This is definitely a time when I'm annoyed to be a New Yorker -- we're shut out of all of these developments. We committed to Citibike (provided by Motivate), and now we're stuck trying to protect the granted monopoly by shutting out all the dockless e-bikes and electric scooters in favor of the overpriced incumbent.
How come Citibike stops New York from having dockless alternatives? DC has the Capital Bikeshare docked bike system (also by Motivate), but still has rentable dockless bikes and electric scooters.
I am looking forward to watch how this develops. I think small electric vehicles have a huge future to reduce traffic congestions and pollution. With small electric vehicles, I think of all new mobility enabled by the progress with battery technogoly, ranging from e-Bikes, Segways, e-Scooters to whatever else might be invented. E-Scooters look like great devices for the typical short distances in urban regions.
I am really excited to see whether this business model is sustainable or not.
I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance. For anyone who wants to curb global warming, these scooters are a darn good way to do it. The tradeoffs are easily worth it. Some people want to act like the tradeoffs don't exist/ if they just wish for something hard enough, the solution that has no tradeoffs will appear, despite institutional inertia.
I have to say I think the impact of scooters on global warming will be nil if not negative.
Those little stand-up electric scooters mostly substitute for walking, not driving. And in that sense they are worse for global warming because they actually use electricity, in many places generated by coal.
And consider the warming impact of making the things. Metal forging, paint, tires, batteries, electronics.
Agreed, scooters (and skateboards) replace walking, not biking or driving.
IMO, they’re also an Attractive Nuisance, in the legal sense of the term. They encourage people to ride them who are not adequately trained or equipped, by virtue of their stunningly low price and easy availability. Then those people are much more likely to hurt themselves or someone else, thus driving up trips to the ER and local healthcare costs.
The old method of drug dealers giving away the “first hit for free” seems to be very apropos here.
If the scooter companies were required to provide health and liability insurance for every rider, and get a hefty fine every time one of their riders was seen using the sidewalk and/or not wearing a helmet, at least those costs would not be externalized on society.
The original Segway device had large wheels that were set horizontally, and incorporated software and hardware to make them as stable as possible. We’ve thrown out all of those advantages in the name of chasing a “cheaper” device.
Disclaimer: I am currently recovering from my own accident from riding a scooter, and so I may be a bit biased. Or maybe That gives me a unique insight that many others in this discussion do not. You decide.
> IMO, they’re also an Attractive Nuisance, in the legal sense of the term. They encourage people to ride them who are not adequately trained or equipped, by virtue of their stunningly low price and easy availability.
That's...not the legal sense of “attractive nuisance”, which refers to an object on land likely to attract children which makes the landowner legally responsible for injuries by the object to trespassing children so attracted in circumstances in which they otherwise would not be, provided the children are unable to understand the hazard posed.
At best, you are referring to a very loose analogy to the legal sense of the term.
> Then those people are much more likely to hurt themselves or someone else, thus driving up trips to the ER and local healthcare costs.
I understand the intuitive attractiveness of this, but is there any empirical evidence for it?
This is a great early analysis on the roll out of jump bike shares on the uber platform. During business hours / commuting hours, uber usage dropped by 15% in favor of jump bicycle shares. Many of the trips seem to replace commutes within the city, and this is while the number of bikes is limited.
If the number of bikes explodes, and they can politically shift the landscape to enable safer biking/scootering etc., then that can make a huge dent in denser cities in America.
I think you may be underestimating how many car rides they are removing. They’re great to not deal with parking and traffic, and they’re not taking people away from walking/riding bikes. I scraped bird vs bike share data in Santa Monica for a while and bird did seven times as many rides as the bike share with the same number of devices in the same area (and the bike share was doing roughly the same amount of rides as before bird showed up).
Maybe, I think it depends on how durable they are. And how much they help with the last mile problem.
Consider the cases where someone has the option to take a bus or train, but there's a mile gap on both sides of their commute (or even just one side). So instead they drive the whole distance. If they can hop off the bus/train onto a scooter to close that gap, it can tip the scales to public transit vs taking a car.
It's not a scooter vs. car question, it's a scooter vs. public transportation question. Or scooter vs. bicycle. And while I am pro-scooter I really think the upsides of public transportation and a city being bicycle friendly are greater than a city having pay per minute-scooters.
> "I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance."
probably because opposing scooters is a squarely conservative stance? as in, let's keep things the same as before, nevermind the death rate or noxious emissions of cars (for the record, i like cars too).
but we're all like this, particularly when we state an (simple) identity but live real, complicated lives. we'll figure it out eventually, but not without working through our collective hypocrisy once again.
In reply to your comment and the other comments, every bit of incremental change is on the margin. To solve the huge problem of global warming you have to solve a thousand small problems.
If you leave convenient, eco-friendly transportation options all around the city, people will use eco-friendly transportation more than if they were not there. These scooters do in fact substitute for cars. Cities that have good public transportation are still enormously polluting, just a little bit less, assuming the darn buses operate at decent capacity. There is no panacea. Virtue signalling doesn't matter.
The existence of these scooters does not prevent buses and bikes from existing at the same level of service/ convenience as they did before. If anything they make the city more bike-friendly.
Do they? Is there good evidence of that? I'm pretty skeptical, and from a google search I don't see that - and others seem to be similarly skeptical (outside of companies that own scooter companies...). It actually seems likely that the same people that would bike or take public transit would ride scooters - and that seems like the wrong direction to go.
I've been using the local Electric Moped rental to get around my large metropolitan city, and I have to say it is really delightful to use and experience. I have all the best parts of having a moped to use, without any of the ownership issues. Of course, it helps that the provider has deployed thousands of the things .. but with every ride I'm ever more convinced this is the future of transportation. Easy to use electric rentals, just great ..
Even if the scooter craze crashes and burns (either due to regulations, insustainable business model, or lack of sustained customer demand aka here comes winter) it's gotta be helping drive down prices to manufacture and improving electric scooters and bikes technology. Scooter rental isn't super appealing for my use case, but buying one to use for commuting now is much more attainable than even 5 years ago.
I know a person who works on Bird's freight team, they apparently have been moving 2 full Boeing 747s of scooters (I estimate that to be about 12,000-14,000 based on weight) every day from China, at one point about $150 a pop). I think it's a sustainable model because after being shipped, delivered, and released (estimating about $80 more per scooter), it's ridden until dead every day on average 10 times (1.43mi/ride average, range 15mi average), earning it $10 plus $0.15/min, or ~$23.50/day. It breaks even after 7 rides, and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast.
I haven't factored in other parts of the economy, like oversupply, theft, premature damage, and payroll for the employees including chargers, but seeing they're in 100 cities with at least 3 million scooters on the streets being ride. I also based my guesses from https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone.
I had a training class on lean manufacturing about a year ago. The low cost enabled by production-line mentality of scooter production combined with the ad-hoc resource allocation enabled by the app for both riders and chargers makes this so darn efficient it is crazy. Very lean.
I think kawfey meant that in a given day, each scooter can be ridden 20 times before the battery is depleted. I don't think this was a description of the lifetime of the battery — just its daily capacity.
I see they're using Cloudflare - likely it's a tradeoff for them between banning attackers and alienating legitimate visitors - and they don't do business in Brazil, yet. They block my (US) VPN exit, too.
Hmm, my daily ride is 8mi / 13km - and I often want to pick up groceries, library books, etc. A scooter (even an electric) is still much less practical for these use cases.
I know it's a combination of 'taxi' and '-ify', but it reads too much like 'tax' and '-ify'. Taxes generally have a negative or necessary evil connotation which doesn't seem like a great company name. It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.
Taxify is huge (read: bigger than Uber) in the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and in some African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa). It mostly focuses on Eastern European, Western Asian and African markets, where there is no single major player.
I clicked on this just to see why a Tax startup was investing in scooters. I will postulate that this is a terrible name. My stance on 'ground scooters' is still up in the air. Both annoying and convenient. I have to agree with another commenter that they seem to replace walking, not driving, a net negative.
>It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.
Maybe Portsmouth harbor. For the past century or so the people of Boston have been generally welcoming to taxes, nosy government and all the other things the Bostonians of the 1700s resented the British for. Their northern neighbors, not so much.
That still doesn't make "tax-$anything" a good company name for any business that doesn't have to do with taxes. Better to have a neutral and boring name than a name that some people associate with bad things.
It was historically about "taxation without representation", not taxes per se. It was a about democratic representation when creating the laws (and taxes) that were imposed on them.
This is definitely a time when I'm annoyed to be a New Yorker -- we're shut out of all of these developments. We committed to Citibike (provided by Motivate), and now we're stuck trying to protect the granted monopoly by shutting out all the dockless e-bikes and electric scooters in favor of the overpriced incumbent.
How come Citibike stops New York from having dockless alternatives? DC has the Capital Bikeshare docked bike system (also by Motivate), but still has rentable dockless bikes and electric scooters.
Vote out your ridiculous government then.
I am looking forward to watch how this develops. I think small electric vehicles have a huge future to reduce traffic congestions and pollution. With small electric vehicles, I think of all new mobility enabled by the progress with battery technogoly, ranging from e-Bikes, Segways, e-Scooters to whatever else might be invented. E-Scooters look like great devices for the typical short distances in urban regions.
I am really excited to see whether this business model is sustainable or not.
I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance. For anyone who wants to curb global warming, these scooters are a darn good way to do it. The tradeoffs are easily worth it. Some people want to act like the tradeoffs don't exist/ if they just wish for something hard enough, the solution that has no tradeoffs will appear, despite institutional inertia.
I have to say I think the impact of scooters on global warming will be nil if not negative.
Those little stand-up electric scooters mostly substitute for walking, not driving. And in that sense they are worse for global warming because they actually use electricity, in many places generated by coal.
And consider the warming impact of making the things. Metal forging, paint, tires, batteries, electronics.
Agreed, scooters (and skateboards) replace walking, not biking or driving.
IMO, they’re also an Attractive Nuisance, in the legal sense of the term. They encourage people to ride them who are not adequately trained or equipped, by virtue of their stunningly low price and easy availability. Then those people are much more likely to hurt themselves or someone else, thus driving up trips to the ER and local healthcare costs.
The old method of drug dealers giving away the “first hit for free” seems to be very apropos here.
If the scooter companies were required to provide health and liability insurance for every rider, and get a hefty fine every time one of their riders was seen using the sidewalk and/or not wearing a helmet, at least those costs would not be externalized on society.
The original Segway device had large wheels that were set horizontally, and incorporated software and hardware to make them as stable as possible. We’ve thrown out all of those advantages in the name of chasing a “cheaper” device.
Disclaimer: I am currently recovering from my own accident from riding a scooter, and so I may be a bit biased. Or maybe That gives me a unique insight that many others in this discussion do not. You decide.
> IMO, they’re also an Attractive Nuisance, in the legal sense of the term. They encourage people to ride them who are not adequately trained or equipped, by virtue of their stunningly low price and easy availability.
That's...not the legal sense of “attractive nuisance”, which refers to an object on land likely to attract children which makes the landowner legally responsible for injuries by the object to trespassing children so attracted in circumstances in which they otherwise would not be, provided the children are unable to understand the hazard posed.
At best, you are referring to a very loose analogy to the legal sense of the term.
> Then those people are much more likely to hurt themselves or someone else, thus driving up trips to the ER and local healthcare costs.
I understand the intuitive attractiveness of this, but is there any empirical evidence for it?
https://medium.com/uber-under-the-hood/understanding-multimo...
This is a great early analysis on the roll out of jump bike shares on the uber platform. During business hours / commuting hours, uber usage dropped by 15% in favor of jump bicycle shares. Many of the trips seem to replace commutes within the city, and this is while the number of bikes is limited.
If the number of bikes explodes, and they can politically shift the landscape to enable safer biking/scootering etc., then that can make a huge dent in denser cities in America.
I think you may be underestimating how many car rides they are removing. They’re great to not deal with parking and traffic, and they’re not taking people away from walking/riding bikes. I scraped bird vs bike share data in Santa Monica for a while and bird did seven times as many rides as the bike share with the same number of devices in the same area (and the bike share was doing roughly the same amount of rides as before bird showed up).
Maybe, I think it depends on how durable they are. And how much they help with the last mile problem.
Consider the cases where someone has the option to take a bus or train, but there's a mile gap on both sides of their commute (or even just one side). So instead they drive the whole distance. If they can hop off the bus/train onto a scooter to close that gap, it can tip the scales to public transit vs taking a car.
It's not a scooter vs. car question, it's a scooter vs. public transportation question. Or scooter vs. bicycle. And while I am pro-scooter I really think the upsides of public transportation and a city being bicycle friendly are greater than a city having pay per minute-scooters.
> "I have found it interesting that some of my left-leaning friends oppose these scooters on the grounds of them being a public nuisance."
probably because opposing scooters is a squarely conservative stance? as in, let's keep things the same as before, nevermind the death rate or noxious emissions of cars (for the record, i like cars too).
but we're all like this, particularly when we state an (simple) identity but live real, complicated lives. we'll figure it out eventually, but not without working through our collective hypocrisy once again.
> For anyone who wants to curb global warming, these scooters are a darn good way to do it.
How is this a better solution than biking?
In reply to your comment and the other comments, every bit of incremental change is on the margin. To solve the huge problem of global warming you have to solve a thousand small problems.
If you leave convenient, eco-friendly transportation options all around the city, people will use eco-friendly transportation more than if they were not there. These scooters do in fact substitute for cars. Cities that have good public transportation are still enormously polluting, just a little bit less, assuming the darn buses operate at decent capacity. There is no panacea. Virtue signalling doesn't matter.
The existence of these scooters does not prevent buses and bikes from existing at the same level of service/ convenience as they did before. If anything they make the city more bike-friendly.
> These scooters do in fact substitute for cars.
Do they? Is there good evidence of that? I'm pretty skeptical, and from a google search I don't see that - and others seem to be similarly skeptical (outside of companies that own scooter companies...). It actually seems likely that the same people that would bike or take public transit would ride scooters - and that seems like the wrong direction to go.
I've been using the local Electric Moped rental to get around my large metropolitan city, and I have to say it is really delightful to use and experience. I have all the best parts of having a moped to use, without any of the ownership issues. Of course, it helps that the provider has deployed thousands of the things .. but with every ride I'm ever more convinced this is the future of transportation. Easy to use electric rentals, just great ..
Even if the scooter craze crashes and burns (either due to regulations, insustainable business model, or lack of sustained customer demand aka here comes winter) it's gotta be helping drive down prices to manufacture and improving electric scooters and bikes technology. Scooter rental isn't super appealing for my use case, but buying one to use for commuting now is much more attainable than even 5 years ago.
I know a person who works on Bird's freight team, they apparently have been moving 2 full Boeing 747s of scooters (I estimate that to be about 12,000-14,000 based on weight) every day from China, at one point about $150 a pop). I think it's a sustainable model because after being shipped, delivered, and released (estimating about $80 more per scooter), it's ridden until dead every day on average 10 times (1.43mi/ride average, range 15mi average), earning it $10 plus $0.15/min, or ~$23.50/day. It breaks even after 7 rides, and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast.
I haven't factored in other parts of the economy, like oversupply, theft, premature damage, and payroll for the employees including chargers, but seeing they're in 100 cities with at least 3 million scooters on the streets being ride. I also based my guesses from https://www.bird.co/blog/birdyearone.
That is amazing.
I had a training class on lean manufacturing about a year ago. The low cost enabled by production-line mentality of scooter production combined with the ad-hoc resource allocation enabled by the app for both riders and chargers makes this so darn efficient it is crazy. Very lean.
> and they have at least 20 rides in them before they're toast.
are you saying the scooters electric part dies after 20 rides?
I think kawfey meant that in a given day, each scooter can be ridden 20 times before the battery is depleted. I don't think this was a description of the lifetime of the battery — just its daily capacity.
now that's interesting
"The owner of this website (www.bird.co) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (BR) from accessing this website."
i understand them not shipping stuff to brazil, but full on block? c'mon. what if i wanted to see this and recommend to a friend that lives in the us?
I see they're using Cloudflare - likely it's a tradeoff for them between banning attackers and alienating legitimate visitors - and they don't do business in Brazil, yet. They block my (US) VPN exit, too.
Take away at least $5 per day per scooter, paid to the chargers, to take it off the street every night.
Scooters and electric bikes are the new hoverboards and segways.
Do your health a favor and buy a regular commuter bike instead.
Or even a regular foot-powered scooter. It will last forever and if/when it wears out it won't be full of e-waste.
Hmm, my daily ride is 8mi / 13km - and I often want to pick up groceries, library books, etc. A scooter (even an electric) is still much less practical for these use cases.
I know it's a combination of 'taxi' and '-ify', but it reads too much like 'tax' and '-ify'. Taxes generally have a negative or necessary evil connotation which doesn't seem like a great company name. It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.
Exactly my first inclination reading the headline. Why is a tax company entering the e-scooter game? Unfortunate naming.
I'm guessing they'd like everyone to pronounce them as taksēfi, not taksifi
As the article mentioned they aren’t a new company, they are the #1 ride hailing app in a lot of European cities.
Also, Taxify was founded by a 19-year-old high-school student from Estonia[1], who was probably neither a tax payer, nor a native English speaker.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxify#History
In which cities is it #1?
Taxify is huge (read: bigger than Uber) in the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and in some African countries (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa). It mostly focuses on Eastern European, Western Asian and African markets, where there is no single major player.
I was really wondering how taxes, an app, and e-scooters were going to somehow come together when I first clicked on the link
I clicked on this just to see why a Tax startup was investing in scooters. I will postulate that this is a terrible name. My stance on 'ground scooters' is still up in the air. Both annoying and convenient. I have to agree with another commenter that they seem to replace walking, not driving, a net negative.
Agreed. Something as simple as TaxiDash would be more communicative while avoiding that obvious pitfall.
>It's a good thing the scooters are not slated to go to the US, where 'taxes' are a four-letter word, or they might end up in the Boston harbor.
Maybe Portsmouth harbor. For the past century or so the people of Boston have been generally welcoming to taxes, nosy government and all the other things the Bostonians of the 1700s resented the British for. Their northern neighbors, not so much.
That still doesn't make "tax-$anything" a good company name for any business that doesn't have to do with taxes. Better to have a neutral and boring name than a name that some people associate with bad things.
It was historically about "taxation without representation", not taxes per se. It was a about democratic representation when creating the laws (and taxes) that were imposed on them.
I had the same visceral reaction, the notion of a transportation service get's lost in that name.