As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect it. If this happens to every bike, that's maybe $20 per week? $1k a year per scooter? And I would guess a scooter itself costs a few hundred, as well?
Can you rent out a scooter for a sensible amount? My guess would be that the scooters are not at 100% capacity, otherwise it would be hard to find one. Kinda like the Boris Bikes in London. There's also infrastructure costs involved with maintaining the fleet, making sure they're where rides are likely to originate, marketing, and so on.
Anecdotally, working/charged/available scooters are hard to find in downtown San Francisco.
They have even more expenses and infra to support. They need to install and dismantle docking stations every season, which requires cranes and trucks in 100s of locations. They have staff that drives around and picks up bikes for repairs. They have stuff driving around and re-distributing bikes when they end up in one location (eg metro after rush hour). All of the staff gets salary, of course. Many trucks and specialized trailers had to be purchased. Lots of capital needed to run something like this.
And for scooters all they had to buy was the scooters and build an app.
If that's true it raises the interesting question about why it works in some cities and not in others, since presumably the operations by Bixi are equally competent in the various places they open.
This model is an inversion of tool or car rental, where the renter returns the device or pays a late fee. Here, Bird chases after you to get their devices back. When scooters are difficult to recover, Bird pays more to the finder for recovering them.
Bird almost certainly plans to sell themselves at some point through some sort of offering in the future. Renting scooters today is just an incidental.
Besides the obvious strife between fellow "chargers" it won't be long before cities get into the act and pass ordinances or enforce them to take them off the streets until they get their share as well. Figure that a whole licensing scheme will pop up and eventually be used to squeeze out smaller competitors who try to get into this arena
I don't think there's a large profit margin in that price given the price of a 280Wh battery and the other components.
These companies also have to add some parts to the scooters such as GPS.
It's really an amazing experience. For a new user, it takes less than a minute to get started. The first time, as an engineer, I just was shocked that it was actually working so well!
I feel like it unlocks a whole new way to see the city for a lot of people.
The only thing that sucks is the battery only lasts about an hour, so it's not great for tourists who want to go on tour for a long time. Presumably a better battery would be more expensive and people would be more likely to steal it.
You sure that Ford Bike (or whatever it's called) I'd wny different?
I guess the can discourage this by making you drop it off at the nest before it can be checked out instead of letting you immediately check it out again the next day for the ride back to work or wherever.
If your house is near a nest you could still make it work I think. The only caveat being that the bird will probably disappear during the day while you are at work unless you hide it in your office.
I don't know, it seems kind of easy to game.
Wait until the food delivery guys get on electric longboards. YT from Snow Crash might be a relatable character for my kids...
https://www.reddit.com/r/boostedboards/comments/8jzokl/11_an...
A modern version of Rip Van Winkle would only have to be asleep for 2 months to be just as clueless and out-of-touch as the original Van Winkle was when he took a 20-year nap.
The webarchive supports that this has always been the title.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
For most content this sort of optimization would be a bit much, but for a piece like this it could definitely work.
Similarly one van making grocery deliveries to 20 people is generally a _lot_ better than 20 people driving to the grocery store.
...and will this land, if it even exists, be larger than the amount of sidewalk space that Bird has repurposed into scooter parking spaces?
People might steal them but the article already mentions that some people steal them already.
So, sure, a scooter which was used and left on a main street can just stay there and get its battery swapped, but maybe it's not worth trying to figure out which scooters need moved and which battery-swapped, and to get the chargers to do the right thing in each case.
The fact that they pay different prices per scooter might invalidate this, but just a guess.
https://blog.atherenergy.com/ev-adoption-made-easy-with-athe...
Beijing (and other cities) have proven that bike sharing can become a major transport type if the city will allow bike sharing companies to just dump bikes all over the sidewalk. It's crude, but it at least let's us see how far bike sharing can go if/when stations are a non-problem.
Besides the mess (I could not imagine buttoned down European city like Vienna or even a messy one like Amsterdam allowing it), there's a problem of space. Scooters are space saving.
In my ideal world, there are "public" scooter stations that can be used by any bike sharing enterprise. These provide efficient, space saving storage and power. With the same footprint we currently use for city bikes, we could probably store 2X-4X as many scooters. One parking space could be converted into a unit. Scooters everywhere!
I don't really see benefit over a bike. Except that bikes don't require charging.
Also, less skill to ride and less risk.
Beijing (one example) has bike sharing without stations. Just dump the bike wherever and the bike sharing guys will deal with it. This is an interesting data point, because it removes the infrastructure bottleneck entirely (but makes a mess). What we learn from it is that bike sharing is bottlenecked and that it can grow a lot by widening that bottleneck, by adding more "stations."
European cities ( early to the bike sharing game) are really unlikely to allow such mess. Scooters may be another way of achieving the same thing, because they can be extremely space saving.
In my European city (Dublin) bike stations usually take up about 4-6 parallel parking spaces and a little bit of road and sidewalk. We don't have enough of them because that amount is space is hard to come by. I think a scooter sharing station could half or quarter the required space, with the same footprint. .. especially folding scooters.
At a pinch, I think you could get a station onto a single parking space. This makes finding room for them way easier. This means we can have more of them, maybe much more.
As to the benefit of powered scooters: cheap, small, fun, carriable, effective over short distances. Cons: need power, not as fast/stable as a bike and less suitable for longer journeys.
I doubt any of these are as important as the availablility of stations near where you want to start and end your trip. I think scooters>bikes in terms of space, and space is the right problem to solve.
I'll stick with my bicycle but I'm happy for anyone who uses an electric scooter, rather than a car.
- Do they [the parents] get a percentage of that money to pay for the bills?
- Is it even legal for these independent contractors to use home electricity to charge a 3rd-party business asset?
- Are damages to the house, in case of a fire, covered by their contracts?
- If the scooters are out of battery, how do these companies know where they are?
- Can these teenagers hold the scooters "hostage"?
- Can they charge extra money for dropping the scooters to places with some people can find it more convenient? Say, if I want to find one of them right in front of my house every morning, I would pay one of these teenagers some extra money for the arrangement.
- Are these houses in risk of over-charging their electricity net?
I have so many questions about all this, it seems so weird to me.
At worst they'll ask for compensation.
The article actually qualifies that for people in large apartment buildings with a "bike room" - so essentially these people are freeloading.
Charging a Bird doesn’t require a ton of electricity, so minus the labor cost, charging a few scooters overnight is essentially free—especially if you live in a large apartment building and can do so in your bike room
I've started to view the expensive Birds as a way for the company to have people try and find their lost scooters, in which case $25 is a pretty great deal...
http://goped.com/know-ped/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtn5kg3ZH3M
Or something like this: Micro PedalFlowhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfIzZo6ouDo
It would reduce the speed concerns too.
"""Bird pays Brandon, a contract worker, up to several hundred dollars a night. On one particularly successful night, Brandon brought home $600."""
The article does not have many specifics but roughly Brandon seems to get 10 or so scooters on each trip, two trips a night(?). so that's something between 10 bucks and 30 bucks per charged scooter cost to Bird. Even if it's just 10 bucks that becomes the cost of the bike every quarter or so - that kind of opex must be killing them?
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/8l12oj/electric....
At least in China, people don't respect the bikes. They trash them. They leave them everywhere. It sounds like a similar attitude exists with these Bird scooters. As societies/cities grow larger, people take less responsibility for things they use and spaces they exist in. I suspect it's partly a cultural thing (see Japan) but I'm pretty sure Japan has litter too. Bird has to incentivize the right behavior and disincentivize (i.e. even enforcement of charging policy) poor behavior.
This was probably inevitably going to happen as the hub motor is constantly in direct contact with the ground, which means that a bad impact can dislodge a magnet.
I wanted to fix it myself, and the cost of the part would have had been almost the same price as just scrapping the scooter and buying a new one. Additionally, I had trouble going beyond about 5 miles, with the lights off and with conservative battery use, before running out of power.
And fyi, something being against the contract is not automatically illegal.
Plus, an electric company might love this: more customers, with demand at off-peak hours that might even slightly reduce the need for energy storage.
Is it legal in the US to use regular cars for taxi purposes? Operating a taxi without a taxi license? Operating a hotel without a hotel license? It's companies like these, and uber, and airb&b, etc that skirt around the laws.
Why’s that a problem for the companies though?
What sweetens the incentive is the "instant" cash transfer within 5 hours or so of drop-off. Mobile micro-work at scale is not only tenable. But may be the preferred operandus of labor market participants.
