Just after 7 a.m. on a recent weekday morning, Alexander Berg pulled his van — bright green, with the word “LimeBike” emblazoned on the side — over on a corner on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berg, a thin, cheerful 31-year old in a hoodie, pulled on a pair of black gloves and threw open the back of the van, which was filled with electric scooters. “We’ll do three here,” he said.
Berg’s employer, a startup named Lime based just south of the city in San Mateo, is one of a handful of companies that have spent the last few months sprinkling hundreds of bikes and electric scooters around American cities. They allow people to unlock the vehicles with smartphone apps and ride them for as little as $1, leaving them sitting on the sidewalk when they’ve reached their destination. The companies — and the investors who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into them over the last year and a half — see this as the next step in the massive recalibration of transportation that Uber and Lyft kicked off about a decade ago. In an open letter to his competitors, Travis VanderZanden, chief executive officer of Bird, another scooter-sharing company, described it as the “biggest revolution in the transportation since the dawn of the Jet Age.”
Scooter sharing was an immediate hit. Lime said that each vehicle in its major markets gets used nine times on an average day. In San Francisco, that adds up to about 2,200 daily rides. But this popularity has also been polarizing. The scooters are broadly seen as an annoying fad among tourists and clueless tech workers, who zip around the city’s sidewalks, breaking the law — scooters are supposed to be ridden in the street — and imperiling everyone around them. Scooters have been thrown in waterways and trees, broken in half, and smeared with poop. (...)
It’s not unusual for startups to set their internal treadmills to speeds they struggle to maintain, especially when venture capitalists are pushing them to dominate. Lime, which has already raised $132 million, is working on closing another fundraising round, which it expects to close within weeks. It’s in 60 markets, and plans to be in 100 markets by the end of the year. To keep this pace, the company has sacrificed peace with local governments, something it has consistently said it would prioritize. Last month, San Francisco’s city attorney sent cease-and-desist orders to the scooter-sharing companies, while local lawmakers wrote new rules. The city is accepting applications from companies looking to operate scooter-sharing services, but the number of scooters they can deploy will be limited. Honolulu; Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Nashville, Tennessee have also taken action to slow the spread of scooters. (...)
Bike-sharing is a deceptively complicated business. Lime had to acquire a fleet of vehicles strong enough to withstand a beating, build software to deploy them, and establish individual operations in each city. Adding scooters was just another layer of complexity. Even transportation experts who support the sharing platforms expected them to spend years in obscurity. “Nobody took it seriously — at least I didn’t,” said Sharon Feigon, the executive director of the Shared Use Mobility Center, an advocacy group pushing for alternative transportation. “Then all of a sudden it took off.”
Besides pedal bikes, electric-assist bikes and scooters, Lime is also developing “transit pods,” one- or two-person vehicles smaller than cars but more powerful than golf-carts, that drive in city streets. Bao and Sun are vague about when the pods might hit the streets. Eventually, Lime envisions a kind of transportation subscription service, where people would choose the type of vehicle based on their needs. While skeptics see an odd fad, Lime thinks its business will become an alternative model for transportation, at least in urban areas. Uber and Lyft have been hinting that they see things in a similar way. In April, Uber paid over $100 million to buy Jump, another bike-sharing company, and Lyft has approached San Francisco about launching its own scooter-sharing service, according to technology news website the Information.
by Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Berg’s employer, a startup named Lime based just south of the city in San Mateo, is one of a handful of companies that have spent the last few months sprinkling hundreds of bikes and electric scooters around American cities. They allow people to unlock the vehicles with smartphone apps and ride them for as little as $1, leaving them sitting on the sidewalk when they’ve reached their destination. The companies — and the investors who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into them over the last year and a half — see this as the next step in the massive recalibration of transportation that Uber and Lyft kicked off about a decade ago. In an open letter to his competitors, Travis VanderZanden, chief executive officer of Bird, another scooter-sharing company, described it as the “biggest revolution in the transportation since the dawn of the Jet Age.” Scooter sharing was an immediate hit. Lime said that each vehicle in its major markets gets used nine times on an average day. In San Francisco, that adds up to about 2,200 daily rides. But this popularity has also been polarizing. The scooters are broadly seen as an annoying fad among tourists and clueless tech workers, who zip around the city’s sidewalks, breaking the law — scooters are supposed to be ridden in the street — and imperiling everyone around them. Scooters have been thrown in waterways and trees, broken in half, and smeared with poop. (...)
It’s not unusual for startups to set their internal treadmills to speeds they struggle to maintain, especially when venture capitalists are pushing them to dominate. Lime, which has already raised $132 million, is working on closing another fundraising round, which it expects to close within weeks. It’s in 60 markets, and plans to be in 100 markets by the end of the year. To keep this pace, the company has sacrificed peace with local governments, something it has consistently said it would prioritize. Last month, San Francisco’s city attorney sent cease-and-desist orders to the scooter-sharing companies, while local lawmakers wrote new rules. The city is accepting applications from companies looking to operate scooter-sharing services, but the number of scooters they can deploy will be limited. Honolulu; Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Nashville, Tennessee have also taken action to slow the spread of scooters. (...)
Bike-sharing is a deceptively complicated business. Lime had to acquire a fleet of vehicles strong enough to withstand a beating, build software to deploy them, and establish individual operations in each city. Adding scooters was just another layer of complexity. Even transportation experts who support the sharing platforms expected them to spend years in obscurity. “Nobody took it seriously — at least I didn’t,” said Sharon Feigon, the executive director of the Shared Use Mobility Center, an advocacy group pushing for alternative transportation. “Then all of a sudden it took off.”
Besides pedal bikes, electric-assist bikes and scooters, Lime is also developing “transit pods,” one- or two-person vehicles smaller than cars but more powerful than golf-carts, that drive in city streets. Bao and Sun are vague about when the pods might hit the streets. Eventually, Lime envisions a kind of transportation subscription service, where people would choose the type of vehicle based on their needs. While skeptics see an odd fad, Lime thinks its business will become an alternative model for transportation, at least in urban areas. Uber and Lyft have been hinting that they see things in a similar way. In April, Uber paid over $100 million to buy Jump, another bike-sharing company, and Lyft has approached San Francisco about launching its own scooter-sharing service, according to technology news website the Information.
by Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
[ed. Seems to be the Uber model: ignore regulations, saturate cities, negotiate later (after cornering the market). See also: Unfortunately, the Electric Scooters Are Fantastic]
[ed. Seems to be the Uber model: ignore regulations, saturate cities, negotiate later (after cornering the market). See also: Unfortunately, the Electric Scooters Are Fantastic]
