirty / littered streets.

On a health note, I’m amazed at how many people use them without helmets (basically 100% of people I observe). Given what we know about brain injury and trauma in 2018, I’m shocked people put their brains at such risk to just get from point A to point B slightly faster. Walking in LA feels dangerous enough to me at times with inattentive drivers, let alone adding some additional speed to any potential impact.

West LA east of the 405 is... definitely LA municipality. There's absolutely lots of Bird scooters in Westwood. I think I've seen some in Hollywood.

Yep, the Daily Bruin has written about their proliferation — and the enforcement/arrests due to violations of helmet laws — on several occasions.

https://dailybruin.com/2018/04/08/ucpd-to-crack-down-on-elec...

I can see how they'd be useful on the hills at UCLA!

Except they don’t have nearly enough power to get up hills. You end up pushing it up the hill with you, which is worse than walking!

the grove, miracle mile, west LA, ucla, pier... those are all three things: (mostly) tourist (or university) destinations, flat and isolated. meaning you will use the scooters to circle around a small flat area.

those things are hardly transportation for people that live walking distance to work. it wont replace anything but the $3 to $5 lyft/uber ride.

Oh, yeah. If you live walking distance to work, you'd... continue to walk.

The $3-5 crowdcab... what we're really talking about here is the last mile, and it's been enough of a subject of conversation that it's not a market I'd estimate low lightly.

Also, West LA contains enough people who are doing other phases of life besides school or touring that there's no way everybody who's using the scooters on/around my block is a student or tourist.

west LA is also a mix of college city and tourist destination.

please bring them back to sf

Madison, WI did the same thing a few months before sf. In Madison they were everywhere.

I miss them so much

they're gone?

dockless bicycles have taken over San Jose. They are worse than scooters by far.

The only advantage I can see bicycles having over the scooters is not being "dead" due to battery issues, but plenty of other things can also take bicycles out of commission. They also take up more more room and can't be packed as close together.

I've seen the same in Berlin and I think they are great. The difference might be that most streets already have a fair amount of bikes, so the dockless bikes are nothing out of the norm.

Is the act of leaving a dockless bike just sitting there on the sidewalk not illegal? Is it not littering?

do scooters require more juice for a short trip, or more current draw, than a portable usb-c battery pack can provide?

if not, scooters should have external ports for BYO power.

It requires ~250W. Most portable USB batteries you can buy put out like 20W or so, this idea isn't really feasible.

I think the Gen2 scooters will have solar panels on the standing pads to slowly recharge during the day when not in use.

No chance. The batteries are 280 Watt hours, solar cells generate about 20 Watt hours per square foot, and the standing pads are probably no more than half a square foot (being generous) so even if you could have an edge to edge panel it would take 28 hours of direct sunlight to fully charge. Even if they were perfectly positioned all day they wouldn’t get more than 7 hours of sun, only 3-4 of those at peak power so it would take something like 6 days to charge. That’s assuming they’re aimed in the right direction and not blocked. Riding them covers the panel and gets them dirty which reduces efficiency and adding the panel increases the cost and maintenance of the scooter considerably.

What if they were free to manually ride but used like 20% of the energy or so to charge the battery until it was full?

Would something like that be feasible?

20% sounds like it'd be a lot of drag. I don't know if regenerative breaking would make sense in terms of cost and energy output but, that seems more feasible than a constant drag of an alternator hooked up to a wheel.

dammit. i knew i should have gotten a job when they were just at $1bn cap ...

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