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.
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.