Electric scooter company Bird files for bankruptcy
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But instead running a scooter rental company became "who is best at navigating municipal RFPs" and the lack of availability brought people back to riding in -- and leasing/buying -- cars.
Rentable scooters require 24/7 staff with collection vehicles in nearly every municipality they exist, and municipalities have a right to demand a standard of service in addressing issues caused by the private scooter rental customers.
This solved the last mile problem in a fashion no one else has to date. Every thing else in comparison on both convenience and cost is a joke.
Moving some scooters off of an ADA ramp is the least of our worries. And I’m guessing less than 1% of these wound up in a river, not that any city would care if they didn’t feel threatened in their monopoly on solving traffic problems.
I don't know why on-demand public transit systems aren't more popular.
Edit: > Moving some scooters off of an ADA ramp is the least of our worries.
Probably because you're not the person who is called when someone with mobility issues can't get to a bus stop.
This is just a taxi.
OP just wants the government to monopolize transit because he really doesn’t want folks having autonomy of mobility.
I realize you’re accustomed probably to arguing by using these types of straw men with preserved topics that cannot be criticized. But you’ll need to show some data exhibiting how many ramps were blocked by scooters versus other obstacles around here to garner any credibility.
What I take particular objection to is the suggestion that it’s my lack of empathy for folks needing accessible ramps that drives my affection for having a more convenient life where traffic problems can actually be solved.
If only that's where these scooters were usually found...
For commuting these things are less convenient than an electric bike, more expensive, less quick, and less reliable.
In European cities these companies catered mostly to tourists using them for fun rather than actually replacing cars.
While locals had to deal with these scooters being absolutely littered everywhere as well as the riders ignoring all traffic rules and treating it like a n expensive toy.
If people want to replace their car they would use public transport or an electric bike. Or just buy one of these scooters directly.
You can ride them on sidewalks up to 6km/h, bike lanes and car lanes at up to 15km/h and if you have a driver's license, in car lanes at up to 20km/h. The police do actually enforce this, at least in Tokyo. 20km/h feels a bit unsafe at times because they accelerate quickly ahead of cars from a red light, but then you get suddenly overtaken by 5 cars going. much faster than you. Overall though these are pretty good policies and they are convenient without being a menace to others.
They are ¥200 for 30 minutes. I liked the original pricing better, which was ¥110 for the first 10 minutes, but either way they are cheap as a transit-extender but expensive to use for commuting, long journeys or leaving parked. This means they are highly available and reliable to use at the start or end of taking public transit. Tokyo has amazing trains but there are times you are 1-2km away from a station that takes you directly to home or work, but you need to transfer 3 times to get to that particular station. Or you want to pick up a pizza on the way home from your home station, but you'd have to walk 1.5km instead of 500m.
I'm also a mechanical engineer and it was cool to see the scooters becoming better (control, handling, suspension) with each iteration. Maybe that's a Japan thing because bird and other scooters/bikes in NA/EU just become heavier with each iteration to deal with vandalism.
I live in Luxembourg now and I pay something like €16/year to use rental e-bikes (up to 30 minutes per trip, you pay more after that). Sounds great but I use them less over time because they are broken in some way more often than not. Often the "e" part doesn't work and because they are built SO heavy to survive vandalism, they are very hard to pedal. Sometimes very, very hard and you can feel vibrations in the brake lever. I don't know what's up with this, maybe overspeed is incorrectly detected. Sometimes you can depress the lever a bit and reduce it. Sometimes you can't so you try to swap bikes at the next parking place. When you do that there is a good chance you can't take another bike for 5 minutes, and a small chance you can't take another bike until the next weekday when someone does inventory. The first bike will be physically locked but not register as returned so you can't take another. You've taken a bike for a reason instead of transit so chances are you are looking at a 30 minute walk to your destination. In one case I was charged about €20 and it took more than a year to get a reply by email. I didn't even check if I got the money back or not.
(Why are we holding scooters to a higher standard than the utter madhouse that I see on the roads on a daily basis?)
ftfy
Why do you only hold the vendor responsible for what happens on the sidewalk? Is it some kind of sacred space? Why do we just accept that people will behave like savages on the road running parallel to it?
I'd say never. Because they successfully lobbied against it and shaped public perception way back.
They used to be blamed for it. They just acquired and spent enough money to make it disappear permanently.
I hope there are more attempts to make getting around and getting to places you need and want to go easier.
Of course it's more of an user problem rather than tech problem. They could work well in a society where bad behavior is not tolerated, and eScooter use is regulated properly. Unfortunately I don't live in one, and thus eScooters really seem to attract lazy and irresponsible types.
>have short lifespan.
Those things are build like tanks by now, every big player has its own repair shops and they are repaired over and over, and nearly none of the damage is from normal use
I can't speak for wider stats, but anecdotally I used them instead of things like taking the bus, or getting a lyft. If is close enough to walk I generally wouldn't want to spend the money.
I don't think it was just me - I stopped seeing Bird scooters get used by others. I still saw the occasional Lime.
It's entirely possible I'm extrapolating too much from my experience and a rough observation. But still, I'm kind of surprised it took them so long to fail.
I've long been frustrated that micromobility is held to a standard no other transportation mode is expected to meet, at least in the US. E.g.
- "Micromobility doesn't make any sense, you can tell because all the companies lose money." But every other form of transportation is deeply subsidized! In the US we spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on roads, trains get federal infrastructure money, public transit [where it exists] isn't close to fully paid for by fare revenue, airlines get bailed out in recessions, all carbon-burning transport has an unpriced carbon externality, etc.
- "I hate the scooters, they clutter sidewalks." Often the clutter is real and a problem and I wish people behaved better. Among the people who I wish behaved better, I'd include car drivers who park in bike lanes or on sidewalks, yet the prevalence of such behavior doesn't create widespread calls to ban all cars. (Well, in some corners of the internet...)
More generally, it's weird that scooter companies are liable - legally or de facto - for such behavior at all. If I get a rental car from Hertz or similar and then park illegally, nobody claims this means Hertz should get a ticket or be shut down. Why are scooters different?
At the end of the day, in the US we've built our legal regime and land use patterns around the assumption that most travel should be by car and this travel should be subsidized. The fact that scooters create some frictions by taking up some of the space left over by cars is more an indictment of the system than of scooters.
28mph is pretty much a motorbike.
In either case, solving homelessness is probably more complicated than scooter litter.
Scooters are different because them being littered all over public spaces is absolutely intrinsic to these companies' value proposition and business model in a way that it absolutely is not for Hertz or similar.
I think hybrid transportation models of this kind are really essential to having liveable cites in the future, but businesses really shouldn't be able to benefit from just ignoring negative externalities associated with their model, and that (unfortunately) includes their customers behaving in an antisocial and/or selfish way. This is no different from how noise levels for residents are considered when granting a license for a bar or something. You're not able to just plan for a world where everyone behaves in a decent and considerate fashion.
Where I live we had a bike and scooter company who had a "park anywhere" type model and our pavements[1] were really littered all the time with bikes and it was difficult (as someone who basically walks everywhere) to get around. Now that company has disappeared and the bike/scooter companies which remain have to look after their inventory and keep it in defined parking spots the situation is a lot better. I don't exactly know how enforcement has been set up and I do see abandoned bikes and scooters around, but I also see company employees rounding them up and taking them to the right spots so the system appears to be working.
[1] Sidewalks for Americans
1) QR code on every scooter so improperly placed scooters can be reported to the owning company with images
2) The use of accelerometer data to verify when a scooter was moved (to ensure things like renters not being unfairly penalized if a scooter is moved by somebody else afterwards)
First, businesses which attract antisocial asshole clients do get extra scrutiny and burdensome regulation; the classic example is bars.
Second, the difference between Hertz and Bird is the rate and visibility of antisocial behavior. The overwhelming majority of Hertz clients park their rentals no differently than any ordinary car driver; and a Hertz rental parked illegally is hard to distinguish at a distance from any other car. By contrast, a very large fraction of rental electric scooters appear to be parked illegally, and they are very visible (due to the color scheme, and because privately owned electric scooters are not very common in most parts of the US and never get dumped in the middle of a road, lest they get vandalized or stolen).
I'm not trying to excuse Bird here - I'm annoyed by scooters parked in the sidewalk like anyone, but going "car people are so nice and not antisocial" is kinda pointing at the underlying unfairness. If we spent/regulated billions of scooter parking spots, Bird wouldn't have an issue either.
FWIW, I don’t own a car at all.
Practically speaking, at least in the US, there's rarely any good or approved place to park anything but a car anywhere. I'm upset with the scooters, but I'm also upset with bikers locking their bikes to trees, or people parking motorcycles in unexpected places. Half of the time there's dedicated motorcycle or bike parking, some asshole parks their car there and isn't fined/towed.
Point being, there's a lot of money behind making it incredibly easy to take a car to anything in the US, and while other options are regularly annoying in parking places that aren't allowed, I've seen some moves over the last few years to make dedicated scooter parking or expand bike parking to accommodate, and that's a net good. It's certainly not that Bird is part of some righteous civil disobedience program by leaving scooters in the middle of the sidewalk, but the scooter plague has done more to improve bike/personal scooter parking than years of pressure from bikers, so I'll take it.
But the biggest difference is rental cars need to be returned to a designated place like an airport or car dealership. Or they get picked up. They are never just abandoned on city streets, and even more rarely parked illegally.
If people could rent cars for very short periods of time and 'return' them on the street, they most definitely would be re-parked illegally. We'd never allow a rental car company to use city streets as a parking lot for their inventory. And, yes, it would be the car company's liability.
Isn’t this exactly what evo/gig/zip is? Easy to miss if you live outside of a big US metro I suppose.
Say what you will, this behavior is from an employee, and is thus the direct responsibility of the company, who does not care at all.
When you escalate from being a nuisance to outright endangering people, there needs to be consequences.
Scooter operations shut down for nearly half the year in most markets due to the winter, and in those markets they either have to pay employees or lay them off (bird did the latter) once a year. They still have to store the scooters during that time, and they need to have scaled operations for their entire market.
Bike rentals tend to be shut down far shorter periods of time in the winter, and ridesharing doesn't shut down. This allows other companies providing bikes/scooters to move their operations around to other business units when they shut down their scooter unit.
As a whole the scooters make less sense than bikes. If we're going to subsidize something, it should be bike sharing (which _is_ somewhat government subsidized btw).
If you get a rental car, and let it in the middle of the road, you will be fined and Hertz might sue you.
You ain’t scooting in Manhattan or San Francisco at 65mph.
I assume this was a Vespa style scooter, not a “stand on a board with no protective gear at all” type of scooter?
If it wasn't for the paragraph before, you'd think things were going just peachy.
Although bankruptcy can also mean restructuring...
They might end up in the hands of someone that wants them. There are many different scooter companies, so it’s likely someone will pick ups the assets.
Bringing scooters to your house would still be theft.
JOKING [I try not to litter] — my US city banned this trash service years ago.
In its place, city-serviced bikes are available to rent (and must be returned to their "stations" after use).
We're strange creatures.
Ps I hate these scooter companies but throwing them in the rivers is terrible for the environment.
Obviously illegal although unlikely to get you in trouble.
Another company's E-Trash is another mans transportation when their car is broken.
I personally own e-bike, and EUC. Totally happy with both.
They don't replace a car or a bike, what they replace is the walk from the train station.
e-bike is somewhat limited in this particular usage. I mostly ride EUC though and that thing can go as fast as a car in the city and since it is so compact I have no problem taking it into any place - store, client's office, coffee shop etc. etc. So unless there is adverse weather, need to bring loads of stuff from A to B EUC replaces everything for me.
That said, I do think that just leaving the scooters around is exploiting loopholes and is a nuisance.
Exactly, they're just littered everywhere.