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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Is this because you can't make money off short-term scooter rentals (Because the cost of providing this service is > what customers are willing to pay), or because other startups ate their lunch?

My wife is seriously considering a scooter (Even a non-electrified one) for her commute (2-3 days a week, 5 miles) - and I can't see a world where we'd rent one on the daily, as opposed to owning.

My uninformed guess is:

A problem with the rental model is the colossal inefficiency of having to pay people with cars and vans to drive around, and collect + charge scooters at the end of the day. This is a huge waste of resources and human time. Even with VCs p------ a firehose of money into the market, most of it ends up going to drivers, rather than customers.

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I’ll try to do the math here.

Assuming the following:

Cost to buy: $500

Cost to charge $0.40/day (maybe generous)

Cost to Rent: $2/day

Rental Mileage: $0.15/min

Assume 10mph average, (10 miles/day) $9/day

Total: $11/day to rent

2x/week,50 weeks

100 days (200 rides):

Buy: $540

Rent: $1100

No way it’s economical to rent scooters routinely. Even if you break your scooter every 6 months, you can still save by buying a new one.

And who wants to ride scooters you know are abused? Heck, I rode one and the brakes didn’t work.

I think the advantage of rental is the ability to drop off or pick up anywhere -- you can ride a scooter to the office, walk or bus to a restaurant after work, then rent a different scooter home. Or you might take a scooter from work to the restaurant, and you don't need to worry about parking the rental scooter securely or carrying it around with you.

But that only works if scooters are ubiquitous enough that you can find one when you want one.

This model works with cars (e.g. ZipCar) but with scooters I don't see how this is possible, unless the entire city is quite literally littered with scooters.

If I have to walk 5-10 min to the nearest car which I can unlock from my phone and then use to drive 5 miles somewhere then it's great, but if I have to walk 5-10 minutes to the nearest scooter pickup so I can scooter somewhere for 5-10 minutes then it sort of defeats the whole point.

If you have to walk 3 blocks for a scooter, then they really aren't "ubiquitous", I'm not a scooter user, but they seem to litter the sidewalks around here, so it's usually only a 1 or 2 minute walk.

As you said, if it's much longer than that, then there's no point -- I don't think I'd want to ride a scooter more than a mile or so anyway, so if it takes me 10 minutes to find one, I may as well just walk the whole way.

Even in LA which has a huge number of scooters, there's been times where I've scooted someplace then when I turn around to leave someone unlocked it.

If it's getting later in the day most of the scooters you find are going to be scattered in all sorts of very strange areas, many times in gated apartments, and/or with not enough charge to get you home. Or maybe you have to settle for that scooter with the screen dangling out of it by the wires and the handlebars at 45* relative to the wheel that everyone else was just not desperate enough to use.

> unless the entire city is quite literally littered with scooters.

This is certainly true for the hire bikes in London (scooters don't seem to have gotten permission for many areas yet).

The thing is, there's no reason why my wife can't take the scooter with her, into the office. It's not like she's riding a moped, or even a bicycle!

The ones you can buy actually fold down in half and are barely bigger than a yogamat. Very practical for office and subway.

Even with that napkin math, the value to not have to own the asset, insure it against theft, or carry it around constantly is still worth it to some consumers. The spontaneity of "hop on and ride, then forget about it" is the appeal.

This. A friend of mine bought one but still rides some from times to times when its practical. He also owns a car but still rides uber from times to times.

You’re right about that value add, but it’s probably not a value add for anyone using an electric scooter as a daily means of transportation.

One of the biggest detractors is that you could ride a scooter to work and when you go to leave, realize the nearest scooter is half a mile away.

Then in that hypothetical you just pay a little more for an uber/lyft. That's the benefit of not being locked into an asset.

5 miles one way? Genuine question but why would you want to commute 5 miles on a scooter multiple times a week compared to a bicycle?

I think the biggest advantage scooters have over ebikes is that for a lot of people, there’s a place to store a scooter at both ends of a commute (under a desk) but not necessarily secure bike storage.

Exactly, I'm actually considering owning a scooter specifically for those situations where I don't have a secure place to store the bike at the other end of travel or during some interval.

Not only that, but as a cyclist who took scooters to the office back when I worked in one, the main advantage was when I used a scooter I didn't show up sweaty.

It doesn't matter how slow you pedal, in the American Southeast, just being outside in the summer makes you sweat. A lot of places in this area don't have offices with showers in them. A scooter let me spend time outside without having to end up being a mess.

Isn't this (under desk storage) why folding bikes exist?

Folding bikes are either clumsy or expensive compared to electric scooters like the Xiaomi. The folding mechanism is rarely anywhere near as nice as a scooter.

What? Decent folding bikes have excellent mechanisms these days. Meanwhile most electric scooters don’t fold at all and have a tendency to topple over if you touch them wrong.

All the rental scooters have been modified so they don't fold for durability. The consumer grade ones all fold. Folding bikes are a lot pricier than the $300 xiaomi m365 that I regularly see on craigslist for $150.

Also a huge advantage is the mobility of a scooter over a bike. With a scooter you are more flexible to changes in your day. Did a friend just message you during lunch to meet up for drinks in a different part of town? No probs, just take the scooter on the tube after work. Did the weather just change drastically? No probs, can quickly change to a different way of commute and the scooter doesn't feel like a huge showstopper whereas with a bike it all becomes really really complicated.

Bicycles in big cities are too inflexible. If all you want is to commute like a sheep from home to work and back to home every day then a bicyle is a great inexpensive and green choice, in every other case it's a problem. Unless of course you are in a small village, where a possible change of plans will still result in a short ride. In London this is not possible. If I was to meet friends spontaneously outside my daily commute area then it would be impossible with a bicycle.

I no longer live in London, but these scooters seem a bit big to go on a metro train.

The smallest folding bicycles (e.g. Brompton) are fine, but scooters must either be balanced upright, exposing dirty wheels, or take up a lot of floor space. No thanks!

In the largest cities like London, if my plans changed I'd just leave the bicycle at work, and take public transport to the party, home, and to work the next day (unless my way home passes work, then I can collect the bicycle).

I love my brompton foldable bike. much handier than a scooter :)

Subways are hard, but many big cities have overland metros and/or buses that can take bikes just fine. Maybe the trip takes 10m more than the subway ride, but then you have the bike at the other end, speeding up the last mile.

The biggest reason for me would be to prevent sweating in your work outfit. On a scooter you can go fully dressed for work.

I enjoyed biking in Austin, but as you can imagine the intense heat a good portion of the year meant a full outfit change and shower after every ride just to start the day.

Many electric scooter models fold into a small form factor, so they are easy to bring on public transit and you can bring it to your desk (making them much less likely to be stolen).

Also they have less of a learning curve compared to biking on roads, and are easier to maintain, IMO.

In certain cities, that might actually be faster than driving.

Me and my friends accidentally ended up testing that theory in LA. We were going to koreatown from Santa Monica and had about 10 miles left. Half of us decided to use limebikes, another half ended up taking uber. The people on limebikes arrived at about the same time, despite the whole scooter group having to stop every 30-40 minutes and search for another scooter, since in a group of 5 people riding those, there would inevitable be one that is running out of charge in that time interval.

Anything that you can lane split with is faster than driving in LA. My bike commute is faster than the car commute since I zip on by at 15mph while everyone is suffering at like 6-10mph in traffic. Motorcycles just go the posted speed limit and don't feel traffic at all, but I know I'd die if I started riding a motorcycle here.

Another advantage is that scooters place less restrictions on how you are dressed. Dresses, shoes not meant for exercise, etc.

If I bike past 3 miles I'm gonna start sweating, and pushing 5 miles I start feeling it on bad air days. With the scooter you just stand still and don't have to do any special layering. People ride them in suits.

An ebike solves that. Which one is more comfortable/safer? I haven't ridden an electric scooter so I don't know.

ebikes for sure. Bigger wheels go over potholes better, and only the original bird scooters actually had air in their tires, the rest are just hard rubber that feels pretty rough/bone-rattly on bad roads.

Safety wise, I'd say they are about even. Cars aren't going to value your life either way.

I have never tried a scooter, is it really that easy doing a full stop with a scooter at 25km/h safely?

The advantage of scooter and bike share over owning is spontaneity. I love being able to grab a bike on a whim without any planning. And one-way trips is a big advantage, which of course only works because people are shuttling them around.

I think the relative efficiency of the share model needs to be weighed against the inefficiency of everyone owning their own while only using it a fraction of the time.

The bike vs. scooter thing is interesting (although a non electrified scooter would NOT be a good idea, much harder than biking a comparable distance with a weirder, less efficient motion).

I think that objectively a bike is a much better option for longer trips like this. Both in terms of efficiency and safety. I'd be VERY surprised if on a per mile basis, scooters weren't much more dangerous than bikes.

However, scooters FEEL safer for non-regular bike riders because you are closer to the ground, the helmet feels more optional (though it should not be) and riding on the sidewalk, where you are away from cars, feels like more of an option on a scooter than on a bike (although again, it shouldn't be).

I'd certainly advise a bike if the route is at all flat, and an e-bike if it isn't, but I can understand why that seems like a less appealing choice to some.

Copenhagen has plenty of novice (i.e. tourist) bicycle and scooter riders.

I'm confident that, regardless of "feeling", bicycles are the better option for pretty much all tourists/novices who can ride one. It's much, much more stable at all speeds. Scooter riders wobble when starting off, wobble when going at a reasonable speed, wobble when stopping and struggle with turn signals.

On the other hand, even very young children on unpowered kick scooters tend to have pretty good control.

As a tourist/traveler I love rental scooters. For commuting I would obviously buy my own, but when I travel somewhere I wouldn't want to carry my scooter everywhere. Just arriving at Frankfurt central station, stepping out of the train station and grabbing a scooter is a huge convenience if you want to get somewhere close-ish in the city.

5 miles? That sounds more suitable for a bike, an eBike if you don't want to pedal.

A scooter just seems dangerous on the roads and even trails around here -- there are many ruts and potholes that will swallow a 4" scooter wheel and bring you to an abrupt stop.

Riding a scooter doesn't even avoid the need to wear a helmet (assuming that protecting your brain is important to you). Many people wrongly assume that the helmet is to protect you if a car hits you, but really it's there to protect you when your head hits the pavement for any fall -- there's a very low speed range where a helmet is any protection in a collision but even a simple fall can result in serious head injury without a helmet if your head hits the pavement.

Exactly. If there was a way to optimize the process of managing the fleet, either by predicting where people want to go from and to or having to recharge the batteries less frequently then these services would be more viable. Maybe the new type of batteries will open up opportunities here.

I was able to rent a scooter from Bird for $25/month in a city and it cut my transportation cost from $170 to like $50. It eliminated ubers to/from events, public transit to/from work, bike rentals to/from gym. Definitely recommend owning a scooter

I'm curious, was there a specific scooter that was yours? Or you just paid $25/mo for unlimited rides?

It was a specific one that was mine. I would open the app and only my scooter would show up (other users couldn't see it). I'd store it in my apt and what not

I see a ton of Ninebots during my commute, seems like more and more people choose to own. Even folks at my company own various escooter variants.

I don't drive, don't even have a license - my Ninebot Max has been the best purchase I've made to my personal freedom of movement living in the suburbs of a city with lackluster public transit.

Intercity bus routes only run M-F, so to go 10 miles downtown I have to get the whole way by myself. I can bike, but even if I were in better shape I would still be quite sweaty and exhausted by the time I make that trip. My scooter gets me the distance in an hour comfortably and I don't feel like I need to change after I arrive.

You would think making a long trip like this and standing up for an hour would be a pretty terrible experience, but I've been quite comfortable with it as well as 3 mile trips to the office when required, etc.

personal freedom of movement, that's an awesome phrase

It is, yet it's something most people take for granted. When I moved out from closer to the metro center with my wife I lost access to the bus system, restricting my ability to get around without needing her to drive me. Buying my bike and scooter this year gave my lost freedom back, which just feels good.

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