Bird may be bankrupt, but shared micromobility is doing just fine

FTA: “In the US, shared e-bike trips increased from 14.5 million trips in 2021 to 20 million trips in 2022”

https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Bikeshare-and-e-scooters-in-t...: “As of June 30, 2023, 56 docked bikeshare systems open to the general public operated 8,796 docking stations in the U.S”

That’s about 2300 trips per docking station in a year, or 6 per day. Per bike, I would guess it to be less than a tenth of that.

And that’s ignoring the dockless bike-sharing systems.

Is it really possible to do “just fine” at those numbers? At best, I guess they have razor-thin margins.

As to Lime’s “unadjusted $20.6 million profitability”, https://www.fastcompany.com/90851725/lime-reports-first-full... says that “does not include capital expenditure, such as the cost of designing and manufacturing their scooter fleet”, so I think there’s still some wishful thinking there.

(Because Lime’s site (https://www.li.me/about/press) doesn’t seem to host press releases, but just refers to third party articles, I had to guess at whether those figures are what the article referred to, but I think that’s correct)

A good reminder of the difference between creating and capturing value.