<Shameless-plug><p>My analysis of Bird's unit economics in Tel Aviv:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ido_co/status/1080883756184023041</a><p></Shameless-plug>
So what is the VC angle with these super high valuation scooter startups? It doesn't seem very defensible. The barrier to entry isn't very high. And it doesn't seem that customer loyalty would be much of a factor.<p>The most obvious strategy I see is that the VCs think they can pump these companies then dump them on the open markets and cash out before thousands of global, regional, and local competitors flood in and make their non defensible positions obvious.
Here in Reno we have Lime bikes (the scooters were withdrawn after being deployed without city permission) and they are almost like litter - they are laying around all over the city but I almost never see anyone riding one. I'm all for bikes and bicycling but the fact that they have no designated docking stations means people leave them everywhere and to this old fart it is borderline blight.
Bad title - article does not cover unit economics at all (it's barely mentioned)<p>> The pair hit on a number of topics, including the unit economics, safety and seasonality of the scooter business
> “The deeper I get into transportation, the more I realize we don’t need autonomous vehicles, we don’t need tunnels, all we need are more bike lanes,” he said.<p>Well said.
Meanwhile in San Francisco we are stuck with two unknown companies, a very low amount of scooters, no scooters in the evening (after 9pm I think?), and you can't ride one if you don't have a driver license.<p>For a tech-pole, it is quite a backward city.
I still think Bird's success is merely symptomatic of American shortsighted solutions to systemic US urban planning issues. I doubt this will reach the same level of popularity in cities/countries with great public transit, highly walkable streets, and good existing last mile solutions (bikeshares, bikelanes, high bus coverage), but I'm happy to eat my words if I'm just not seeing it and folks from Amsterdam, Seoul, Tokyo, NYC or Berlin would like to chime in and prove me wrong.<p>The biggest challenge I see of existing well-executed public transit/cities is last mile coverage for handicapped/disabled folks and sufficient infrastructure for them in stations without having to resort to uber/lyft for <1mile transit. If Bird/scooter industry expanded into solving these problems I would greatly celebrate. I get frustrated seeing Bird celebrated as the next coming of the steam engine, when it barely moves the needle for regular transit, without remotely addressing the biggest long-standing issues of the space.
Bird is trying to land (pun intended) in Amsterdam, but from what I've heard they're already losing so many employee scooters in the canals that it's becoming a problem. I already predicted this would happen when I first read about Bird online... I hate that Im right about how shitty people are.
Scooters are only truly safe in a separated bike/scooter lane, so given that cities have to invest in that infrastructure, they should ban Bird and others and only allow their own bike/scooter systems that are integrated into their own public transportation networks.