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Comment by whymsicalburito | Hacker News Reader

This article says these scooters make $16/day in revenue?! Where are they making that kind of money? The scooters in my city just sit in the same place for DAYS without moving... I don't buy those numbers at all...

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Bit of a selection bias... you are much more likely to notice the ones that are in the same spot day after day, and not notice the once that are in constant use.

This is the average revenue, I am sure there are some that generate a lot less/barely any.

Even with some of them being in constant use, the math still doesn't work out.

Pricing for Bird looks like $1 to unlock and $.15 / minute to ride. I think it's not unrealistic to see utilization of at least 5 rides per day for $5 of revenue + average of 15 minutes per ride for the other $11 to get to $16 / day.

It's likely that there's a few that are much more highly utilized to balance out those that are not utilized at all.

Maybe you live in a low usage area, and scooters that just go back and forth in high usage areas generate far more than $16/day?

That's possible, but with a range of only 15 miles and they're most likely only getting charged at night, that's a max revenue of around $35/day for a scooter. I doubt there's enough scooters maxing out each day to offset the losers.

> That's possible, but with a range of only 15 miles and they're most likely only getting charged at night

I suspect that statement isn't true. I see multiple drops a day on my street.

I live in a small university town and people are always on them.

When I spent a week in Denver they were being used everywhere as well.

What city?

Santa Barbara and Goleta

It's possible that utilization is lower in smaller cities.

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