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Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip: if you want to get acquired by your competitor just have SF grant you a permit they can't have :)

Funny, but doubtful that's it even the majority of the reason for this acquisition. Do you really think there's $25M in profit by operating one of many scooter rental services in San Francisco?

I'm sure the permit was a nice to have, but Bird's got a bunch of reasons to acquire Scoot. Experience with motorized scooters (which Bird just announced their own variant), an existing software team, a "kleenex"-level trademark, not to mention keeping it away from their competitors.

> Do you really think there's $25M in profit by operating one of many scooter rental services in San Francisco?

How many of Bird's other moves seem to be driven by profit? They seem to be at a point where they're fighting to still exist in a year or two. Given that, they'll want to take some big risks to give themselves as much of a chance as possible.

Fair point on profit vs growth. But the idea that a mid sized city's scooter permit was the sole reason for the acquisition still doesn't seem reasonable. Possible, just not reasonable

>But one detail in particular caught my eye. About 24 percent of Uber’s bookings—all the money that customers pay through the app and in cash, including driver earnings—occur in just five cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and São Paulo.

>For a company that operates in more than 700 cities, including quite a few giants—Mexico City, Tokyo, Paris, Lagos, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Mumbai, to name a few—that concentration gives Uber a surprising vulnerability at the local level. And they know it.

Acquisition for just SF could be sole justification.

If pattern is similar to Uber, SF would be one of the 5 core markets for Bird.

I hardly see anyone in SF using scooters anymore. When I do, I usually see people riding the Skip ones and not so much the Scoot ones.

I ride every day in SF and I gave up on Scoot. There are too few of them. A lot of them are out of service. It’s not even worth checking the app.

I would like to see more scooters. There is a shortage of scooters and ebikes in the popular Caltrain <> downtown route.

That's too bad. I used Scoot a lot back in 2012 before they even had one way trips. The biggest issue back then was also lack of availability near the Caltrain. I get the distinct impression that's going to be the achilles heal of the entire "last mile" effort in SF.

I'd be interested in learning if anybody takes the BART into SF and then uses Scoot or something similar. I imagine that would be more successful since there are many more stops downtown.

Try using the Transit app which consolidates all the scooters and bikes together, that way you can still opportunistically ride a scoot.

in my case, I cannot sign up to Scoot because I do not have a driver license. Theoretically I can't ride skip either, but they accepted a picture of my passport so it works.

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