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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
News flash: people don't take care of shit they didn't have to purchase or get emotionally invested in.
Even half a year wouldn't be enough to recoup costs, and you have to include the price of maintenance too.
My guess is that they are either hoping to monetize the location and user data they gather, or the whole thing is just a scam to suck up investment money for a few years before it all collapses.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The city of Corpus Christi wanted at last check, a dollar of day PER UNIT. That's murder on any operation, large or small.
People oppose an outright ban, so an onerous tax is as close as they got. Nobody (majority anyway) wants these things around. They clutter up the neighborhood, ruin accessibility, and have plenty of bad riders. The sooner they run out of VC money the better. Their business model is probably not that much more viable than MoviePass anyway.
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
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....
You should call it 'Shü'
Ownership matters.
What on Earth gave you the idea that cheap rental scooters are anything like Socialism? Bird and Lime are private companies, trying to provide a service.
404: Socialism not found. This is pure Capitalism my friend; with all the externalized costs that entails.
Public bathrooms get gnarly ...
In Kentucky? I suspect SUD (Slow Unplanned Disassembly) by meth addicts is how most of these scooters are meeting their ends.
That, and target practice.
Oh do please bring this to Atlanta where apparently the City Council's ONLY data point regarding whether to allow these abominations to be scattered all over the commons is that "people have ridden them X times". I had a lengthy email back and forth with my city councilman asking about cost-benefit analysis, how the city was going to pay for the "enforcement" of the new rules they passed, and what I got back was "i support them because if you ask the people who ride them, they like them". I pointed out that if you polled cocaine or heroin users you would likely get similar statistics so why did we not just legalize those too. I then asked what the city would do if I bought 1000 drink vending machines, put them on wheels and scattered them all over the city so that by using a phone app and moving the machine to a new location, you could buy a drink. Of course we all know the answer to that - the city would have impounded them all and fined my business. So now these eyesores are apparently legal in Atlanta, because "people use them" and because we charge each company something less than the cost of a single emergency room visit generated by an uninsured ride. No allowance made for enforcement officers, not attempts to enforce the rules. As long as you can dump the cost on the taxpayers, why not let people put hideous crap all over the city that provides no utility that cannot be had by walking.. with or without rental shoes.
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.
How long has Uber been bleeding a billion dollars a quarter? It makes sense because the end game is to sell the money losing business at a profit to the unwitting public in an IPO. You know, like Uber, that is supposedly going public with $120 billion valuation all the while losing $4 billion a year. Unfortunately for these scooter companies, I don't think their total sales will ever scale like Uber and people might think twice about buying a rental service that tries to charge people to replace walking.
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.
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?
News flash: people don't take care of shit they didn't have to purchase or get emotionally invested in.
This is why communism doesn't work.
It is too bad that Karl Marx didn't run a scooter company before he wrote Das Capital. That would have saved us all a lot of trouble.