Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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