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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> The decision to close North America was made based on two extremely complicated realities. The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape, and the second being the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation today - such as a rapidly evolving competitive mobility landscape, the lack of necessary infrastructure to support new technology (including electric vehicle car share) and rising operating costs.

This is difficult to parse. It looks like they're saying:

1. operating costs were too high

2. we don't know what is in store for lyft/uber, scooters, etc

3. there aren't places to park and charge the cars

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Car2go was also running into the wild-westness of America. Like this story about 75 car2go cars being stolen in a single day in Chicago. [1] I imagine things like NYC bumper-to-bumper damage adds up as well. Comparatively it's very calm in other markets like Germany and Denmark.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20434719

That's hilarious.

and sad...

A culture of theft and violence is rampant in inner cities like Chicago, unfortunately.

I wonder how this is not big news/political issue over there. I've recently saw a documentary on Seattle and all those addicts in the streets. Now reading this just fit the picture. How could this come so far? This sounds like some 3rd world dystopia stuff. Is there some national effort to fix those conditions? I mean this is the USA. You can't take this as normal.

Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance.

There is not much the government can do to fix this. One of the few things government could do to help - increased police presence and general law enforcement - has been rejected by inner city politicians. Police often find themselves at odds with the political leadership of major American cities. It's a shame, but that's politics.

Ultimately it's a cultural issue that the people themselves need to figure out. If they stopped having kids so young and women weren't forced to raise their children alone, things could improve.

> Ultimately it's a cultural issue that the people themselves need to figure out. If they stopped having kids so young and women weren't forced to raise their children alone, things could improve.

I’m still amazed when the privileged few sit on HN and espouse views like this. There’s an obvious answer and it’s probably the only reason you’re here - education. You’ve likely had access to decent or great education throughout your life. Your government could easily change its priorities and fund education, healthcare and social programs to correct these problems, but they don’t. Also, when you say it’s a ‘cultural’ issue, your suggesting it’s inherent to the people it affects, and given that they are largely black and ethnic people, it has a whiff of racism.

The government already funds education in inner cities. It has nothing to do with education funding. It has to do with personal priorities. What social programs do you propose?

Also has nothing to do with race. There are different cultural issues that afflict every community across America and the world.

I wonder why Chicagoans don't trust the police? Is it "politics", or the problem that the police violence can sometimes be worse than the crime? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

There are things that can be done, but there's no solidarity and a legacy of racism.

Also, police are cut from the same cloth as the rest of society. If the social fabric becomes frayed then every facet of the culture is degraded.

Victim blaming a failure of society as "cultural" is disgusting. How do you expect people to solve structural issues themselves? Even more without any kind of support if they take a wrong path in their lives?

It sounds like there is no empathy in your speech, as in if someone took a wrong turn then they deserve to suffer for not having lived a perfect life with perfect choices.

A decent society would look at these problems and fix them in multiple levels: better education and support for teens to not get pregnant, opportunities for those with kids so young to be able to change their lives so they don't perpetuate a cycle of misery.

This is a failure of American society, its values and your comment just make it clear what is wrong in the public mind and discourse about these issues, these people are also people, unfortunately growing up in much worse conditions than you probably have and this, in the US, will completely impact the rest of their lives.

So please, think about the bigger picture here, use some empathy and stop perpetuating this idiotic "individual responsibility" discourse.

Policing without investment in education is just oppression

"Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance. There is not much the government can do to fix this. " Here are some things the government could do to help fix this. 1. Stop locking up black men at a rate higher then white men and higher than any other country locks up its citizens. 2. Provide free or subsidized daycare and pre-k like most rich modern countries do. 3. Build trust with minority communities by listening to them and supporting them, not using policies like stop and frisk which alienates them. 4. Provide free/subsidized health and family planning services instead of doing tings like trying to defund planned parenthood. 5. Stop being so fucking racist.

>Many - if not most - of the residents of inner city slum areas were raised by single mothers who had them very young without the means to support them. They turned to drugs and gangs. They never graduated high school. In short, they never had a chance.

Do you have some actual peer reviewed studies on poverty that argue this or is your view into this issue based entirely on David Brooks columns?

> This is the USA. You can't take this as normal.

.. but it is "normal"? It's been like that for years. America just doesn't fix "local" problems, even if they're on a huge scale. That's how Puerto Rico managed to be without electricity for three months. This is what you get when you have a party that believes government is inherently bad: you get a failed state.

You say this as if a government with the capacity would save the day? The government already has the capacity to solve problems but this is the best that it can achieve. This is it. It's not being held back because it only had a trillion dollar budget to work with.

Is it though?

How come other countries look so much better being on pretty much the same level of society and culture?

Who else can fix an issue on this scale? Or does it mean society needs to come to terms with it and accept it like some force of nature?

It chooses not to. It chose to waste the trillion dollars in Iraq; it chooses not to rationally investigate its options and invest in those most likely to have good outcomes.

As to why it chooses to do that, it looks like the crime in Chicago isn't an issue that affects marginal voters. Or that crime is endemic all the way up in Illinois; four of the last eight governors have been jailed for corruption, and that appears to be a cross-party problem.

Help my ignorance here, but why is the first response seem to go federally? Corruption seems to be a huge issue for Chicago, and the city is mostly run by one side for a while so why can’t they get anything done?

Hardly the first response, since it's been a mess for years, but it follows naturally from your second sentence: it's clear that the problem has festered for a long time and the local system is incapable of fixing it. If the corruption can't be attacked from the inside, perhaps outsiders will be able to break it?

It took Federal prosecution to get Al Capone, after all.

It chooses to do that because it’s constitutionally engineered to favor rural communities over cities.

Don't be fooled by SV having all the shiniest, coolest companies. Overall US infrastructure is tending very close to what all those scifi dystopias show us: just absolute chaos[0] for all but the richest people, who get their own privatized infrastructure and are thus isolated from these problems.

[0]: exaggerating for effect, but it's hard to describe it otherwise when comparing to any other developed nation.

>How could this come so far?

People, including drug addicts and mentally ill (which largely comprise the homeless population), have a fundamental right to living on the streets in squalor.

Unfortunately, that's a legitimate question that will probably never get a legitimate answer because of all of the forces and opinions at play.

>How could this come so far?

Reagan began the process of "deinstitutionalization" which involved shutting down mental institutions and throwing their wards on the street. In theory, they were supposed to be sent to homes and provided publicly funded caregivers to help them be more independent or whatever. But they never actually bothered to hire the caregivers and, in fact, cut the budgets for all public health and mental health services dramatically.

Consequently, you've got a bunch of people with undiagnosed (or diagnosed) mental illnesses running around untreated. There is no public health system so they can't afford the treatment or medications even if they know they need them. There are no facilities in place to protect those who might be a danger to themselves or others. And even the homeless shelters are so full up with addicts and, sometimes violent or dangerous, headcases that otherwise healthy or stable homeless people are scared to go there, putting them at risk since they're actively avoiding the places that might have resources and support to help them get on their feet.

But people earning more than $250k a year pay like, 2% less in taxes so I guess it evens out or something.

I think I'd read this more like:

1. We don't know what mobility technologies to invest in (electric cars, scooters, electric bikes, who knows what else)

2. Increased hassle building out in US cities in general (you can look at comments around Google Fiber as well).

3. Lack of any investment from civic actors on developing support for bikes / scooters / electric / etc.

Basically, there are a lot of imaginable futures for urban mobility and there are no real signals in the US market about where things are going to end up. Uber / Lyft / the scooter folks / Tesla are all pushing their things but there's no real direction or leader and as a result cities are largely staying out (even failing to build obvious projects like bike infrastructure and public transit to urban cores).

I'm slightly curious how much of this is some unexpected cost that they could't come to terms with as they expanded across NA.

Across the street from my house, it's fine to park in the evenings, and a tow zone during the day. People would leave Car2go cars parked there all the time, and, with it being so uncertain when the next person would get the car, those puppies were like manna from heaven for the city impound lot's balance sheet. Someone on my block tried putting their car up Getaround, too, but that ended right quick.

In many of the cities I've lived in, street parking is also odd/even in the winter in the denser parts of town where Car2go makes sense. Parking is less brutal further out parts of town, but I imagine actually finding and getting yourself to a car starts feeling like more hassle than it's worth. Seems like it could easily escalate into a choice between no customers at all, and customers who tend to produce negative revenue.

Parking is even more of a hassle in their core market, dense urban Europe. I live in Berlin and have been hit with an unforeseen parking fine due to the hard-to-read parking signs.

I think it has more to do with the fact that most people in America own cars and only rent if they need a car long term.

Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite a bit).

Recently, I tried to return a car only to see the parking space being taken up by an unauthorized car (all the more aggravating as my car was electric and should have been recharged overnight). I was advised to find a legal parking space where I could leave the car for 12 hours or so — which turned out to be a significant hassle. I was essentially unable to find a spot and ended up parking in my own driveway.

> Mobility, the Swiss car sharing company I'm using, is solving this by renting a dedicated parking space for each car (though of course this reduces flexibility quite

Zipcar in the US does this for awhile now. It's ok, but means you can't do point to point as easily. So if you drive somewhere, do something for hours, you have to hold the reservation the whole time and then drive back when you're done.

It's useful for many things, but the pricing doesn't work for everything.

I think they'd need quite high density before releasing your reservation makes sense - after all, how are you going to get home if someone else has taken the car?

But you never get a situation in Germany where parking is allowed Mo-Wed-Fr during the day but not on Tue-Thu-Sat from 8am till 12am, which was driving me crazy in the US.

Yes you do. For example we have bus lanes that are parking lanes outside rush-hour.

this is actually quite common in Germany

The model is supposed to work only if you can park anywhere anytime (inside the city limits). For example in Milan (Italy) this works good.

Reading between the lines, it seems like they're probably unable to compete with the VC-subsidized prices of the big mobility providers in the US (uber/lyft/lime/bird, etc.). The "infrastructure" comment is a bit weird since they mention mobility competitors again.

Some cities have provided dedicated parking spaces on blocks for Car2Go/Zipcar type services, but the issue is that not every city is doing this in every neighborhood, there are not necessarily enough being created even in places where they exist, and finding out where one can legally park otherwise at any hour of the day is extremely complicated.

I agree. But this is a natural disadvantage in comparison to both rideshare services (no one has to worry about parking) and shared mobility (leave your bike/scooter wherever). US cities often don't want to provide the spaces because it means less revenue, more work, and disincentive to use the public transit they fund.

I wouldn’t even say that.

Free parking is now a significant policy hill to die on for a loud, politically vocal portion of the population, even in places like NYC where they are a minority. Any giveaway of free parking, whether it be for dedicated carsharing spots, a bike corral, a bus lane, to free up spots by making people pay for usage, or to reduce double parking by delivery vehicles, is equivalent in these peoples’ eyes as personally driving a bulldozer to eminent domain their living room, despite the fact that the street is a notionally public realm. And at the scale of local elections with such low turnout that margins are measured in the hundreds of voters, pissing these people off is something you do at your own peril.

Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep, and changing parking is a fear that other issues will pop up and be ignored.

And in some cities, streets are actually not managed by the city but by the state, and good luck getting a state DOT to do anything even a hairline outside of the box.

> Some jurisdictions, as it is, do not spend nearly enough money on street maintenance and upkeep

There's an interesting tension there. I imagine that paving and maintaining streets wide enough to allow for free street parking is a massive drain on the city's street budgets. And, considering that, in my city, an annual on-street parking permit costs about the same as 1 week of off-street parking on the private market, it's probably being provided at a massive discount just on the basis of land value alone.

Combine the two, and it would seem that you've got what amounts to an absolutely massive taxpayer-supported hand-out. Which I could swear is exactly the kind of thing that Americans are supposed to hate the most.

Paving them costs money, and maintenance does, but that implies that proper maintenance is being done.

Most cities are far behind on maintenance on many of their roads. Modifying the free parking might also result in people asking to fix the other things wrong with the road, and before you know it you're Seattle spending $12M per mile to reconstruct the road from curb to curb. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/12-...

It's certainly written very carefully to avoid saying anything. My interpretation is much simpler:

"We can't compete, so we're leaving."

Right. Because immediately after they said this.

My read is, they expanded too fast. The fear of them being too late drove them to be too soon.

> "Moving forward, SHARE NOW will focus on the remaining 18 European cities. We, along with our shareholders, believe these markets show the clearest potential for profitable growth and mobility innovation."

This previous article mentions a bunch of services stopping:

https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/car2go-latest-short...

"It's not worth trying to run this business" can be the same thing as "we can't compete", but it isn't necessarily the same thing.

Or maybe… "we prefer not to compete against competitors burning VC money".

Probably a minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but I would imagine they also had trouble competing for engineering talent. For instance, ReachNow was owned by BMW, a privately held company. The salaries they were offering devs were very low, and they offered no equity compensation (which would have been illiquid even if they had).

Can't compete with who? Car2go was the last such service with cars available in my neighborhood.

I had once been an iGo user, but canceled my membership after realizing that 80% of the time I'd either rather take the bus, rather find something else to do, or rather pay (often less money and certainly less time) for delivery services, whichever is more appropriate for the situation in question.

I guess you could frame it as, "Can't compete with the fact that Americans who don't own cars do so because they either prefer other transportation options, don't have much money, or don't have a driver's license."

I do know people who use short-term rentals. But between subsidized Uber/Lyft and traditional rentals, it's definitely a fairly niche use case. (e.g. run out and do a bunch of errands for a few hours)

I remember when Zipcar was a new economy darling with the CEO a common speaker and panelist at certain types of events. That pretty much ended when Uber got big.

I was an early Car2Go user in Austin, the first city in the US where Car2Go was available, and I loved it. I'd use it for a couple trips a month.

In the last few years of its existence I used it maybe once (if at all, honestly I don't really remember). It simply got killed by Uber and Lyft. Uber and Lyft are just generally much more convenient, and I don't remember the cost being that different.

Bingo. Once Uber and lyft caught on it was only useful when there was surge pricing.

Here in Montreal the local competitor Communauto is doing great, but with both Zipcar and car2go usage models in the same subscription, and cheaper than any car-based alternative including both of those as well as taxis and Uber.

"Local" is a bit misleading - they're indeed based here, but they also serve Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, and over in Europe, Paris. (Service details vary by location outside the province of Quebec.)

Yeah, but uber is running at a loss... Sooner or later they will increase the cost.

But I doubt that they will come back....

I wonder if their pricing change earlier this year had anything to do with it. They made the pricing model very antagonistic (eg the 1 hour package doesn't roll over, so driving for 2 hours on it costs way more than driving one hour, ending the rental, than immediately starting another 1 hour package!)

Before that I used the service a lot, I’d just hop in a car and go do stuff, changing my plans on the go, and know I’d get the best deal. After I had to plan things very precisely and hope for no randomness (heavy traffic, no parking, friend taking too long to come outside) and often it was less hassle and as expensive to take an Uber. I used to use them maybe once a week, then after all that I dropped to once every few months. But that’s just me..

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