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Comment by nasmorn | Hacker News Reader

It is just really expensive to ride. I use it sometimes where there are no good public transport options and it is like half a cab fare. I can’t see them maintain a market if they increase prices. Maybe if we had longer lasting batteries they could drop the prices since they would not need to be charged so often. But as it stands it is either a curiosity or replacing something already expensive like a taxi for a small subset of taxi rides.

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I don't think it's just the batteries, the whole economic model makes no sense. First, they're expensive - they need to be built for commercial use, so they're $500+ each. Second, demand is massively inefificent, a hundred thousand people want to travel from the train station to their office in the morning, and then back in the evening. Either you pay someone to keep riding the scooters back to the train station in the morning during commuting hours, or you accept that their utilization is going to be woeful. Thirdly, the MTBBTITR (Mean Time Between Being Thrown in The River) is 2 days, so you end up replacing your entire inventory every 2 days.

So, we need to hire a full time worker per scooter to return it to where it's needed constantly, we need to replace the scooter every 2 days, and they're $500 each. So it costs the company about $300 a day to run 1 scooter, so they need to charge about $100 per journey. Unsurprisingly, the demand is highly elastic.

The numbers are a bit facetious, but you get my point.

Bike share systems with docks have the same demand problem, but they are locked to docks so don’t get thrown into the River. They survive fine. Maybe a docked scooter share would work?

Aren't those subsidized by cities? I know that they are here in Montreal, and the Bixi corporation behind our bike share system went bankrupt at least once in the past.

Bixi isn't subsidized anymore (and I don't think they have been since they went private in 2014). They even got acquired by Lyft last year.

Edit: I was thinking of their international division. Looks like the Montreal network is still run by the city of Montreal.

There is something I don't understand. Why are people throwing these things into the river, so to speak? The more you break these the more units will have to be bought and the more expensive the ride becomes and the more resources "energy" is necessary to keep the system going --which seems ironic since riders are the ones who opt to ride in order to use fewer energy resources to begin with...

Drunk tourists don't care? At least where I live scooters are just littered all over until they get picked up which can be hours. Might not even be the rider dumping them in the river.

Maybe because they're an eye sore?

Some people probably resent that if they were the ones leaving their product lying around all over common areas, such as footpaths, so they could make a buck, they would feel the weight of the local municipality. But they have to put up with it because a VC backed company can move faster than local government because DiSruPtive?

Yeah, fuck 'em, harvest them for 18650s I say.

I mean people do that with cars too, and I don’t mean public parking, they drive their shit up on the sidewalk and park, park on cross walks and drive down bike paths and do donuts in the park. drivers generally don’t give a shit ever. But people mostly leave them be. So I think the answer is easier. People throw scooters in the river because it’s easy and fun. Anything that is left around near a river and is light enough to throw, somebody is going to throw.

People give a shit with cars too. In some places you’ll get towed quickly for putting your car somewhere a homeowner doesn’t like. And obviously if cars were easier to move people would absolutely shove them out of the way.

Kids do it. Kids destroy stuff just for the fun of destroying stuff. They don't care about the rides becoming expensive or whatever. It's just funny to them to throw it in the river.

So, where are they putting their Gretta money? Looks like they would be ignoring her imperatives.

What is Gretta money?

Why do you assume the riders are the ones throwing them in the river?

And what does "so to speak" mean here? They're literally getting thrown into rivers.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/spark-421-1.4973383/why-are-p...

https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/electric-scooter-bird-l...

https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/electric-scooters-hi...

I was under the impression that the river throwers were not the riders. Annoyed locals trying to hurt the company, teens looking for tiktoks, etc.

The costs are pretty high these days. I took a lime recently and I ended up paying a dollar more than what rideshare quoted me. In hindsight I really should just skip them and go for rideshare. The rich enclave cities in my area with their octopus like city borders have geolocked scooters. So when you are going on a major road and you go over one block into the rich angry city, the scooter loses power and you nearly die from the fickle 45mph traffic on your tail that is now angry at you even more than they were previously.

In Poland they are already more expensive than cab. It makes zero sense to me that scooter that I ride on without needing to be driven by other people, and which only needs to have battery switched daily, can cost even close to cab.

In Barcelona too. There's no point over a cab really.

I have a similar experience where I live. Taking a scooter only saved me a dollar or two on my trips over a ride share. It even took me longer to scoot over rather than what the ride share would typically take too, so it’s just really not worth it.

Also so many horrendous riders when I’m cycling in the road.

The system makes sense in well-planned (dense, accessible) cities. Most American cities -- indeed, most cities designed primarily after the invention of automobiles -- do not fit this definition.

A classic XY problem. The issue is not the cost, it is what the built environment demands.

The article talks about how they're not even really working in European cities, despite being less spread out and more amenable to cycling options.

Why don't you just buy your own scooter?

You are reading far too much into my comment.

Sorry, I actually replied to the wrong comment

I read that batteries can last for dozens of miles.

This changes dramatically if its cold or if its the end of the night and all the scooters have been used during the day. I’ve ran them dry a number of times and had to find a new steed.

Why don't you just buy your own scooter?

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