Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We will see. Been "workating" with my family in LA for a few weeks and we ended up using Bird much more especially because it looks like Lime require you to pay in bundles (10usd) and there are just way more Birds available than Limes. It might change now that Uber is involved but they would have to increase their scooters fleet quite a lot I think.

Been interesting because in New York Bird isn't something people talk about where as here it was everywhere (didn't hurt we lived at Venice beach either).

One thing I realized is how much the ability to just leave your bird/lime anywhere and just pick it up where it is, affects your desire to use it.

We will see the same uptick in bicycles in NY I think once you are not required to park them at specific places.

It's a little bit of a mess though especially down on the beach promenae but I think there are plenty of ways to encourage good behavior.

Where I live (San Diego), Lime and Bird have swapped places a couple of times for who has the most scooters on the street. They are both being really aggressive in increasing the number of units. It's not uncommon to see 10 of each lined up on a sidewalk.

It's also been fun to watch both companies experiment and revise their hardware. The original Lime scooters were slow and the Bird scooters were much stronger. With the v2 of each, it is reversed.

But from what I've heard second hand, increasing the number of units on the street isn't that expensive. I've heard that the units cost them in bulk ~$250 each and they quickly (< 3 months) earn that back. So the investment to blanket a city with scooters is way less than you'd expect and not the main barrier to entry. Of course that's second hand, so I could be totally wrong.

I love riding them at mission beach! I was sort of sad about the version 2. It had a speedometer but only would go 10mph, and the brake was so weird. The version 1s are much better.

Agressive is the right word I think Bird has the former Uber head of growth.

Lime doesn't require you to pay in bundles. There have been some days where I've seen more Limes around than Birds.

It required me to after my second ride. I went to rent another scooter, and it forced me to load a balance onto my account first. I would have just switched to Bird at that point, but there were no scooters nearby.

You should be able to get mostly the same benefit if there was plenty of places to park them.

I could theoretically rent a bicycle, but there are only four places I could park it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com