Tracking Electric Scooters in Lisbon
sknzl.github.io
sknzl.github.io
Side note: I’m not using google analytics or anything privacy concerning on the page. I host my own instance of Ackee. That’s where I found HN as the top referrer.
One could think the hardest part of starting a new scooter company these days is finding a differentiating color...
Note: I was also trying to retrieve similar information for Lime scooters. However, the Lime API does not return a unique Scooter ID. For every request the returned scooter IDs are randomized (and internally they map them to their real IDs), which makes it impossible to track individual scooters.
Incidentally, in comparison with car sharing, I hate these scooters. With cars you have to park them legally or the you (the last renter) will have to pay the potential parking ticket. With scooters, people can easily lift and move them, so the last renter has plausible deniability if they parked idiotically. End result? They're all parked fucking idiotically.
How did you figure this out?
I’ve been playing with this scooter data for a while (Lime included) and I’ve always been able to correctly map scooter ID uniquely to a scooter at a location. Multiple requests will return the same scooter in the same location and I’ve always believed the same ID in a different place later meant the scooter actually moved.
But I might be wrong about this. I'll give it a second try for confirmation.
Also, I had a look at your repository and it’s fantastic. Great work on this.
Did you choose Lisbon for any particular reason?
I'm from Lisbon.
> 1793 scooters
> 34671 scooter trips recorded
> 63322 km of scooter movement
over 111 days, at 1 EUR to unlock + 0,25 EUR/minute = 34671 EUR in unlock fees. Assuming each scooter covers an average of 15km/h, that's 254k minutes or 63k EUR in revenue.
Assuming each scooter costs 400 EUR, that's 717200 EUR for the scooters.
So about 14% return in ~4 (summer) months, excluding any promos, transaction costs or maintenance/juicing fees.
Plus overhead of customer service and engineers to actually build/maintain the service and of course data plans to keep the scooters connected. These are almost certainly more than the 14% gross margin. Long-term profitability of these companies remains questionable at current activation/per-minute fee levels.
At least We can establish an upper ceiling on return.
I remember reading somewhere a number of Euro 6,50 for a guy working somewhere in Europe. But cannot find that anymore.
I also wonder what the lifespan is. I regularly see damaged scooters and I think most are not well treated.
But in general I guess they potentially can make good money because otherwise there would not be so many.
Mitmproxy acts as a middleman. Typically you’ll run it on another device on the same network. app > proxy > server
Which means every time the app makes a GET request (for example) the proxy can log the url/ip as well as the parameters passed to the server.
Then, to get the data yourself, you use a web client like Curl (or Requests in Python) and send the same headers/auth/parameters as the app did. But now instead of returning it to the app, it’s in a format you can store/manipulate.