It's a bummer to see what I think is a good idea in theory be hated because the people who implemented it did such a bad job in practice.
The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.
Unfortunately, instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money. This made them a symbol of tech and gentrification for many, a symbol of growth and change for others, and aligned basically everyone in the city against them.
These devices are hardly low emissions if you compare them to walking or biking which are the modes of transit they are most likely to replace.
I had a conversation with an ex C-level employee of one of these companies, and there is no way for these devices to offset the environmental impact of production and shipping during the short lifetime of each device. The environmental aspect is a pure lie.
I don't buy that. I know lots of people who have switched to Lyft bikes and, for some time, had switched to scooters. The alternative was Uber, which is far worse since - you get idling drivers, the trip encompasses both the distance to pick you up and to drop you off, and it's a car.
Electric replacements that are cheap and take care of those commutes would seem to be obviously much better. I don't know about any C level exec saying whatever they said, but I'd need a lot more actual information to believe that.
Further, I can't drive, I will never be able to drive, because my vision is shit. I can bike, I enjoy biking, but I can go way faster on a Lyft bike and a way longer distance, it's just radically more convenient - if I need to get across the city to see a friend it's basically the lyft bike or a car.
yes its not the emissions during use it's the emissions from manufacturing. a car might last a decade. the scooter lasts a few months and you have to keep making them at scale
I'm still not convinced. Maybe that raises the footprint, but I can't see that offsetting the benefits. Sort of like taking the bus - yeah, the bus might be empty sometimes, like at night, but during the day it's able to take hundreds of cars off of the street.
I mean... you're likely talking about 1 van per 100+ scooters. The number of replaced auto trips is massive, especially in and out of urban centers like Austin that aren't as walkable.
If you live in SF, NYC, or Boston? Sure, they're mainly replacing public transit or walking, but they have a huge impact in the less walkable areas like Austin, San Jose, Seattle, or Los Angeles.
They're hardly low emissions once you consider the full lifecycle as North Carolina State University did[0] (units from article converted to less insane CO2-eq g/passenger-km.. or maybe it should be oz/mi?):
257 Personal car
25 Personal electric bike
5 Personal bike
126 Shared scooter
118 Shared dock-less bike
51 Bus /w high ridership
The shared scooters/bikes have lots of CO2 from lifetime, redistribution, and charging (scooters). Somewhat counter-intuitively, a popular bus has less than half the CO2 belching impact of a shared scooter.
That's not a reasonable comparison. All other transportation methods are measured solely by tailpipe emissions or energy consumption, like they're some kind of natural geological phenomena. The CO2 emissions for shared scooters/bikes, according to Section 2.4, table 1, additionally include mining and processing the raw materials, manufacturing, shipping over the Pacific, shipping across the entire width of North America on a truck, collection, distribution, and maintenance.
The unmentioned takeaway of this study is how important it is to incentivize improved manufacturing methods that are closer to markets, as well as maintaining existing product (if it's reasonably efficient) to extend service life. Materials, manufacturing, and shipping are responsible for vast CO2 production, largely because there's a strong cost incentive to move that manufacturing to locations with inefficient production and/or loose controls that are far from the product's market. For reducing overall CO2 emissions, improving CO2/KM alone is literally only half of the picture.
It is not so counter intuitive when you consider that popular bus carries a lot of passengers. I'm not sure what is the high ridership, but even average of 20 means per passenger rate is fraction of others.
As an anecdotal counterpoint, scooters have replaced Uber as my main method of transport and it's not even close. I probably take 4-8 scooter rides every single day and an Uber or two a week, when it was previously multiple Uber rides daily.
Also Even if we deny the carbon-cycle benefits of electric scooters, they probably do have local air-quality benefits.
(I don't have a car or bicycle and never did in this city, but I do walk less now than pre-scooter.)
Also scooters/bikes don't create any noise or soot pollution. I live on a very busy street on the 5th floor and I hate the noise when my windows are open (but I love having my windows open in general) - the noise is unbearable even after midnight, and after a couple days everything is covered in a fine layer of particles (dust, soot and whatever else is in the air). I didn't have any of these problems whenever I lived on a quiet street. Thankfully I'm moving soon to a quieter area again.
That's not the right frame of reference to use. Yes, they're a little more pollutive than cycling or walking. However, they're also much faster. Scooters compete with cars, not with walking. And it is obvious that scooters are much more environmentally friendly than people driving or purchasing cars.
It's kind of amazing how we just ignore the massive environmental toll of cars, and then hyper optimize for tiny tiny amounts of smaller emissions that don't mean a thing.
Unfortunately our cultural and political biases prevent us from making the best choices all too often. We have a big discussion about whether it's ok for these small scooters to exist, but never question the far more damaging status quo.
there's history of big business actively promoting that, such as plastic recycling campaigns pushed by big oil. i think it was mark fisher who wrote about capitalism managing its own critique within itself rather than try to defend its own crap as ideal - that it keeps the debate framed away from them or real (revolutionary) solutions, and where you can even now point at your neighbor as one of the climate criminals instead of joining with that neighbor against the real enemy
with the level of organization and resources big business have, meaning years-long organized campaigning and learning what strategies work, it's hard to see how common people who dip in and out of political engagement have a hope against that
The only environmental analyses I have seen are for extremely short life, as is exhibited by the people who actively destroyed the things, from thrill-seeking teens to the people who hate change and would tip them over when passing them to cause as much inconvenience as possible.
It is quite possible for a culture to adapt them in a environmentally friendly way, just as it is possible to adapt e-bikes in an environmentally friendly way. But as long as we prioritize car-access over everything else, it's not going to change.
I think the goal for them is to replace cars, or rather make transit actually possible in low density. I used to have a commute where I could walk 15 minutes + take a bus for an hour with connection, or I could drive 17-20min. Reading on the bus is nice but there's no way I'm walking almost a mile and taking 3+ times longer. Scooters made it much more practical to get to the bus, or even cut out the connection and make it 12min by scooter + 25min by bus.
That might be truer in some cities than others. I'm currently visiting Yerevan where there are lots of scooters. Yerevan is hilly and hot, and your choices for public transit are cabs or busses, the latter being pretty inaccessible for tourists, especially if you can't read Armenian. Scooters seem like almost the ideal way to get around for distances of a few miles.
Comparing two systems, one with everyone using mass transit plus scooters of various types, the other, everyone owning an auto, I suspect the former would have a lower emissions footprint. A lot lower.
Scooters may be worse than walking, but they could be a step in the direction of a pollution-free future.
Looked into this a while back, and this isn't really true[1]. Worst case (6m lifespan) emissions from scooters are twice as bad as a passenger car per passenger-kilometer, and best case comparable to a tram (assuming 2y lifetime). Lifetime was the determining factor. Has anything happened in the last couple of years to increase the average life span of these scooters, to change this scenario? Unless average lifetime is 2 years or more, emissions are nowhere near "low".
A few years back, I talked to an engineering manager at one of the scooter companies and he said that their longest lived scooter at the time was 11 months old. I can't remember what the average was at the time, but it was shockingly low. Something like 3 months. No idea what it is now.
Having worked at one of the big scooter companies, I can say that (when I left in 2021) we had plenty of scooters in service that had been operating for two years or more.
That said, this generation of micromobility has fallen flat. Any solution that's economically viable will need either dedicated infrastructure or self-driving (so you don't need to send a person after each vehicle), not to mention better safeguards to protect the vehicles themselves (vandalism/theft was the #1 cause of vehicle end of life, and even if you can turn a stolen scooter into a brick, $20 of spare parts is still $20 of spare parts to an addict or anybody else who is sufficiently desparate). All of that is to say that the first company to crack that nut will almost certainly need to work in close partnership with city governments--the Uber model will not work.
Glad to hear that they are lasting longer. I probably should have prefaced my comment by saying that this was around the first year that these companies really blew up in LA. (Can't remember when that was.) Vandalism was super high and they were just figuring things out.
Also they reduce(/avoid) congestion, so fewer cars sitting idling, so they also mitigate car emissions. Where is that part of their impact factored in?
Consider the net effect of 100 people using scooters, instead of 100 people using (say) 50-100 cars for rideshares.
PS and of course, essentially zero footprint for parking, so better urban planning.
It is unlikely that there is a 1:1 relationship between number of people that take a scooter instead of car and the actual measured reduction on the road. In fact, I'd bet it is negligible.
> instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money.
Are these two mutually exclusive? They probably would love to solve the problem of sidewalk riding / inexperienced drivers, but that's a very hard problem to solve.
Actually the problem of inexperienced drivers isn't so hard - and governments here (and probably elsewhere) are making it worse by only allowing registered share- scheme scooters to be used on footpaths etc., when clearly private owners are more likely to be experienced. It would surely make more sense to require a basic sort of license to ride e-scooters on footpaths or roads, but honestly I think the public just need time to adapt - there were outcries over cars when they first started appearing widely on public roads (justifiably too, as they were pretty deadly).
I wanted to use them when I was a student and lived 2 miles from campus. Unfortunately I couldn’t ride on campus, and I couldn’t ride in the residential area where I lived. So basically I could only ride in between - one mile out of the two. I just got a bicycle which didn’t have such restrictions.
Right. The popularity of e-bikes is partially just regulatory. An e-bike can go 2-3 times faster than a Bird scooter, but it looks like a bicycle so it is legal to ride more places.
As far as I know you can't really ride your bike on the sidewalk. Either the street or specialised bike lanes. So you will never really see someone driving a bike at 25 km/h (the legal limit in many European countries) on the sidewalk.
Plus, people are much more used to dealing with bikes than scooters.
> The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.
The solution you're looking for is a bikesharing service. These have become increasingly more common around my parts (in Germany), and thankfully these are not run by some VC-backed startup, but by actual local companies. That's good news because they integrate with existing public transit passes, so everyone with a tram pass can just swipe the tram pass on a bike and start using it with some pretty generous discounts.
It's a stretch to think they were even a good idea in theory. Putting riders with no helmets and no wrist protection on electric scooters is just this side of distributing free trampolines on the public pavement as a safety disaster.
The shortest path to transforming city transportation is protected bike lanes and law enforcement putting in the effort to put bike theft rings (if you have ever passed a pickup with dozens of bikes in the bed, that's a theft ring taking bikes far enough away from where they were stolen to sell them) out of business.
I feel safer on my electric scooter than my (non-assist) bike, because I can accelerate quickly enough that cars don't zoom around me. It also solves the theft problem for me, because I can take it with me inside instead of locking it up.
I agree that dockless scooters were always a stretch. I hope if they go away, they'll have been a gateway drug for private ownership of e-scooters.
> It's a stretch to think they were even a good idea in theory. Putting riders with no helmets and no wrist protection on electric scooters is just this side of distributing free trampolines on the public pavement as a safety disaster.
Any idea what the injury/accident/fatality rates are for scooters vs bicycles?
Those things shouldn't go above 10mph. The tech makes them seem like a bike until anything at all goes wrong, like hitting a small pothole or clipping the corner of a road barrier. Then you're suddenly in mid air above a city street with nothing helping you out.
A bike can handle hitting something small, and has enough of a gyroscopic effect that it doesn't just fall over.
I'm a bit puzzled that you didn't mention accidents at all, just like the article. Every time I see one of those rushing by it looks like some gnarly injuries waiting to happen, and an emergency doctor confirmed that (although I don't have numbers).
Also, I'm not sure that calling a battery-powered mode of transportation, for distances so short they don't require motors at all, 'low-emission' is adequate.
Scooter startups have in my opinion totally missed their target market.
Sit looking at a scooter on a street in a city, and you'll see perhaps 10,000 people walk past the scooter before one person uses it.
So, in the 'go short distances' market, walking has 99.99% of the market, and the scooter industry has 0.01% market share.
In my view, that's a total failure. Scooter companies should have interviewed each person who walked past a scooter and asked themselves, why didn't that person use our product?
In many cases, it's a combination of cost, friction of setting up an app and account, and fear of something going wrong and being fined (for example, parking the scooter out of the operating zone).
Scooter companies should have solved all those issues. You should be able to use the scooter entirely for free, without an app or any registration, perhaps limited to 10 minutes or 5 mph.
Then, encourage people to pay for more time or more speed when they become accustomed to being able to get around quicker.
> In many cases, it's a combination of cost, friction of setting up an app and account, and fear of something going wrong and being fined (for example, parking the scooter out of the operating zone).
I'm going to challenge this hypothesis with what I think are likelier reasons:
1. Many people like walking. I get much less exercise than I actually should, so to be honest the last thing I want to do is replace a short, 10 minute walk in an interesting urban environment with 10 minutes of me not moving
2. Fear of riding a scooter. I have family members who work in hospitals who have seen horrific injuries and deaths from scooters, and who refuse to ride them. Even without this specific fear, my guess is there are a ton of folks who are just uncomfortable riding scooters.
3. Many people walking around in urban environments do so with others, and like the social aspect. It's a lot harder to converse (safely) on a scooter.
If your primary solution is "make them free", I hardly see how that would eventually turn scooters into a profitable business.
I'd add that it seems like a worst of all worlds vehicle in my limited experience. I've only ridden one once in what was a busy downtown (I suspect the only place these things could possibly make economic sense). Riding on the sidewalk was frustrating because you're limited to other people's walking speed (and paying by the minute), so I switched to the street and immediately wondered how I'm not hearing about mass scooter deaths everyday because now you're basically a pedestrian moving amongst cars; the smallest of which weigh well over a ton. That was my first and last ride, and I can't believe that it was legal for me to ride either on the street or the sidewalk on one of those things.
The 'make them free' is to compete with the also-free walking.
Then you charge for upgrades, like going faster than walking pace or further than most people would be happy to walk (about 10 minutes in my experience).
> Many people like walking.
People say this... But when there is a convenience store 1 minute away and another one 10 minutes away, most people go to the one 1 minute away, indicating they don't actually like walking just for walkings sake. Even if they did, they probably prefer to 'go for a walk with a friend in a park' independantly to the 'walk to the convenience store to buy some milk'.
> But when there is a convenience store 1 minute away and another one 10 minutes away, most people go to the one 1 minute away, indicating they don't actually like walking just for walkings sake.
I'll clarify - it's not that I "like walking for walking's sake", but if I have to do something anyway (go to lunch, get from a train station to the office, etc.) I prefer to at least take a meager opportunity to try to keep my fat ass from getting any fatter.
I just think it's ludicrous when an article that discusses the extremely poor economics of scooter companies to think the solution is "make it free", even with "upgrades". So now suddenly 90% of your scooter fleet's battery usage is on free trips, and all these scooters now need to be charged again.
Or like me I replaced a lot of walking with scooters which are a lot more thrilling/fun/cool. Till I noticed I wasn’t walking as much and wasn’t feeling as good, and then dropped scooters 100%.
I will short term choose convenience but medium term, I have a belief that certain kinds of inconvenience are essential to a good day. Walking or otherwise using my body being a chief example. Also being around people and hard mental work and cooking.
> In many cases, it's a combination of cost, friction of setting up an app and account, and fear of something going wrong and being fined (for example, parking the scooter out of the operating zone).
I would add that scooters, as urban means of transportation, require a set of extremely specific variables to be successful, e.g. cities with a degree of walkability that would both enable people to go longer distances, with streets that would accommodate the use of scooters, and where bikes aren't already widely adopted.
Cities in the US aren't usually great for scooters, as most are designed around car usage. In Europe, my perception is that bikes and public transportation (buses, trains), are already better and more convenient than scooters.
Anecdotally, my experience in both the US and Europe is that scooters are mostly aimed at younger people and short term tourists, and in cities with bikes available to the public, there is really no use for them.
They might be, but I don't see any added value that bikes don't provide already.
Also, these are three of the largest metro areas in the US, and likely the three most walkable cities in the US. Penetration would need to be way higher for the business to actually scale.
Rental bikes may also be electric. Madrid does this very effectively.
> If you have those 3 cities you're already dealing with 10s of millions of potential customers
That would be the 100% penetration scenario, which is not realistic by any metric, especially in Boston and NYC where they already have strong and efficient public transportation networks.
Interoperability would indeed help a long ways in many markets but it's antithetical to the monopolistic business models of the current tech industry.
Card processing is something you can do on a cheap microcontroller - the only blocker here is EMV certification. I'm sure with all those millions (billions) collectively poured into the industry they could've released a cheap EMV-certified module that can accept payments locally, or failing that, bypass the certification problem by building their own, interoperable system end-to-end so that customers at least just had one app to install.
It reminds me of a company here selling(?) powerbank vending machines - seems like they're still around, at least online (I can't imagine this thing ever making money, but I suspect it was more about "growth & engagement" and resume fodder than building a sustainable business): https://chargedup.theup.co - the problem is that for you to take out a powerbank, you need to install an app on your phone. This automatically excludes the customers whose phone has already died even though they're the most likely to pay for it. I used to see their machine at my local bar for a couple years and I don't recall anyone ever using it. At some point it disappeared and replaced by a competitors' that at least has a built-in card terminal. Still don't recall anyone using it ever, but at least I guess you now technically could if you had no other option.
Isn't the main issue that cities banned them and people adopted an anti-tech mentality towards them? I think everything I saw was:
a) People think Uber is a disgusting company and scooters were associated with that
b) Some people were leaving scooters in bad places and it seemed like companies didn't have a solution to this, which blew (a) up when particularly bad incidents (eg scooter left on muni tracks) would occur
> Some people were leaving scooters in bad places and it seemed like companies didn't have a solution to this
I don't have an anti-tech mentality, I have an anti-externalization-of-costs mentality. If those scooter startups did not have a solution to scooters creating dangerous obstacles on sidewalks, maybe they should not have dumped them there in the first place and left the problem for the locals to figure out.
It was particularly bad because, whenever a new scooter company started operating in our city, it happened by them dumping thousands of the things into the streets overnight without prior warning. I understand that a slow ramp-up is difficult because you need a certain density to make the service viable, but it was all executed very badly without engaging the local community beforehand. It just made the companies come off like a bunch of douchebags dumping their shit all over the city. Like those drunken assholes that throw their empty beer bottles into the sandboxes at the public playground.
IDK, cars are super dangerous, and we did make manufacturers take some responsibility ~70 years ago but I'm not sure "scooters are dangerous sometimes therefor bad" makes sense given "cars are radically worse".
First time I tried, all six scooters in the vicinity were broken. The second time I tried, I went a hundred feet until I passed into a "no scooter zone" where it insisted I push the thing to my destination. Their map had no indication of such zones. Begone with these scooters, they are a waste of time and resources.
Unfortunately the business model of charging 1 EUR to unlock plus 29 cents per minute (which is the same ballpark as car sharing) was totally killing this spontaneous use potential.
For me it’s a combination of liking to walk and most importantly it’s kind of embarrassing to ride those things, they draw too much attention and that form factor doesn’t look great.
A busy London shopping street probably has 1 person per second walking past in each direction on each side of the road. That's 3600 * 2 * 2 people per hour. And those scooters seem to sit idle for at least an hour between users. Some of them sit idle for days at a time.
I don't think $2000 and under devices belong in the rental space, in most situations.
That's the real issue at hand here. Scooters are light enough that someone can just buy one and carry it around with them all day. At $5+ a ride, it isn't long before people would rather just buy one of their own.
Bikes are at least large enough to be a hassle to carry around.
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Consider computers (and no, not cloud computers. Like normal office computers). There was a time when timesharing computers was popular, when computers were $100,000.
Similarly, back in high school, one local entrepreneur gave a talk to my school. He explained that 3d printers, while their costs were going down, were still too expensive to own. He predicted 10 years before 3d printers were popular for home labs (and it turns out he was right). In those 10 years, he made money by renting out university-level / research 3d Printers (no one wanted to buy $100,000+ printers anymore, everyone saw the writing on the wall and would rather rent), so the rental company did well, albeit only temporarily. (Overall, the talk was about "risk taking". In this case, the calculated risk that he'd make money before the business opportunity closed as 3d printers became cheaper)
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But these Bird scooters look like they're around $500? If you're using the thing like 2 or 3 times a day, it won't take long at $5 / ride before it makes more sense to just buy one for yourself.
With the Bird scooter you're paying for the convenience of "free" parking (obviously the public pay in terms of sidewalk space etc., but to the rider, it's included), with no risk of a loss (to you) due to theft.
Yes, you can buy a scooter and the raw numbers make sense. But carrying a scooter up and down stairs, through elevators, and so on is a pain in the ass and, you need a place to store it at each destination.
The value in a Bird scooter isn't in the use of the scooter, it's in the non-use of the scooter. Jump on, leave it, jump off.
The value isn’t the cost saving compared to buying your own - it’s the convenience of being to pick one up anywhere and drop it off anywhere.
If you think you can carry an electric scooter with you around all day… good luck! I struggle to get one up a set of stairs.
That’s not to say that the price isn't wrong, but if the cost was equal between having my own scooter and having access to a rental pool, I would choose the flexibility of the rental pool every time. Having said that, I do think you have overstated the typical costs slightly too with a 15 minute ride costing c$3.
I bought a Xiaomi model for $400 at Walmart, cut a QR code off an Amazon package and taped it over the power button. I left it out in the open next to the bird scooters in LA wherever I went and lasted about 6 months before somebody scooped it up. I assume the rest of the time people tried to scan the QR code and assumed the app wasn't working. :)
Yes. It got stolen in the end but for 6 months I just left it unlocked on the sidewalks of LA under the guise that it was a Bird scooter. It might have actually been accidentally scooped up by a charging truck but I'll never know.
> it’s the convenience of being to pick one up anywhere and drop it off anywhere
Sure _if_ there’s a scooter nearby _and_ it’s charged… Then there’s the issue of needing a half dozen scooter apps all to use / find a scooter near you. The problem only becomes worse if there’s a group of people… These scooters are mostly just expensive trash laying around cities.
> Sure _if_ there’s a scooter nearby _and_ it’s charged… Then there’s the issue of needing a half dozen scooter apps
Sure, but these are all relative inconveniences and you have to compare them to the alternative inconvenience/cost of either other forms of transport for your short journey, or lugging a scooter around with you constantly.
The app tells you if it has battery - you go to the app and it shows you a map of all the nearest scooters with charge rather than wonder up to random scooters.
I find it way more convenient to just be able to pick something up and then leave it again. In Austin the scooters still seem to be doing great -- they are everywhere and get tons of use. (And I don't hear too much hatred of them, unlike other places.)
I thought they were cool in SF too before the city fucked it all up.
I am sort of sympathetic to arguments that they look kind of janky lying all around. But come on, cars are 1000x times worse! We're just used to it. (And the scooters aren't nearly as deadly as cars -- both for accidents and for emissions.)
Yeah I also live downtown. The scooters and bikes here seen to be always be used, either by people who just want to get from A to B or groups of people just enjoying their time downtown.
The scooter companies tend to be smart too and relocate a bunch for any events. I'll frequently see dozens of scooters and bikes lined up and organized outside of the arena before whatever event gets out.
I feel like I'm willing to "rent" things that cost less than $500 all the time. I'm probably unique, but I hate maintaining a printer. When my laser printer died early in covid and supply for new printers was messed up due to WFH I just printed at the local print shop. That's also what I did before I had a laser printer and anytime I needed color prints. I rent power tools all the time from the hardware store.
I recently spent almost a year in a medium sized city in Europe. The first month or two I had a bus pass, but after I had a routine I only used it for one-offs and walked most places. It was very bike friendly so it had space for scooters. If I stayed longer maybe I would have bought a bike. I walked most places, but if I was in a hurry a scooter was the fastest way to get somewhere and I used it at least every few weeks--faster than a bus. I never once thought about buying a scooter. I noticed a few people carrying them inside stores and it seemed so awkward.
Dude your friend seems cool with his 3D printer but those don’t move. The problem is that people move and want convenience where ever they go.
I own a car and yet I still Uber and walk. Sometimes you walk somewhere and are too lazy to walk back. Maybe you walk to your friends house and they drive you to a restaurant and now you don’t want to walk all the way back. Tons of use cases where “transit comes to me” is better than “I go to transit” or “I babysit transit”.
Cars ruin cities and are expensive. Scooters are comparably cheap and low impact (visually, physically, acoustically, etc). The issue is that the road system is designed for cars (lanes) and sometimes walkers (sidewalks) and by a rare miracle bikes (bike lanes). Do you drive scooters in the sidewalk (illegal, annoying, likely to get them banned) or in the street (dangerous, bikers all have horror stories, nevermind scooters!) or ambiguity (bike lane?). If we had “alt mobility lanes” for bikes and scooters and one wheels and long boards and all that shit then it’d be so easy.
If the device were large enough that it was a hassle, maybe you'd have a point. But I've used these scooters. They're rather small.
They also beep at you if you're in the wrong part of the street, and they shut down seemingly randomly with crappy GPS sensors trying to keep you in certain lanes. If I had my own, none of that crap would happen.
i don’t get it. i can look out my window from this cafe and watch people on these scooters deciding it’s worth it to them regardless of whether someone on HN can convince you that the trade offs are worthwhile.
> But these Bird scooters look like they're around $500? If you're using the thing like 2 or 3 times a day, it won't take long at $5 / ride before it makes more sense to just buy one for yourself.
Theft. I live in a city where you can expect any portable form of transportation to get stolen, from inside your house's garage at that.
Renting offloads the risk of theft to someone else.
Most people who have scooters around me use it for part or entirety of their commute. They just carry it in buses, trains or trams and have them stashed under their desk at the office. They are at no point left unattended.
> I don't think $2000 and under devices belong in the rental space, in most situations.
Taking this completely out of context (i.e. I'm not debating the original point, just saying it for the purpose of sparking potential discussion) - this doesn't extend to other industries. In particular, a ton of photography / videography equipment for rent is under $2k.
One factor there is that you can choose between having a limited set of gear that you own vs a pretty much unlimited set of gear that you can rent from which is guaranteed to work when you need it.
So the comparison between something you'd need day-to-day and one where you would need to use something only incidentally is where it breaks down and I think that is exactly how it works for those scooters: people that need them every day for the same kind of trip will buy one and the incidental users will rent. But for the economies to make good sense those companies would need a substantial base of regular users.
I’d be curious of any research but my anecdotal knowledge of their use is not for planned trips but ad-hoc. I’m here and I could walk to X but I’ll pay 5 bucks to get there in 5 minutes instead of 30 or whatever. I don’t think most folks are using them for their daily commute- certainly that market will quickly do the math and get their own.
> Scooters are light enough that someone can just buy one and carry it around with them all day
The lightest of the e scooters come in around 30lbs. They’re not exactly small either. Certainly not easier to drag around than a bike, as you mentioned.
And airplane luggage weighs 50lbs, and I carry that around for extended periods of time, depending on the situation.
E-scooters are much smaller than bikes in my experience. Bikes are lighter, but the bulk means that you can't take a bike into a typical elevator for example. I know they make some very small city bikes but even the smallest bike seems bigger than a scooter.
That's about the weight of my (non-electrical) folding bike, so not that bad actually. (They have a titanium one too but for that price you can buy a nice second hand car...)
I really don't think it is. If you think about it as a rent-or-buy trade off for the "same thing", your reasoning is fine. However I think it's really a transportation trade off, which has a bunch more factors.
NB: I was never optimistic about the scooters per se, I just think this is too limiting a way to view it.
I think there is a gap between people riding every day and people riding once a week to go to the bar or something. Of course it is going to be more practical to buy one for the person doing a daily commute to work or something, but my hunch is that user pool is vastly smaller than the pool that is getting around on the weekend.
In addition to all the other sibling reasons why ownership is a dubious proposition, there’s also the fire hazard of storing one of these on your property. Sure, it’s not likely to go up in flames, but from the videos I’ve seen if it does you’re looking at significant damage.
The sweet spot for scooters/bikes seems to be as a tourist attraction.
I live in Toronto and there is a rental bike thing with bike docks. The bikes are shockingly heavy, the phone app sucks, but they remain popular. I attribute the success to summertime tourism.
Bike rentals enable the renter to put the security and maintenance burden on the provider. If bikes were not so easy to steal, rental bikes would not be a business.
My family went to Washington DC recently and there were perhaps 4 companies providing scooter rental. I found out that if I rented one, I could not then rent one for my teenager. That was a fail. Then, the scooter I rented happened to be in a "no park zone." I could rent the scooter, but not return it to the exact place I'd rented it from. So I had to go out of my way to park the stupid thing. My wife rented hers from the exact same spot, but then immediately a "no ride zone" was triggered, so she had to push it for 1/2 a mile before she could actually ride it, all the while paying per-minute fees for the rental.
It cost us probably $20 to go 3 blocks. It was not nearly as simple as scan to ride, ride, scan to park.
I wonder if these wild valuations could be kept in check if there were a way to short/buy puts on private companies. There's positive pressure on valuations from the funding, but scant negative pressure.
Scooters-as-a-service can probably be a profitable business worth millions, but you had to be really out of touch to think it could be worth billions.
That defeats the whole point of a private company, and take away most of the benefits. The thing with the scooter business is that there isn't really a moat for it. Any number of players can come into the market(and they did) and just run the price down the bottom. But by that point a company can probably IPO and transfer the risk from the VCs to the public market.
I kind of have a secret about this: if you’re an accredited investor, you could 100% take short positions on these shares by borrowing shares from employees and seeking them in one of the random secondary markets that’s out there.
It’s just no one does because the asymmetric downside of going naked short on companies with low market caps (“uh oh, Uber just bought this company for 10x my strike price because xyz stupid reason”)
If you want to get really complicated you can write puts, but good luck pricing them and finding enough liquidity.
Yeah the problem is liquidity, and the "bespoke" nature of this kind of bet. I can't just stroll into Bird HQ like Christian Bale and ask them to do all the work for me. I only want to risk a few thousand, not millions. Even setting up the deal might cost more than I was willing to risk in the first place.
Also I always wonder about margins. They have software component, but they also have rather expensive hardware. And then overhead of management of that hardware. Like paying people to relocate and charge them as needed.
Unpopular opinion: I know there would be other problems to solve if things were different, but I wish there was no such thing as private companies. As it is, private companies are an investment vehicle that regular people just don't have access to. It's a game of who knows who with very little regulatory oversight. Maybe early stage startups don't need a ton of regulatory oversight (they have other things to worry about), but maybe it also shouldn't be legal to have a private company with a market cap over a billion dollars.
This would be nice, but it's also possible to get cheaper rent by just, y'know, letting people build housing easily. That's how the rent in Seoul and Tokyo is surprisingly reasonable, despite being megacities.
We're now at a point where rent prices are higher in Columbus Ohio than Tokyo (1). Part of this is probably average apartment sizes being smaller in Tokyo, but still, that seems insane to me.
Can we please stop talking about Tokyo housing. It was only a few decades ago that California was cheap and Tokyo was insanely expensive and locals couldn't afford it. 30 years of economic depression has created cheaper houses.
> Tokyo was insanely expensive and locals couldn't afford it.
IIRC that was buying housing, not renting. Purchasing housing is subject to speculation in a way that rent is not.
But if you have data that says otherwise, I'd love to see it. The data I can find shows the expected price spike in Japan for buying condos, but no such spike for renting:
Yes of course buying housing. This is what most households want and what most of them eventually do. Renting is a stepping stone or for people that are mobile, dont want to commit or really can't afford to buy. People who dont own are often subsidized or given public housing so also less relevant.
Certainly Germany, Switzerland, Austria have unusually low ownership rates right now. I think its more likely that will change rather than anyone copying those countries.
Not to mention a declining population in Japan. Over the past 20 years new housing has lagged population growth in the US. it doesn't take much supply/demand mismatch for a non-discretionary item to have exploding prices.
Sure we could spend the next few decades building high end housing and watching as the poor continue to get priced out of our cities, ensuring they have longer and longer commutes, more stress, and shorter life expediencies.
Or we as a society can recognize that all people deserve housing, and that the poor are in most dire need of it. We can build specifically affordable housing, which both accomplishes your goal of "build more housing" while also ensuring that vulnerable people get what they need.
I think there is something to the idea of being a society which cares for those in need, instead of ignoring them and letting market needs serve those with the most money first. Serving those in need not only helps the needy, but it helps all of us center what matters most: our humanity.
Theoretically yes, but they are really two different undertakings and I think it is important to advocate specifically for social housing. If you just advocate for building more, you're really just advocating for gentrification and making things harder for the poor.
Not really. You can't realistically pursue more public housing in the US without major zoning and other building changes anyway, it's just too hard to build anything now, and that includes potential public housing.
You think the NIMBY's who show up at community meetings to shut down both for-profit high-end housing and also 100% affordable housing for seniors are going to hold off on blocking public housing? Without changes that deal with the nosy neighbor problem, we won't get anywhere.
> If you just advocate for building more, you're really just advocating for gentrification and making things harder for the poor.
Nope. This is a common talking point by the left, but it's wrong. If we had more reasonable rents like in Tokyo (compared to similar US major cities), that'd be great for the poor, working class, and middle class.
Now, having renter protections as well would be fantastic, absolutely. I think it's terrible how little protection renters usually have in the states.
I bet it was a "growth & engagement" situation. The objective was never to build a sustainable business but was instead to build an engineering playground while collecting hefty salaries paid by VCs.
Those startups popped into existence in the west just as pictures from Chinese rental bike graveyards showed up. Everyone with IQ of a donut could see where it was going.
I personally could not be happier with Bird's downfall. I was seriously thinking of running (as a one-issue candidate lol) for some City office in Santa Monica to get them off the streets. It was absolutely bonkers how terrible it was when they're weaving past you while driving, how terrible it was with people leaving them in front of my apartment building, and how terrible it was that the majority of folks taking advantage of them were out-of-towners anyways. This one time when I was walking home from a bar, some poor girl face-planted off a scooter in the middle of the street, she started crying, bleeding/etc. and myself and a few other bystanders had to call 911 to make sure she's okay and taken care of.
So the vibe of cool cities like Santa Monica were totally ruined by these annoying "micromobility" startups, but also from a business standpoint, the idea also made no sense. All their pivots (in particular: what do you do with used scooters?), fell flat. With that said, I do know folks that worked at Bird (mostly ex-Uber or from the LA tech scene), and they were super smart, motivated, and driven people.
Squandered is a bit harsh. I don't have skin in the game either way, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a profitable business to be built once the dust settles. It can be hard to know in advance just how big that market would be, and how defensible.
If they're going to make that many bikes, why not just give them away? Why have them be "shared" and made to be returned to a pile?
It would at least eradicate theft. Most people would have the same model. You could get a handout instead of having it stolen, and if it was stolen, then that person could get the handout. And the only people claiming them would be the ones using them.
In practice, China is highly capitalistic as an economy. It's authoritarian capitalism, not communism, even though it has a "communist party".
This phenomenon of bikes piling up is literally venture capitalists throwing money at startups (in return for equity) to deploy more and more bikes to outnumber competitors in a hopeless race to monopolize bike sharing. It's literally an exhibit of one of the failure modes of extreme capitalism.
Giving them away, as GGGP suggests, would actually be a departure from capitalism, and perhaps a good one.
Profitable is not enough. This is an extremely competitive business space. Employees joined these companies and were granted equity at multi billion dollar valuations and investors invested in these companies at multi billion dollar valuations. What is the addressable market here? What do margins look like? I would be surprised if the companies that win this market are going to be worth more than $2 billion dollars.
> Employees joined these companies and were granted equity at multi billion dollar valuations and investors invested in these companies at multi billion dollar valuations
Hubris and a lack of pragmatism has a cost. Of course the equity is worthless! If you do small things that don’t scale and poop aren’t profitable, and then scale and still aren’t profitable, there’s nowhere else to go.
These investments of time and fiat never seem to ask, “walk me through the milestones you’ll accomplish to corner the market.” Same with Uber (from their S-1): “We include all passenger vehicle miles and all public transportation miles in all countries globally in our TAM, including those we have yet to enter” eye roll
TLDR The koolaid has a bitter aftertaste.
(tangentially, Uber has spent almost $28B and still isn’t profitable)
VCs aren't in the business of creating profitable companies. Their LPs aren't going to be happy with a negative return on their investment, regardless of whether they helped to create a nice, sustainable small business along the way.
I wonder if there is a path to profitability if they have to deal with all the scooter-litter described in the article. That'd probably mean having someone continually going around town moving scooters into racks or something like that.
Well a start would be educating riders on how to safely park the damned thing when their trip is done, instead of literally dumping it on a sidewalk/pathway, and collect fines for bad stewardship.
You could have motion/orientation sensors to complement the GPS to see if they are moved after the rider parks it. It's far from unsolvable its just that nobody cares or is motivated.
Lyft/Divvy does this in Chicago. If you lock the scooter at a docking station, there’s no additional charge, but if you leave it somewhere else, there’s a small fine of $1
At the very least, Lime and Scoot now require a picture of the properly parked scooter upon ride end. I wouldn't be surprised if the other apps are the same.
Squandered isn't harsh at all. The deployment of capital was disproportionate to the size of the profitable business that will result. It could have been better spent elsewhere... or saved.
Though if it takes $2.9 billion in funding to make a business with ultimately, let's say $10m/yr net profit, I'd still call that squandered.
Especially if part of that move to profitability ends up needing to be like european city bike hire schemes where they need docks to avoid theft, reducing availability and adding infrastructure costs.
My reading is that "squandered" doesn't refer to the potential market for scooter-sharing services itself, but to the poor strategy of pumping an insane amount of money into a new/untested category in a very short amount of time.
One place the scooters work well is in both Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. The app for the scooter is the same as a popular taxi app and connected to it. Simple as scan the QR code and ride away. Leave it wherever. They still work great even in war time.
Based no how they mostly seem to be used in Berlin, scooters are predominantly a joyride thing for teenage to 20-something boys, doubling as status signaling given their relatively high costs (for this demographic)
As a middle-aged dude, I find them quite awkward to navigate and much prefer a car, and I have literally never seen an older person use them. Are people commuting with those? I guess it happens occassionally, but the predominant use case, at least in Germany, seems just-for-fun cruising. Probably not a powerful or frequent enough thing to justify lofty valuations, and given the externalities (cluttering sidewalks, or folks having to fish them out of lakes and rivers) probably a net negative for society, too.
Wouldn't like to see them banned out of principle, but I assume it'd make sense for cities to ask providers for some upfront deposit in case the provider can't ensure proper clean up etc...
Same observation in US cities. Lots of younger people riding them for fun. I’ve done some joy rides on them for fun and to see part a city I was visiting. Haven’t rode one in years after the novelty wore off and partially Covid related.
Maybe last-mile mobility is a problem that requires public-private partnership.
Public communication does not need to bring profits, it needs to serve the citizens. If public communication limits need for parking space, limits traffic jams and polution, that's a win.
A number of cities introduced city-wide bike sharing networks that are paid, but subsidized. Sometimes it was more successful, sometimes less, but at least a few cities proved it can work. They can also work with the public transport card, removing the need for an app.
Maybe the same can be applied to scooters? With the current approach they'll disappear in a few years, as their prices are too high, but having to maintain and charge them daily adds a lot of operational costs.
This one is actually a true stumper. Like the segway, urban short to medium distance transportation is a problem but somehow it's still not clicking. I think streets need to be free of cars for people to ride these. Would be an interesting experiment.
First, I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand the mandate of VCs. The firms themselves receive funding from limited partners, who are often very large pools like the California State Pension or Yale University. Those pools are almost all deployed into very low-risk asset classes, like bonds. A very small amount, say like 2-3% is invested in the PE/VC asset class, thereby diversifying and giving that fund some upside plays in their overall portfolio.
Now, because the VCs were given the mandate by their LPs to find home runs and not a bunch of singles and doubles, this changes the logic by which they make their decisions. You may have heard of the pejorative "lifestyle business" in this context, but it's the reason why a lot of small businesses or low-upside startups don't get funded: they just don't have enough TAM to justify a potential home-run outcome.
Second, if we look back to when Bird and Lime blew up, it was still very, very early for these businesses and their breakout trajectory probably didn't look all that dissimilar from other home runs. (Lots of analogues here: how did Clubhouse look in it's early metrics? Probably a lot like Facebook. HQ Trivia probably looked a lot like Zynga's first breakout game.) It's only in hindsight where you're able to look back and see that adoption wasn't what they thought and cities were more adverse to it and so on, but it doesn't mean the investment logic at the time was flawed -- it just means that it didn't work out. Again, any VC will tell you that they'd rather invest 100 times in something with a 1% chance of being Uber than invest in 100 mom-and-pop shops.
I'm sure many people will say "I guess, but it was obvious that they weren't going to make it!", to which I say, yeah, maybe. But it was probably obvious that Uber wasn't going to become Uber until they did; you only need to have in a portfolio to make it because you become A16Z or USV. And if the metrics from the first year look like Uber and the default gameplan is investment-driven, loss-heavy aggressive growth, then it doesn't seem like such a bad bet.
I'm not sure the two companies are all that comparable.
When you peel away the glitz and techie veneer, Uber is a giant cab company. Cab companies can work we know that. They added a single universal dispatcher with a consistent interface for all and added an on demand labor system and found ways to gouge labor, all solid ways to make more money but still a giant cab company.
Scooter companies weren't modifying a known quantity. They were doing something much more out there. Because they're basically mobile vending machine companies who rely on enticing people to modify their locomotive behavior. That being something notoriously hard to do. Just ask urban planners.
While I agree that this logic applies to the first, and maybe (though this is arguable) the second, none of the later startups in the same space were plausible "home runs". If that model was going to work, it would work for the first or second company in that space (unless they were somehow pathologically mismanaged). An also-ran in the same space is not only less likely to succeed, but if they succeed it will be because that space will be one where there are many long-term competitors...which will mean they have no "moat", and cannot be the "home run" that the original investor was looking for.
So, in this case, you could excuse the investors in Bird and maybe Lime, but it seemed that there were a lot more companies than that.
Fair, I'm definitely talking about the execution of the "dump VC on it and winner take all" strategy that would have only worked for Bird or Lime.
Also, as a personal aside, I actually enjoy the product a lot. Whenever I visit San Diego or Austin, those scooters make getting around downtown a lot more quick and fun and it's absolutely worth $3 or whatever to do it. I do of course get the point that my personal anecdote does not a plausible unicorn make.
Is Uber even going to become Uber, ever? Aren’t they in the process of tightening up their belts because the era of acceptable unlimited unprofitability for the sake of blitzscaling is ending? Already the subsidized rides aren’t as cheap anymore. Aren’t they doomed as a success story once SoftBank & the Saudis stop footing the bill? There’s not like some sort of AWS play Uber can pivot to as their breadwinner that underwrites their unprofitable consumer-facing business.
My small European city of 500k people had at least 9 (!) scooter brands last summer: Bird, Tier, Lime, Voi, Bolt, Zeus, Dott, Ryde, Surf. An article I found says there were actually 12 (!).
As a result, last fall, there were a total of about 25,000 scooters out clogging the streets, enough that the city administration decided to establish a city-wide limit of 8,000 scooters. This spring, the city kicked out all but three services: Voi, Tier, and Bolt.
As a consumer, I like scooters a lot, but market fragmentation was frustrating (one app for every service), and these days you can rarely even find a scooter when you need one. I ended up going back to using my bike.
For all the people somewhat defending the VC's: Nah.
One point I haven't seen here is the extent to which these things just littered cities; there's something of a "tragedy of the commons" type argument here.
Honestly, I'd be interested in favor of a bigger movement for individuals to hack and "steal" them for keeps.
(Note the quotes around steal, please. I am a lawyer and I do not believe I am inciting an illegal action because I believe there's a very strong legal argument as to their status as mislaid or abandoned property.)
Can downvoters please explain why they disagree with this comment?
Agreed on the litter. Imagine I own 1000 scooter-sized fake pink flamingos, imagine they contain a bunch of lithium batteries for some reason. I set them out on city-owned property and encourage strangers to take them. Predictably, they get left all over the damn place. Blocking sidewalks and wheelchair ramps, in storm drains, waterways, and dumpsters. Some of them get picked up one way or another, but the rest become hazardous waste litter that cannot go in the normal trash. Who should bear responsibility for cleanup and disposal?
That a city would allow this to happen with no penalty to the owner is a lavish gift of a public (and at times rivalrous) good to a private party.
Bro, I thought I was taking crazy pills and I'm still baffled as to why I don't see this argument made elsewhere more. I've seen enough blocking sidewalks and I'm just like, well, hey good thing I don't happen to be in a wheelchair right now.
I want to visit Amsterdam to see how they deal with this. Most people there get around on an (almost scooter-sized) bicycle but they usually _own_ it themselves, so there's incentive to look after it and not allow it to be impounded for blocking the way (or stolen or whatever).
I think the "you don't own it so you can forget about it after the ride" aspect of Lime/Bird/etc is a bug, not a feature.
Exactly. It's just kind of wild that there was apparently no accounting whatsoever for dropoffs/pickups/retrievals, i.e. all the things you'd have to think about if you did this with cars.
Especially as I recall, they were kind of halfway there with the deal where anyone could pick them up and charge them for the company?
Probably because cars are littering and polluting cities to a much greater degree; the people making these arguments are invariably drivers to whom the impacts of cars on the urban environment seem to invisible.
Invariably? Right now I ride a bicycle to where I work 4-5x per week, and make car trips maybe 1-3x per week. The nearest grocery store is across a 7-lane stroad. I would believe the externalities of cars are an order of magnitude worse than those of scooters.
But if we're introducing NewThing with new externalities, we should still try to mitigate them. As NewThing becomes ExistingThing, the overton window narrows around norms of its use. The overton window around scooters is still wide open!
If your car is parked illegally, you get ticketed and maybe towed. The threat of enforcement keeps no-parking areas free of cars. (This works in part because cities ticket the _registrant_ of the car -- not the user, who is often impossible to tie to the act.) I think my point is: should we have rules and norms like this around scooters too?
The process is working fine. Scooters are far less likely to block sidewalks these days, because the apps now require riders to photograph where they left them and lock them up. Improper parking can result in a fine.
It's exactly these kind of tweaks that are appropriate, not bans.
I agree that they shouldn't be banned; I just also like my idea of helping yourself to a free one if it's clearly been discarded and not taken care of. :)
America is hard to say because it's a bit of a conservative place and highly tuned to reject anything novel on "dangerous" grounds. But I'm curious about urban micro mobility in developing South and South East Asia.
This stuff must have failed there, but I wonder why it didn't displace a 50 cc motorbike. Storage capacity? Range? Ease of refuel?
Recently in Berkeley, California we got a bunch of new players: Veo, Superpedestrian, and Spin, which is an older company but just arrived here. So they are still chasing the dream, despite the money pit.
For the customer these scooters and bikes are cheaper than the bus at distances of 1 mile and at longer range if you value your own time.
As a method of urban transportation escooters have been relatively successful (at least in Europe). But this hasn’t translated into profitable businesses due to the lack of a strong technical moat: it’s too easy to clone Lime, Byrd, etc, especially with cheap capital availability.
Here’s a better idea: finance individual scooter purchases/leases as a business. Manufacturing will match actual not falsely inflated demand, and people will take better care, not just leave their scooter lying about on sidewalks and crosswalks.
I've heard of three different companies offering e-bike leases, with the monthly lease payments eligible for commuter reimbursement by employers. It seems like a good business model.
I'm not sure who these are for, but it definitely isn't me.
According to some back-of-the-napkin math I did:
- Most items are marked up 16%
- There's a ~$5-15 service fee (that's WITH Instacart+)
- And most of the sources I saw showed that you should tip between 10-20% (which they deserve, given what I've seen of how they're paid).
While I could absolutely see using the service if I was having a party and couldn't leave to pick up some forgotten items, paying $60-80 extra on top of my $200 grocery bill is too rich for my blood.
Yeah, when I used it the first time I was in awe, but over time I removed their apps and I just walk to the supermarket.
Their prices are quite high, delivery time is unpredictable (even though their app says 10-15min, sometimes I had to wait 30-40min), and their inventory is limited. I still use them once every 2 months or so, but on a weekly basis I'd just rather go to a local supermarket myself.
My biggest issue is the high rate of failure with fresh produce. I remember when one of my orders came in with a bag of organic sweet potatoes, with the claim that the organic Russet I had ordered were "out of stock." I was doing a specific recipe, so ended up having to go to the same supermarket from which I had just had my groceries delivered (thinking, perhaps I could get singles or non-organic).
The bags of organic Russet were right there, right next to the organic sweet potatoes.
On that same order, the bananas that came were so green that they wouldn't ripen for three weeks. When I've had groceries delivered, issues like this are the rule, not the exception.
At this point the emergence (or re-emergence) of the instant grocery startup in is like the apocryphal story of Joseph Kennedy getting stock tips from his shoe-shine boy - a sign that the market is about to crash.
LPs fire them by no longer investing more money. An actual VC would get fired if they never made a good deal. And there's always the case of criminal actions (fraud, etc) but that's the exception.
Other than that, venture capital is a high risk investment where 99% of the portfolio is expected to fail so it's not exactly a surprise when it happens. How are you going to prove that an idea was definitely going to be successful or not? If you know that then you should be a VC.
The reality of portfolio theory means they only need a single big win to return all the gains, and the rest is just a reasonable attempt at disqualifying ideas and spending the money on things that might work.
> LPs fire them by no longer investing more money.
That I understand. I was curious if any VCs been fired by the firm for repeatedly making bad bets. But I guess since in general >1 partner signs up on a deal they share collective responsibility so can't blame a single partner.
The idea of having a fast, easy, low emission and cheap way to get around short distances in a city without needing a car or having to bring a bike or similar is awesome.
Unfortunately, instead of solving the things citizens disliked about them (sidewalk parking/riding, inexperienced riders, rapid expansion) the companies decided they should just take the Uber approach and bulldoze any opposition with money. This made them a symbol of tech and gentrification for many, a symbol of growth and change for others, and aligned basically everyone in the city against them.