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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
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.
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
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....
Ownership doesn't. Liability does. There's a reason rental cars that you have to return in working conditions or else the person working at the desk will have you pay for it last longer than scooters that the automatic return station accepts as long as it can somehow still read the ID, independent of the state the scooter is in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
That is what happens when you use a consumer product for commercial purposes. If you want something that lasts, only buy products that retain their warranty under commercial use.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
That is what happens when you use a consumer product for commercial purposes.
Yeah. Decades ago I ran across the expected lifetime of my newly purchased CD player: 5,000 hours. Don't know if it was the LED or what that broke. I also ran across a commercial player that was considerably more expensive.
I wondered why radio stations didn't use the cheaper version, so I did a calculation: 5,000 hours / 24 / 30 = 7 months. So while it was cheaper for the standard unit, you've be replacing it twice a year with the fun downtime and swapout event that would occur.
"We'd play you the latest hits but our player is broken, so I'll just hum them instead. And here we GOOoooo!"
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
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.
Liability is simply a term for "owning the consequences". His point stands.
Fat of the land.
Do you know what an RC enthusiast pays for batteries/year. If I was a kid, I'd already be hooning a home made electric car powered by scooter batteries.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Hmmm, maybe the Terracotta Army is actually some ancient, failed, rent-a-statue business venture.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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?
I am a volunteer at a local electronics museum. We use tesla coils and van de graf generators for demonstrations. We learned long time ago that you don't use consumer hobby grade stuff for public demonstrations. During my three year (so far) tenure there, we went through three cheap van de graf generators before settling on one that is more institutional grade; costing about twice as much. That unit is still going strong.
It generally pays to buy quality. My blender is much more expensive than many you see in stores but blends stuff that would strip a cheaper one's gears in a second. That doesn't necessarily mean buying the absolute best when a high quality less expensive item will work, it's a cost tradeoff and at some point the added value is less than the added costs.
Same goes with tools. Please don't get me going on Harbor Freight. Put it this way. A jewelry maker told me that he will not be caught dead inside a Harbor Freight store.
While I am in wholehearted agreement with you in tools and have had a "Buy quality once or cheap forever" mentality ingrained by my mechanic father; Harbor Freight has its place. It's perfect for when you need a cheap one time use item. For example, I built a fence using a HF nail gun. I ran quality nails through it and it lasted throughout the project, in fact it still works but is basically relegated to hanging on the wall. For about $60 it was cheaper than a rental and way cheaper than a quality nailer that would drive nails long after the HF tool died. I would not use a HF tool for something I made my living on and needed to run reliably and the cost of lost productivity exceeded the tool's cost.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
Yea. You quickly grow tired of hearing someone yell excuse me as they try to zip past you or having one whip right by you a few inches away while you are walking on the sidewalk. The faster they disappear the better, and it seems like Adam Smith's invisible hand will smack them down at some point; probably after an IPO. I wonder if the scooter companies asked Louisville to strip ID data to prevent analysis such as in TFA which shows how fast they are burning cash and the steep hill to just become profitable, let alone grow fast enough to warrant a high stock valuation?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The business model is not getting the money from passengers, is from cronyism getting government grants.Your money.
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.