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Shared Scooters Don't Last Long (substack.com)
Alison Griswold, writes on her newsletter Oversharing: I took a look at data on scooter rides in Louisville, Kentucky, shared online as part of the city's open data policy. The latest data is available here. The data set I used was older and included monthly data on scooter trips from August through December. It also included a unique "ID" for each scooter, a detail that was key to my analysis and has been stripped out of subsequent data sets published by Louisville. The data doesn't differentiate between Bird and Lime, but as Bird started operations in August 2018 and Lime that November, you can assume it skews toward Bird.
With that preamble, here are some things I found: The average lifespan of a scooter in Louisville from August to December was 28 days. Median lifespan was 23 days. If you stripped out scooter IDs that first appeared in December, to focus on older vehicles, the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days. Still stripping out scooter IDs that started in December, the median scooter took 70 trips over 85 miles.
Scooter lifespan is a key factor in scooter unit economics, as you may recall. The more trips and miles a single scooter can cover, the better for shared scooter companies, which have to recoup the cost of each vehicle before they can start making any money. In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter with a goal of reducing that cost to $360. At the time, I said that meant Bird needed five rides a day on a $551 scooter for 5.25 months just to recoup the initial cost. The picture painted by the Louisville data is even worse.
[...] So, our scooter company walks away with $2.32 in revenue per day from the average scooter in Louisville. As we said at the beginning, Louisville data indicates that the average scooter was around for between 28 and 32 days. That means the typical scooter generated something like $65 to $75 in revenue for the company after most operating costs over its lifetime.
With that preamble, here are some things I found: The average lifespan of a scooter in Louisville from August to December was 28 days. Median lifespan was 23 days. If you stripped out scooter IDs that first appeared in December, to focus on older vehicles, the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days. Still stripping out scooter IDs that started in December, the median scooter took 70 trips over 85 miles.
Scooter lifespan is a key factor in scooter unit economics, as you may recall. The more trips and miles a single scooter can cover, the better for shared scooter companies, which have to recoup the cost of each vehicle before they can start making any money. In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter with a goal of reducing that cost to $360. At the time, I said that meant Bird needed five rides a day on a $551 scooter for 5.25 months just to recoup the initial cost. The picture painted by the Louisville data is even worse.
[...] So, our scooter company walks away with $2.32 in revenue per day from the average scooter in Louisville. As we said at the beginning, Louisville data indicates that the average scooter was around for between 28 and 32 days. That means the typical scooter generated something like $65 to $75 in revenue for the company after most operating costs over its lifetime.
with junk scooters, including those toxic batteries and electronics, cities should require they be recycled as much as possible, all refuse should be recycled as much as possible because we cant survive by turning the planet in to a dump
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What the fucking hell. Another throwaway product, another ecological disaster. They should ban those things on that basis alone.
They did a trial of the scooters in Portland (which has a river running thru downtown) and there is speculation about just how many of the scooters ended up at the bottom of the river. They were able to trace a few of them to that watery grave.
The biggest concern here was riders without experience and who did not use helmets. There was an uptick in ER visits for scooter accidents.
do scooter batteries change how city water tastes?
Ownership matters.
Sure, they last about a month on the street. Does the idiot who wrote this assume they are then tossed in the garbage? No. They come into a shop for a couple hours of repair work, and go back out on the street. What a fucking moron.
With that much scooter "turnaround" that just seems ... wasteful.
-Miser
See, if it's not yours, you don't give a damn about it.
Someone will rent it, ride it like ... well, like a rented mule ... and then return it.
They're not going to baby it, or treat it nicely. They're going to ride it hard.
Not sure why anybody would be surprised by this. Rented things are pretty much always treated like this.
even with constant new equipment being injected, stupid things like brake failures can happen:
https://www.ajc.com/news/local/atlanta-woman-has-warning-for-scooter-riders-don/fwMFwjcSm7QMOJNvbSSHIO/
The data does not take into account malice, both by the customer and political. There are clips showing people throwing the scooters into the bay here in Corpus Christi, ruining them. Then you got the city itself, charging onerous fees per scooter to allow them to operate within the city. The city of Corpus Christi wanted at last check, a dollar of day PER UNIT. That's murder on any operation, large or small.
the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days.
I can believe the scooters would last that long before being pulled for servicing.
But I can't believe scooters after a month are so trashed you cannot repair them and get them back out in the field. Even with rough use and vandalism, you should be able to have the units in service for at least half a year...
That doesn't account for outright theft but I don't think so many are taken outright is affects the overall stats.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...of trash
I'm thinking of starting a shoe sharing service so people can walk from one place to another without getting their socks dirty. They'll have an app where they can locate a nearby pair of shoes in their size.
I'll call it "Shoeme" or something stupid like that.
Taking investment money now....
And obvious to everyone else. Is this SlashDot or Tiger Beat?
Crypto mining economic are far worse... crypto entices miners with "today's profit" without telling them about the exponential decay in revenue. It always looks like you can ROI in x time but the reality is that you never ROI..
Ima buy all the scooters I can though because there's probably going to be a mad rush into scooter rental because on paper it looks awesomely profitable.
Now, where did I put those tulip bulbs?
> the typical scooter generated something like $65 to $75 in revenue for the company after most operating costs over its lifetime.
"Revenue after operating costs"...so, profit?
If you're still making $65 to $75 of *profit* (assuming that's really what this is) after all costs are covered and everybody involved in looking after these has been paid...then that's a win.
If one of these generated $65 to $75 worth of revenue over its lifetime however, *before* paying anyone, then it's a disaster. I suspect this is what the article is trying to convey (I only read the summary, of course), but the wording being used doesn't infer that.
this is capitalism in action. People pay for using it, and they want to get the most value for money.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
There's probably some way to show that scooter sharing was to keep Chinese state-owned steel and manufacturing businesses alive.
The bubble will pop and your ass goes pop too as you crash them.
There's not much on a scooter to easily brake. It can only accelerate so fast according to design, so you can't really overwork the motor. The scooters I've seen have pretty sturdy bodies, with engines (the only expensive part) pretty well protected.
I could go way beyond simple mistreatment of a scooter - say attack it with a baseball bat, or throw it against a wall - and it should be usable for field use with some replacement parts and repainting.
It is at the very least a question I did not see the article (yes, I read the whole article) even attempt to ask, either rhetorically or the companies directly. They might want to keep that info close to the vest but like I said it simply makes no sense that only a month would render every single scooter un-repairable.
In fact it's pretty obvious the goal for any scooter company would be to move to scooter designs that are even tougher and more repairable for exactly the reason of viability of the model.
I absolutely will not say it's impossible that so many companies are being funded that are not financially viable, because venture capital. But again I'll say, just from a logical standpoint of considering very rugged use of scooters length of service should be six months to a year, if not indefinitely.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What was the point of these free scooter programs anyway?
Public bathrooms get gnarly ...
...because WE only care about what we've earned, what we've invested in, not what is given freely.
THIS is another reason socialism simply does not work.
CAPTCHA: weakness
There's nothing special going on here. This isn't some kind of new economy. Things have been rented for millennia. These aren't shared scooters. They're rental scooters.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
and you have to worry about things like the breaks not being properly maintained. For one thing a skilled mechanic is going to make at least $12/hr and probably not going to work "gig" economy. You could do it with unskilled labor but you risk maintenance not being done. If you use gig economy piece workers they're likely to cut corners (since they're doing it for temp work to make ends meet they don't care about long term job prospects).
As it stands Bird and Lime shift the blame for failed maintenance to the manufacturer. If they start repairing the scooters that's on them now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
These scooters likely get stripped down to parts, which are completely interchangeable, so there's no point in tracking individual parts that "go together". This leaves you with the Sacred Galley of Athens question -- is it the same boat after you've replaced every single part? If you completely disassemble a dozen schooters and reassemble a dozen scooters from randomly selected parts, what happens to the "identity" of the scooters that were taken apart? The answer is you don't need it anymore.
If it were firearms, we associate the identity of the firearm with the receiver -- the metal housing into which the barrel and moving parts of the firearm are assembled. But that's purely conventional; you could just as reasonably define the identity of the firearm by the barrel. But why even have a concept for the "identity" of a firearm? Really one only: to track ownership and custody of a firearm, you have to have some kind of database. Databases require identifiers. Seventeenth century gunsmiths didn't stamp serial numbers on their guns because nobody was tracking them.
You could take the same approach as firearms to scooters by declaring that the identity of a scooter sticks to, say, the scooter's deck. But what *function* would that serve? The function of a rental scooter's id is to track user custody of company property and determine when a scooter needs to be serviced. Once the scooter is brought in for repair the need to track that ID disappears. If you insisted on having an id that persists through the rebuild process it would do something that only bad database designs do: constrain physical operations to serve the record keeping system.
In my experience every database design can be invalidated by expanding the universe of questions it must answer (or equivalently, processes it must support). This is the problem with identity in the relational model; it's *implicitly* tied to the questions the designer anticipates. That's why UUIDs are such a robust solution to many identifying tasks: their uniqueness is not tied to any particular set of questions you might want to answer, or to any context (i.e., they are unique *between* databases).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Never lend or rent anything you arenâ(TM)t willing to have destroyed and if you do expect that to happen unless you do something to prevent it. In other words people suck.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
oh bullshit - "Money is involved so its like capitalist and stuff, this isn't troo soshulism" Russia, Cuba and Venezuela have money and allow you to buy things too.
Guess they're not really communist countries.
This is natural greed which is why socialism will NEVER work because it all degenerates to gimme dat stuff.
Both Bird and Lime should know this data already themselves and yet they're still jumping into markets (ergo losing more money that they'll never recoup).
Either both companies have moronic leadership or there's some other scam going on. That includes all the weird (and oddly almost always negative) attention in the press these things get.
if public stuff disintegrates in a puff of Marxist smoke, then how is that going to go at the national level?
There are these things called Bicycles.
Great for short trips, No DRM, and fairly inexpensive.
But you might have to move your legs a little and go less than 5 MPH on a sidewalk.
I have a bunch of tools here that I've used for one or two projects. They are ready to go if I need to them a third time. No point in paying 10 times as much when these Harbor Freight tools last ten times as long as I need them for.
The rotary hammer I bought cheap at Harbor Freight might well wear out after only drilling 600 holes in concrete. In four years, I've drilled six holes. So at this rate it should last me about four hundred years.
I wouldn't nornally buy a Harbor Freight ratchet because I plan to use the ratchet thousands of times. Same with my cordless drill. I use that all the time, so I bought one that will last through many uses.
Heck, even my air compressor (still running fine after six years) is from Harbor Freight. It turned out that I used my bench grinder more often than I expected, so after several years my $15 Harbor Freight bench grinder eventually wore out. Still, if I were to replace a $15 bench grinder every five years, that's a better value than replacing a $120 bench grinder every fifteen years.
Use the right tool for the job, and if you're only going to do the job once or twice (or ten times), a Harbor Freight tools might be the right tool.
The scooter sharing fad can't go out of business soon enough. The notion of easily accessibly and affordable transportation is a good one, but electric scooters are the WRONG solution. The tiny wheels paired with uneven sidewalks (let's be honest about where they are usually ridden) and inexperienced riders without helmets is a recipe for accidents. And there are a LOT of accidents.
I spent some time in Germany last year and the cities there are loaded with bicycles provided by multiple vendors that can be located and rented via an app just like the Bird/Lime scooters. The bigger wheels of a bicycle makes it much more resilient against cracks and bumps in the road surface, and you can strap a small baf or backpack to the back without completely ruining the balance (often see people riding Limes with grocery bags on the handlebars, some people are too dumb to live). Not to mention that a little bit of exercise wouldn't hurt the average american, electric poer not necessary (and more economical without).
What is Lime's business model?
Just this semester Lime pulled bikes [from Eastern Kentucky University] without telling the university
There was an article on Slashdot this past Sunday, A Software Malfunction Is Throwing Riders Off of Lime Scooters
Hmmm, maybe the Terracotta Army is actually some ancient, failed, rent-a-statue business venture.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
No surprise there... there is a reason private ownership is important in order to maximize the value of items. However, ownership requires responsibility - something that increasing numbers of people desperately try to avoid these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're too stupid to post here. If a private company doing business doesn't qualify as Capitalist, what does?!!
Did the author stop to consider that they directly list "repair costs". Maybe, just maybe, when a scooter is taken out of circulation for repair, then put back in, that it is assigned a new ID number?
You have to add the costs of hospitalizations for impact trauma for the participants who panic brake and then go head over heels into the pavement. Of course, this will and must be borne by the participants if it's their own fault. I'm talking about the city's math in their rapacious quest for more money from any IPO gimmick that comes along rather than by creating a place people want to live in, and not just until they get a job somewhere else.
Sad but true testimony against humans in general: they tend to not have respect for things that they don't own.
+1 philosophical humour
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The business model is not getting the money from passengers, is from cronyism getting government grants.Your money.
It's not the DotCom era over again, this is NEW! Yeah, they lose money on each unit, but they will make it up with volume! It's how you can lose billions of dollars buying customers, and then become a hundred-billion-dollar valued entity!
Silicon Valley has "rediscovered" that you can sell and infinite number of $1.00 bills for $0.90 each...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The same blog did a pretty good look at the business model behind the scooters. At current utilization rates, scooters need to survive at least six months for companies to recoup their costs. Clearly that's not happening now. Which means either the companies need to buy scooters at a cheaper price, build a better scooter at the same price, or somehow increase utilization per unit. I don't think they have a clear path forward with any of those, at least not enough to make the numbers work.
The early scooter designs had some issues, so Bird changed the design significantly (different battery pack layout is the most obvious), so it is probably just a design changeover, not reflective of the scooter actual durability.
Russia, Cuba and Venezuela have money and allow you to buy things too.
Guess they're not really communist countries.
Exactly. And you didn't even need to read Marx to realize they were authoritarian despots!
This is natural greed which is why socialism will NEVER work because it all degenerates to gimme dat stuff.
Actually, that is why Capitalism never works.
Call me cynical, too. If I was in the business, I'd be looking at the competition and their tricks. I'd know and I'd know that you know I know!
Since this has absolutely nothing to do with socialism (when using the proper definition of socialism), please mod the parent off topic.
The EOL (end of life) of an individual electric scooter does not result in it being tossed wholly into the wastebin. Very few of these are likely complete losses - the aluminum frames are made of durable and reusable parts, I imagine the electronics package is wholly reusable as well, save for a worn-out battery... Which out to be good for hundreds of recharge cycles, not just 30. Electric motors are built durable and tough these days. It's likely a badly wrecked frame, damaged wheels, or depleted brakes that takes a scooter out of commission after an avergae of 30 days (likely this is thought of as routine maintenance, not even full "repair") and after a mild rebuild it's returned to service with a new unique ID. Genuinely totalled scooters would still be stripped for parts to be used in future repairs. Or am I missing something?
Scooter companies are learning this truism the hard way. It's why you never want to buy an ex-rental car.
Gaps in the methodology. Scooters are not generally just scrapped. Also some scooters are replaced with a better performing model without anything being wrong with.
Ah yes, blame the user- a computer geek's favorite go-to. We don't set prices. We don't set our wages. Ignore the corporations who do though. Don't stop to ask WHY we can't or won't "overspend even a little". Greed is somehow just a problem of the individual and excuse the greediest who have governemnt protections and laws which allow the concept of a corporation to even exist. Heaven forbid that the corp only gets a 3000% profit margin instead of a 2000 or 1000% one. They NEED those 10 yachts and Bugattis, but fuck me and my needs of basic shit like health care. Stop blaming those with no power. We can't change a fucking thing unless you want us to whip out the torches and pitchforks.
Don't come in here screaming marxism when you wear the badge of the Shanghai commies, ya fucking hypocrite. YOU got to choose that name. FUCK OFF.
Call me low-tech, but If I was in that business I'd go round smacking competitors' machines with a hammer,
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."