Charging electric scooters is a cut-throat business
theatlantic.comI want to hear more about Bird's business model. How can it be worthwhile for them to give hundreds of dollars out to have the scooters charged? What do people pay for using the scooters?
As per the article, it also seems incentives are not quite thought out yet, so people can grab the $20 "hard-to-find" fee reasonably easily. It sounds like you can have a friend stash them until the fee goes up, then go and collect it. If this happens to every bike, that's maybe $20 per week? $1k a year per scooter? And I would guess a scooter itself costs a few hundred, as well?
Can you rent out a scooter for a sensible amount? My guess would be that the scooters are not at 100% capacity, otherwise it would be hard to find one. Kinda like the Boris Bikes in London. There's also infrastructure costs involved with maintaining the fleet, making sure they're where rides are likely to originate, marketing, and so on.
All of them are VC funded. The cash they are burning is of their investors. The business model should be getting acquired or going public.
Many of these companies make a lot more sense to me if I think of the founders(+select early employees) as the company, the company as the product, the VCs as the customer, and product+customers as the sales pitch.
Thanks for this very interesting point of view, a company as a product. If you look this way, then a lot of stuff makes sense in the VC/Start-Up world.
Dan Lyon’s Disrupted describes the experience of working at one such startup. It’s brilliant, funny and brutal.
It only makes sense if we’re in a bubble.
i guess so. but what causes these persistently bubbly conditions?
the top 1-2% have very large cash hoards they absolutely must invest. and they can't just go around opening laundromats, liquor stores and flipping houses. that's chicken feed. it requires too much attention. too much work.
there are challenges investing in the really big global growth stories (e.g. China): state ownership has the upper hand. they can be forced into a loss position by the state.
yet, vanishingly few are smart enough to predict the rise of Facebook or Google. so what can they do? take shots in the dark in the US tech economy until they hit something large.
The upper echelons are awash in cash. The ratcheting down of taxes on corporations and profits, frees up that capital for investment. There is more capital than sane investments, at this point.
I don't understand the "it requires too much attention". Isn't that what managers are for ? Assuming your opportunities are profitable enough , just hire enough managers and be done with it?
Generally retail requires lots of efforts ( management must take care of really very little details ) and produces a very limited capital gains. You have a steady CF but you are always on the edge if you need to expand or innovate.
Who manages the managers and how do you trust them? How do you measure their value when it's possible to cook the books? A portfolio of managers seems less reliable to me than a portfolio of companies. At least in the latter case, you can all pretend that the other investors are doing the proper diligence.
It could also make sense if there's so much inefficiency in the job market (hiring, retention, etc.) that large companies can afford to make VCs whole just to lock in productive employees for a couple years.
I like this! Had never thought of it that way, but you are correct I believe.
Spot on!
In the first example, the acquirer takes the loss, but can hopefully provide enough cash for the acquired company to survive until the company figures it out (see YouTube). In the second model, the shareholders take the loss; there is no sugar daddy to continually provide cash without significantly hurting current shareholders.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/10/how-to-understand-the-fina...
Anecdotally, working/charged/available scooters are hard to find in downtown San Francisco.
Bixi bike rental system exists for many years now. The only city as far as I know that is not profitable is Montreal, ironically the city of bixi headquarters and where it started from. The same system, under other names, exists in other major cities around the world.
They have even more expenses and infra to support. They need to install and dismantle docking stations every season, which requires cranes and trucks in 100s of locations. They have staff that drives around and picks up bikes for repairs. They have stuff driving around and re-distributing bikes when they end up in one location (eg metro after rush hour). All of the staff gets salary, of course. Many trucks and specialized trailers had to be purchased. Lots of capital needed to run something like this.
And for scooters all they had to buy was the scooters and build an app.
Bixi made a 3 or 4 year go of it in Toronto before exiting the market. So it could be that all their locations (except Montreal) are profitable because they exit markets where they are losing money (except Montreal).
If that's true it raises the interesting question about why it works in some cities and not in others, since presumably the operations by Bixi are equally competent in the various places they open.
It could just be that bike shares aren't profitable in northerly cities with long cold winters.
Sometimes founders keep a home city alive despite being unprofitable as a symbol if nothing else. Like when clothing companies have expensive flagships in NYC that are more about marketing than being stores.
> Riders can locate and unlock scooters using the company’s smartphone app, and after paying the $1 unlocking fee are charged 15 cents per minute during use.
Back of the napkin calculations suggest that, in order to break even just from the charging costs alone, each scooter needs to be ridden for at least 2 and a half hours. Based on some quick googling (but without taking into account the terrain and the rider's weight and riding style), a scooter with a full load can be ridden for about 6 hours.
Looks like you're assuming every charge costs them $20. From my (admittedly skimmed) reading of the article - that's a special case for scooters that've "gone missing", and is effectively a "reward for finding and returning it".
Correct. $20 appears to be the exception. The majority of charges seem to be worth $5
Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/8l12oj/electric...
6 hours is nowhere near accurate, it's closer to 2 hours in ideal circumstances. 1-1.5 hrs in most usage scenarios. 6 hours is about how long it takes to charge.
Six hours?
The Xiaomi M365 that is used as a base for many of these e-scooters has a real-life range of around 20km and a top speed of 25km/h (a 280Wh battery and a 250W motor with 500W peak performance).
So the battery can be drained in one hour if you're moving quickly.
So best case scenario, let's assume that each ride is 15 minutes, that means 24 rides in the 6 hours. If we also assume full 6 hour usage, we end up with (24 rides * $1) + (360 min * $0.15).
So best case seems like $78 revenue per charge.
That's really a best case and that's not counting the maintenance costs (replacing the broken/stolen scooters in particular). They seem to pay the "chargers" extremely well currently, I'm sure they're still in the bootstrapping stage and not actually trying to make money. One person quoted in the article even says he expects the reward to be lowered eventually.
I actually didn't include any costs, just revenue.
6 hours is inaccurate. It's more like 1-1.5hours of actual use.
Your calculation is completely off. 150 min * 0.15 $/min = $22.50. In the US you can get a kWh for about 12 cents. That means you can get 187.5 kWh. The largest Tesla Model S has a 100 kWh. I don't know what kind of battery these scooters have, but I am sure it's not nearly as big as a Tesla battery.
> Your calculation is completely off.
Ah, someone complaining online how some random person's back of the napkin calculations are off.
Let's see if the nitpicker has a case.
> 150 min * 0.15 $/min = $22.50.
So, let's actually do the math:
* $24/0.15 = 160 minutes
Wow. Completely off.
> I don't know what kind of battery these scooters have, but I am sure it's not nearly as big as a Tesla battery.
280Wh. They have nowhere near 6h range either, the machine is advertised for a range of 18.6 miles and a top speed of 15.5, though it has regenerative braking which can improve the range a bit.
It's a pretty standard Xiaomi M365: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076KKX4BC/
Their actual range is around 20km (12.5 miles).
The electricity costs aren't the problem, the big cost here is paying people to collect the scooters up and charge them. As the article points out the cost of electricity makes up such a tiny amount of this cost that it's not even worth calculating.
And, from reading the article, the cost of the electricity comes out of the "finders fee". So those that charge them receive $5-$20 each, minus their cost of electricity to recharge them. So if most scooters only receive the $5 "finders fee" then Bird is paying a flat $5 per scooter for finding, recharging, and returning the scooters.
It costs $1 to 'unlock' and $0.15/minute after that. So a $5 payment requires: 1 unlock $1 and $4.00@0.15/min = 26.7 minutes of "usage" (note, not ride, usage, the 0.15 is paid per minute that a user has the scooter "unlocked") before the $5 "finders fee" is repaid by one scooter and one rider.
The numbers shift of course if the same scooter is "unlocked" by plural individuals during the day, due to the $1 unlock fee. Five usages of a few minutes each for a single scooter in a single day repays the $5 "finders fee" just with the $1 unlock fees alone.
>And, from reading the article, the cost of the electricity comes out of the "finders fee". So those that charge them receive $5-$20 each, minus their cost of electricity to recharge them.
To be picky, since these chargers/gathererers are largely teens living with their parents, the cost for recharge comes from the household utility bill (not paid by the kid).
Surely it is a trifling amount, but to it you must sum the miles with the car/minivan used for the search and pickup (which costs is as well at least partially subsidized by the parents).
> Surely it is a trifling amount, but to it you must sum the miles with the car/minivan used for the search and pickup
I suspect the cost of driving easily overshadows the cost of electricity, considering that even inflated California electricity rates price a kWh (of which these scooter batteries hold about one quarter) about the same as the incremental cost of driving one mile.
Whether it's trifling depends on how far they have to drive for each scooter. That cost is sunk if they "recover" it or not, unlike with the electricity. According to the article, the company has made it a bounty-hunting model, so even if the total area is only a few miles across, just getting there is no guarantee.
* Another poster provided a technical sheet asserting a 280Wh battery and 250W motor [1], which means the scooter can be discharged in slightly more than an hour. * Getting electricity at $.15/KWh [2] means that you essentially have no cost recharging the battery.
This means that, while there is no business riding and reloading (aside from, essentially, having rides at 40% off), it is profitable to empty a scooter and reload it yourself, provided you can trigger the increased fee.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076KKX4BC/ [2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
no way bird is getting the $1 themselves. that’s the swipe fee.
There's another important task they do though - they collect them up from random locations, charge them, and then drop them off at pre determined locations, "nests".
I reckon the bicycle ride rental (no it's not "sharing"!) companies would be less hated here if they had a crew of teenagers making good pocket money returning all the out-of-the-way (mostly at-the-bottom-of-hills) bikes to locations where people expected/wanted to rent them...
I doubt it truly is profitable for Bird, which most likely is paying out from VC cash not from their own revenue cash.
This model is an inversion of tool or car rental, where the renter returns the device or pays a late fee. Here, Bird chases after you to get their devices back. When scooters are difficult to recover, Bird pays more to the finder for recovering them.
Bird almost certainly plans to sell themselves at some point through some sort of offering in the future. Renting scooters today is just an incidental.
They only pay $5 per Bird per night. If each Bird "works" only 3 hours a day on 15 minute trips, that's about $30 a day earned per Bird. They probably get the scooters for ~$300 so each one pays itself off in 10 days. Call it 12 to account for damaged Birds. Extrapolate that out to say, 1000 Birds in a City, and that's at least $1MM in revenue monthly per city.
3 hours seems very optimistic. Also what about the cost of actually running the company ? It exists even if it doesn’t directly handle scooters day to day
Yes but going by these numbers, even 1 hour of use a day would produce a marginal profit on every scooter added. An hour sounds attainable. And coming up with clever operations hacks that push utilisation towards two hours a day sounds like the sort of challenge that most startup founders would love to be dealing with :)
(edit: another comment in this thread mentions the current batteries only last one hour, so that probably limits daily usage.... taking the long view that's ok I think, because at this point it seems a safe bet that batteries will be a lot cheaper in a few years time.)
The alternative to is hire staff and vehicles to go on scavenger hunts around the city, also an expensive thing to do (I see Lime Bike vans around Seattle, can't be cheap). The scooters that need charging are ones that have had paid rides, so the economics should be workable at some equilibrium.
There are all sorts of costs here and risks. How much is Bird paying per scooter? Each charger? I have not gone through the sign up process? Are you on the hook for the chargers or does Bird just send them out and hope for the best?
Besides the obvious strife between fellow "chargers" it won't be long before cities get into the act and pass ordinances or enforce them to take them off the streets until they get their share as well. Figure that a whole licensing scheme will pop up and eventually be used to squeeze out smaller competitors who try to get into this arena
The Xiaomi M365 costs around 330€ ($390) in Europe when on sale.
I don't think there's a large profit margin in that price given the price of a 280Wh battery and the other components.
These companies also have to add some parts to the scooters such as GPS.
I love these scooters! It's such a fun way to get around. There's a charger in my building, so they always leave scooters right outside for me, ready to go when I need them.
It's really an amazing experience. For a new user, it takes less than a minute to get started. The first time, as an engineer, I just was shocked that it was actually working so well!
I feel like it unlocks a whole new way to see the city for a lot of people.
The only thing that sucks is the battery only lasts about an hour, so it's not great for tourists who want to go on tour for a long time. Presumably a better battery would be more expensive and people would be more likely to steal it.
It's better than City Bike which forces you to 30-minute sessions and to pre-established locking stations.
Citibike (in NYC) allows unlimited length checkouts, but simply starts charging by the hour past a certain grace threshold. It's not a huge surcharge either, roughly comparable to the amount that the electric scooters cost starting from the first minute.
You sure that Ford Bike (or whatever it's called) I'd wny different?
Pretty cool. I was tempted to take a few and race them around our office as we've got a lot of open space. Had to ask a friend about how it works; he contacted the company and unfortunately he wouldn't be ALLOWED to take it home after work, charge it at home, then return it somewhere the next AM. Yup, it's more acceptable to their T&C to leave it on the sidewalk in front of his suburban house than to actually charge and return it to a train station where it'll get used.
You can't sign up as both a rider and a charger? It seems like it should be pretty easy to ride home, sign out, then immediately "find" the scooter and get $5 while you charge it up.
I guess the can discourage this by making you drop it off at the nest before it can be checked out instead of letting you immediately check it out again the next day for the ride back to work or wherever.
If your house is near a nest you could still make it work I think. The only caveat being that the bird will probably disappear during the day while you are at work unless you hide it in your office.
I don't know, it seems kind of easy to game.
Man, the gig economy is getting pretty surreal.
Wait until the food delivery guys get on electric longboards. YT from Snow Crash might be a relatable character for my kids...
That isn't as unrealistic as you think, there's some people on Reddit posting about working for Uber Eats with Boosted Boards in NYC, and I know of at least one other that does it in SFO:
https://www.reddit.com/r/boostedboards/comments/8jzokl/11_an...
I mean, they already rent electric Scooter mopeds...
> “Charging scooters for Bird is like Pokémon Go, but when you get paid for finding Pokémon”
A modern version of Rip Van Winkle would only have to be asleep for 2 months to be just as clueless and out-of-touch as the original Van Winkle was when he took a 20-year nap.
Pokemon Go was two years ago
I love how you can see the original less-clickbait headlines of 'Who charges those electric bird scooters?' in the title tag and 'charging-electric-scooters-is-a-cutthroat-business' in the url.
How do you know that the <title> tag contains the "original" headline? It seems to be more tailored for SEO, i.e. to attract the people who wonder (and then Google), "Who charges the electric scooters?"
Never thought about that. Do they really do different titles for different entry points?
The webarchive supports that this has always been the title.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
For a popular article that will earn a lot of links its also a good strategy to change the title multiple times during its viral phase. Since many people/cm systems link with the title tag it means you get a wider mix of anchor text which can help the article to rank for a more diverse set of key phrases
I've noticed New York Times does this too.
Not sure what content-management system The Atlantic uses, but WordPress (or at least its popular SEO plugins) allow you to specify different values for <title> and article <h1> headlines. A lot of news orgs are now savvy enough to use varied titles for different formats. For example, this week's New Yorker print issue has a story titled, "Behind the Wall", which works in print because your eyeball can scan the article's entire presentation and see the headline in context with a photo and subhed "As the U.S. abandons diplomacy, an Ambassador resigns in protests".
In the online version, the story's title is "The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration", and the subhed (which is also the <meta> description) contains proper nouns: "For John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama, moral failings at home seemed to compound tactical failings abroad"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/the-diplomat-w...
I'd assume that google actually penalizes title mismatches like that
Any decent CMS allows for these to be configured differently for each page because they serve different audiences. Your title tag, open graph title tag, Google metadata title and actual <h1> all serve very different purposes. For Facebook you might want something clickbaity, while for Google a clearer title will usually do better.
For most content this sort of optimization would be a bit much, but for a piece like this it could definitely work.
They A/B test the titles. The title I got was "Electric Scooter Charger Culture Is Out of Control"
This reads like an in-universe article from a Cory Doctorow YA novel.
Bird talk about making transportation more environmentally friendly, yet it turns out people are driving the scooters to and from their locations every day... it wouldn't be surprising if the scooters are traveling more miles in the back of a gas powered vehicle than they do each day in actual rides.
Even if the _only_ thing Bird does is enable people not to use parking spaces, and thereby permit the land for such to be allocated to other things (housing, retail, parks, etc.) that is a huge boon. It should also mean reduced vmt (for cars at least) meaning more lives saved, especially those of people walking or cycling since these scooters are in city centres, where cars are especially dangerous.
Similarly one van making grocery deliveries to 20 people is generally a _lot_ better than 20 people driving to the grocery store.
I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company.
...and will this land, if it even exists, be larger than the amount of sidewalk space that Bird has repurposed into scooter parking spaces?
Every person who is riding one of these scooters is someone who could have been using some other form of transportation.
Now, some of them may have switched from walking; in which case the small amount of sidewalk space taken up by a scooter not in use is an increase in use of space over the status quo; but not a very big one.
But many of them may have changed from driving. A car takes up far more space than a scooter. For each person who switches, you free up that much more space both on the streets while they're driving, and in parking at their final destination.
Having scooters available won't generally mean people will give up their cars. But a combination of scooters, bike facilities, car shares, buses, trolleys, commuter rail, and so on can make it possible to live in a city without a car, or by reducing a family from two cars to one.
One thing that bike and scooter share systems can help do is solve the "last mile" (or more likely "last quarter mile" or so) problem of public transportation. Walking to the nearest bus stop or train stop, coupled with the wait and then time to reach your destination, is a big factor in how efficient public transit is. Having options for being able to get to and from these places more quickly and conveniently can be a big benefit.
And parking spaces are being reclaimed, especially in cities with high levels of foot, bicycle, and public transportation travel: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/business/when-the-parking...
Anything that reduces the number of people who haul around a couple of tons of metal wherever they go, while burning black gold that funds crazy religious monarchies and failed democracies to do so, seems like a good tradeoff to me.
Hell, solving the last mile problem enables a previous failed suburb-car-city pattern, where you drive to a parking garage on the perimeter of a city core and go on foot from there.
In Montreal, restaurants rent curb side parking slots and convert them to a terrace. Very popular.
Unfortunately this isn't the sort of thing where you're going to have an obvious answer because the causation chain is really long.
1) Person sits in traffic getting to work
2) Person notices Bird scooters zipping by them
3) Person ALSO notices that their company has to pay them the cost of their parking space if they don't use it (in California at least - see parking cashout law)
4) Person starts taking Bird, and enjoying the cash from their company
5) Person's office now has an extra parking space
6) Person tells coworkers about how great it is getting to work 20 minutes faster and making a couple extra grand a year
.... (wait a year or two)
7) 20 of person's coworkers are now doing the same
8) Office building has more open parking spaces
9) Business leasing office space says "I actually don't care if my office has loads of parking, most of our employees take scooters/walk/transit/whatever"
10) Office building developer says "wow we can make more money if we build the office with more units instead of more parking"
11) Office building development petitions city to reduce legal minimum requirement of parking spaces
12) (couple years later) FINALLY gets the parking minimum reduced after overcoming the screams of NIMBYs who think only a few weirdos are the ones riding scooters "because the scooter/bike lanes are empty". (Related - this is a problem with people thinking bike lanes are unused - turns out a bike lane with 500 bikes an hour will LOOK emptier than a road with 500 cars an hour because, well, bikes are faster (in congestion) and smaller)
13) More of that space can be used for offices, homes, or just not built on, etc.
So if we can design an experiment that can track all of that, awesome, but in the meantime it's messy.
If nothing else, just making parking compete like any other land use reveals that there are people who would happily repurpose the land for other things. You can park your car in the absolute most prime land in downtown Santa Monica for $525 a month. That is CRAZY. I would pay ~$1600 a month for a few of those spots and build a studio in an INSTANT because you could rent that out to a human for about $5,000 a month.
But instead we use taxpayer money to subsidize sleeping spaces for cars, even though there are humans who would happily pay to sleep there instead. It must really suck for the person who can barely afford their $3400 rent at 16th and Santa Monica blvd that their taxes are helping provide affordable housing for cars right on the beach.
>I challenge you to find just one example of land that has been repurposed from parking spaces into something else, because of Bird or some other scooter company.
These companies have existed for how long? The point is that if more and more people switch from using cars to using alternative transportation options we may move away from being a car centric society.
These companies have existed for how long?
It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade.
I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? The answer isn't clear, but I'm worried because of the excessive waste generated by the cycle hire companies like Mobike and Ofo. I expect we'll see the same problems with the scooter hire companies too.
> Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters?
Isn't the, well, _whole point_ of the sharing economy to reduce waste by not having everyone own things they only use some of the time?
Yes, but the costs might prove to be too high. For example, if people owned their own, they wouldn't need people driving around town collecting scooters to recharge, and then driving them back to a drop-off point. Likewise, rented scooters probably have a far shorter lifetime due to theft, harsh treatment, abandonment and so on.
Yet electric scooters existed before these services started, and there was no major uptake of their ownership comparable to their current rented use, as far as I know. Which implies that alternative is not real.
It could still be environmentally friendly, depends on the total truck distance vs total scooter ride distance across the fleet (since a truck carries multiple scooters). Harder to work out what kind of transport the scooter miles are replacing, though - if it's walking, then it's obviously not helping.
This is an awesome example of how tricky it is to innovate and regulate towards cleaner environmental behaviour.
Tax the fuel to cover the total externalities
Doesn't work if it's teens converting family money into personal money. That is a situation with some surprising similarities to money laundering.
Why is that a concern to anyone other than the person who pays the bils (presumably the parents)
No different to someone mining bitcoin using their parent's electricity, or someone delivering pizzas using their parents car
Going forward we'll have to figure out how to tax electricity used for charging electric cars(probably special chargers that have a car-taxed tariff).
Why? Does electricity used by cars have more externalities than electricity used by a washing machine?
No, but at the moment(at least over here in UK) the tax on petrol and diesel covers road building/maintenance for the entire country. With this tax slowly disappearing, we will have to find another way to tax people who use the roads, and the best way to do that is to tax the fuel they use as it's directly proportional to their use.
Same reason why heating/farming oil doesn't have this tax, even though it's technically just diesel and your diesel car would happily run on it. Yes, the electricity used in your car is the same as the one used in your washing machine, but it should be taxed more because of its use, exactly the same as we do with oil already.
It seems to me that taxing something based on its use is a pretty much just a way to set up exactly these kinds of loopholes that continually need plugging.
Instead of taxing gasoline to help fill in the road budget, why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight? Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates. An electric car uses just as much (if not more, due to weight) of the road as a gasoline car, while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.
You could do this based on odometer, or based on automatic toll collection devices, or whatever. Automatic toll collection devices are probably better, because you could also include congestion charges for places where roadway real estate is low and congestion is high, like big cities.
The main reason to have taxes on something like fossil fuels would be for emissions reasons, as there is an external cost being imposed on everyone else by their emissions, and that money could go towards paying for health care costs, providing tax breaks for HVAC systems with air purification, carbon offsetting, and the like. But such a tax should be imposed regardless of use, as any use is going to wind up with the same or similar emissions.
At least in most of the US (can't speak for all 50 states) vehicles are taxed based on weight- a 1 ton pickup will cost more each year to register than a compact car or motorcycle. And what is a better method to tax based on usage than taxing fuel? Do you really want to have to log every mile driven, and submit it to the IRS? Parent poster had a good point, in that this will need to be examined in regards to EV usage of roads, but how much $ do you think it would cost to have automatic toll collection points to cover the entire US road network, and where are those billions/trillions going to come from?
And I would also like to point out that the main reason to tax fuel isn't to cover emissions, it's to help pay for the incredibly expensive roads that we all use (regardless of mode of transport). Sure, it is a good side effect that inefficient vehicles are taxed higher than more efficient ones, but that is a side effect, not the goal. Your proposed solution is far more complicated than just metering EV charging separately and taxing a portion of it.
> At least in most of the US (can't speak for all 50 states) vehicles are taxed based on weight- a 1 ton pickup will cost more each year to register than a compact car or motorcycle
Registration fees and taxes are frequently based on weight; and tolls are frequently based on number of axles.
But the relationship between weight or axles and fees is generally linear, while the actual wear and tear on roads is quartic (to the power of 4) in the weight per axle, times the number of axles. If taxes and fees were properly proportional, there would be a much bigger difference in price between a motorcycle and 1 ton pickup truck, let alone an 18 wheeler.
> Do you really want to have to log every mile driven, and submit it to the IRS?
You can use odometer readings that you collect at annual inspections. I realize that not every state does this, but every state I have ever lived in does; you have an annual vehicle safety and emissions inspection, and at that point they can check your odometer too and include that in the calculation.
You could also use the current automated toll collection systems, which are based on transponder or license plate for those who don't have transponders, for highways and congestion charges for cities, if you want to be able to charge different rates in different areas, and just subtract those numbers from the odometer readings afterwards.
Metering EV charging separately does't really solve the problem. Gas taxes are not in proportion to actual maintenance costs of the roads, and are currently a fixed amount, not tied to the price of gas or inflation, so they don't cover the full costs. If you just applied the same kinds of laws to EV charging, you'd be left with the same kinds of problems.
By not charging proportional to road wear and tear, there is an effective subsidy of those who drive larger vehicles, and in particular commercial cargo transport on the highways, by those who drive smaller vehicles. If you were to change the way vehicles were taxed, the larger vehicles would pay more of the burden, which would mean they might switch to alternatives like train transport, or moving production closer to consumption, or the like.
A similar problem exists in cities and on busy highways used by commuters, where congestion is a substantial externality. There it's the square footage of vehicle footprint that makes the biggest difference.
> where congestion is a substantial externality
It is, however if you tax people based on congestion they cause, shouldn't you refund them based on congestion they receive?
> vehicles are taxed based on weight- a 1 ton pickup will cost more each year to register than a compact car or motorcycle
An F-350 is 3.7 tons.
Two problems with this 1) It's unlikely to be proportional to road damage - if a 1 ton vehicle that costs $100 to register, a 2 ton vehicle should cost $1600, and a 4 ton vehicle should cost $25k. 2) It doesn't take into account mileage. Own a heavy truck that you use on your own land, and do about 1,000 miles a year on the road, and you pay the same as someone that has the same truck but does 50,000 miles a year commuting.
The odometer idea elsewhere in the thread probably works well for the U.S, just have a website to post your mileage when you drive into mexico/canada, and again on the way back, with spotchecks at the border. People who do significant mileage on their own land will be annoyed, but they currently pay gas tax on that mileage
> Instead of taxing gasoline to help fill in the road budget
In the UK we don't. We tax gasoline because it has negative externalities (same as us taxing cigarettes and alcohol). It goes into the central budget that's run by Phillip Hammond in the UK. Out of that, and income tax, national insurance, VAT, alcohol tax, etc, he funds the national road network, trident renewal, the state pension, the nhs, etc. Some of that money goes to councils to spend on what they want.
Electric cars don't have those externalities of burning gasoline in the middle of our cities.
While we don't tax fossil fuels used to generate electricity, we do subsidise non-fossil-fuels used to generate electricity. It probably should be the other way round, however in any case burning gas (not oil) in a power plant out of town and charging an electric car is better than burning oil in an ICE in the middle of a city and thus should attract far less tax. Currently 42% of UK electricity is being generated by Gas - no other fossil fuels.
The councils then take the money from central government, and the local council tax (about £1500 a household), into a local pot, and fund things like bin collections, maintaining parks, operating libraries, and maintaining the local roads.
> why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight?
Until relatively recently that's not really been possible (ANPR makes it possible), hence taxing fuel as a proxy.
> Then you don't have all of the "electric cars and bikes don't pay gas taxes" stupid debates.
Given that the cost of a road is wear and tear (which a pedestrian or bike causes pretty much zero)
Charging more than £5 a year for even the most extreme cyclist wouldn't make any sense. Because damage increases at 2^4, 1 mile car does about 1/100,000th of the damage of a lorry. A bike and car is a similar ratio - therefore if you charged a bike 1p per mile, you should charge a car £1000 a mile and a lorry £100 million a mile.
> We tax gasoline because it has negative externalities (same as us taxing cigarettes and alcohol).
This is contradicted by the difference in taxation for diesel fuel and heating oil (which is also the case in the US as well). Or used for generating electricity, as you point out.
I think that like many things in government, there are multiple reasons for taxing gasoline; negative externalities is one of them, but acting as a proxy for usage fees is another.
In the US at least, the federal gas tax is specifically earmarked for transportation expenses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund), which indicates that it's explicitly intended as a proxy for usage fees.
> Until relatively recently that's not really been possible (ANPR makes it possible), hence taxing fuel as a proxy.
Yes, but times change, and it is possible now. Lots of people bring up the problem of not collecting gas taxes to fund roads when electric cars usage grows. So every time someone brings that up, I suggest a fairly simple solution. Electric cars also weren't previously possible, but they are now, so rather than complaining about how we won't be able to fund the roads, how about charging more effectively for road usage.
> Given that the cost of a road is wear and tear (which a pedestrian or bike causes pretty much zero) > > Charging more than £5 a year for even the most extreme cyclist wouldn't make any sense.
I addressed this in my comment, indicating that it doesn't make sense to charge usage based amounts for cyclists:
> while a bicycle uses so much less (and pretty much equivalent to any use of public space like walking, using a scooter, etc) that it makes the most sense for that to just be accounted for out of the general fund.
There is the cost of constructing the roads in the first place, and wear and tear from weather, but that can be adequately accounted for out of the general fund; and when I say that, I mean the taxes collected at whatever level of government is responsible for paying for road maintenance that are not based on road usage at all, such as income tax, sales tax, VAT, property tax, or the like.
As someone who lives in the Northeastern US, I know very well that it isn't just vehicle weight that leads to road wear and tear; I've ridden on dedicated bike paths that were unmaintained, and frost heaves and roots of trees cause quite a lot of trouble, though it does take a lot longer for it to become unusable than roads used by cars and trucks.
Anyhow, I think we're mostly in agreement here. It is absolutely possible to do more effective taxation of vehicles based on their direct costs to infrastructure as well as other externalities.
> Because damage increases at 2^4, 1 mile car does about 1/100,000th of the damage of a lorry. A bike and car is a similar ratio - therefore if you charged a bike 1p per mile, you should charge a car £1000 a mile and a lorry £100 million a mile.
The damage per axle is proportional to the weight per axle to the fourth power. You multiply that by the number of axles to get the total amount of damage. Also, tandem axles do substantially less damage than single axles. This ends up at being a factor of about 5,000 between a passenger car and a truck, not 100,000.
It's still a big difference, and it's not accounted for by gas taxes, tolls, or vehicle registration fees, at least in the jurisdictions I've checked. Most of them seem to just go up proportional to the weight or the number of axles, not the fourth power of the weight per axle.
If you want to do it right, you'd charge fees based on equivalent single axle load times mileage, plus a congestion factor in congested areas based on the area taken up by the vehicle, times the amount of time it's within the congested area, times a time-varying congestion factor. And of course a carbon tax which covers all forms of carbon emission, and possibly a particulate emission tax that varies with density.
But despite how obvious it all sounds, it would be somewhat expensive to implement, and would face huge political opposition from industries and individuals who are effectively subsidized by paying into the highway systems way less relative to their usage than other users.
"why not tax vehicles based on actual road usage, and their size and weight?"
Because this relies on either odometer readings, which, at least here in the US, you wouldn't be able to say how many miles were driven in one state vs the next. Or it would rely on tracking the location of the vehicle, which is downright creepy and sets off all kinds of alarm bells in people.
Every car is legally equipped with a tracking device known as a license plate.
There are no more toll booths in the state of Massachusetts.
If you travel on a toll road in Massachusetts, your car will be tracked either by E-ZPass transponder, if you opt in to that system (at a substantial discount), or via photographing the license plate and sending you a bill in the mail.
Also, pretty much everyone I know, even the most privacy conscious, carry a tracking device in their pockets at all times. I think that rms may be the only person I've met who I know does not.
Petrol tax goes into the exchequer, it's not ringfenced for the roads. Most roads are funded from council tax in any case.
Petrol and VED raises £33b a year, but total road spending (including local councils) is under £10b.
The solution to rationing road usage and paying for their use is road charging (with heavier vehicles paying proportionally more based on axel weight, and different charges depending how congested the roads are) which should pay for the maintenance of the roads, new road building, and renting the land to have the roads on.
This is kind of a perverse incentive though:
- Discourage "bad" thing (driving, drinking, smoking, sugar, ...) by applying heavy taxes
- Occurrence of that thing goes down
- Complain about falling of tax revenue
I'm generally in favour of applying taxes like this, but they need to be based on the actual harm/externalities, and be targetted effectively. Taxing electricity-used-for-vehicles seems easy to game, and only indirectly related to harm. It might be more effective to tax fossil fuels, both for transport and electricity generation, due to their environmental problems; and tax ownership of vehicles to cover expenses (infrastructure, medical care, ...) and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter; perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT? (Although it's currently perfectly legal to alter odometers, as long as it's not used to defraud someone when selling the vehicle)
>>and discourage excessive use (reducing fatalities, etc.). We have car tax for the latter;
If you mean VED I don't think that achieves anything, perhaps only discouraging people from buying cars with particularly high CO2 emissions, but if you can afford a sports car with 200g/km+ emissions, you can probably afford the annual VED on it. Besides, with VED refresh recently it almost doesn't matter, you only discourage people from buying expensive vehicles as they incur extra tax due to their purchase price, not their emissions.
>>perhaps it could be made proportional to use by checking odometers during MOT?
The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom, and obviously it's not illegal to use your car abroad. Taxing fuel has the nice property of the taxes going into the budget of the country where you buy it, so the assumption is that visitors to the UK will buy fuel here and contribute at least a bit to the UK road budget - and the same goes for British drivers going abroad.
> The issue here is that obviously you have to prove that those miles were done in United Kingdom
Why? The law could just charge based on miles regardless.
However if you did choose to allow people to exempt overseas mileage you could read the odometers at ports (say charge them £10 for the privilege, so it only makes sense if you're doing a lot of mileage)
Clearly Northern Ireland would have to be exempt.
However mileage is very different, the externalities of a smart car driving 50miles from Lancaster to Carlise at 3AM is far different to that of a 13 ton lorry driving from Luton to Oxford Circus at 8AM -- in pollution generated (locally and globally), in damage to the road, congestion
Hmm, I hadn't thought about foreign travel. Food for thought, thanks!
Wear and tear on the roads done by driving cars.
Washing machines don't use roads.
So you want to tax the usage of roads, not the fuel.
Tax the fuel to cover the externalities of that (pollution) Tax the road use to cover the externalities of that (cost of using the road)
Why? We're still in the phase of giving out huge subsidies for them. More likely would be a general weight-miles tax to cover repairing the roads.
How much money do we pay to keep the middle east from devolving into all-out war and keeping a stable oil price?
Eh? Currently or in the future? The war is mostly already there; while Iran and Saudi aren't directly shooting at each other they've on opposite sides of the wars in Syria and Yemen.
Over the last 50 years the US government has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of american lives on keeping the oil flowing from the gulf, directly funding the current shooting wars, but only to a level where the oil carries on flowing.
That's a massive subsidy
This is commercial enterprise, not regulation. Taxation could simply make driving them around too expensive.
The article also notes lots of scooters in the car at the same time, which pretty much negates this issue.
Wouldn't it make more sense to make the batteries replaceable? Just have them locked in place until a "charger" person authenticates through the app, then allow them to swap in a fresh one. At that point transport would be reduced to just moving the batteries around instead of the whole scooter. They could still be charged at home.
People might steal them but the article already mentions that some people steal them already.
It would but that would require custom designed scooters. These are Xiaomi M365 with some additional electronics - https://www.gearbest.com/skateboard/pp_596618.html
Ohhh, that explains it! I wonder if they'll have to switch to that kind of charging system in the future, this current model doesn't seem all that economical.
It's an interesting point. Perhaps the reason they ask people to move the scooters is that they also sometimes need scooters to be retrieved from weird places and left somewhere more convenient.
So, sure, a scooter which was used and left on a main street can just stay there and get its battery swapped, but maybe it's not worth trying to figure out which scooters need moved and which battery-swapped, and to get the chargers to do the right thing in each case.
The fact that they pay different prices per scooter might invalidate this, but just a guess.
No, it would make less sense to Bird to do that. They are shifting the costs to freelancers. Purchasing double the number of battery packs costs Bird.
It will disappear just as fast as it arrived. Maybe one will survive. Just like Sprig, Spoonrocket, Maple, Eatclub, etc and the legion of instant food delivery services came and went, this too will pass.
Really? What will replace it? In the LA beach cities it is super useful.
The LA beach cities seem a good environment for them. I'm skeptical how successful they'll be more broadly especially to the degree cities get more aggressive about keeping riders off sidewalks. It's not a big problem in less crowded areas and a relatively small number of users but it's a problem with more riders and more crowded areas.
Meanwhile, Ather Energy, an electric scooter startup based in Bangalore, India is launching charging stations across the city and it'd be free to use for the next six months (for any type of electric vehicle).
https://blog.atherenergy.com/ev-adoption-made-easy-with-athe...
Dunno about the way charging works, at least long term. Scooter sharing through, that's kind of promising.
Beijing (and other cities) have proven that bike sharing can become a major transport type if the city will allow bike sharing companies to just dump bikes all over the sidewalk. It's crude, but it at least let's us see how far bike sharing can go if/when stations are a non-problem.
Besides the mess (I could not imagine buttoned down European city like Vienna or even a messy one like Amsterdam allowing it), there's a problem of space. Scooters are space saving.
In my ideal world, there are "public" scooter stations that can be used by any bike sharing enterprise. These provide efficient, space saving storage and power. With the same footprint we currently use for city bikes, we could probably store 2X-4X as many scooters. One parking space could be converted into a unit. Scooters everywhere!
>I could not imagine buttoned down European city like Vienna or even a messy one like Amsterdam allowing it)
I don't really see benefit over a bike. Except that bikes don't require charging.
The main one would be that you are a pedestrian rather than a road user. People who take bikes along sidewalks and footpaths are a hazard but a scooter is less of an issue.
Also, less skill to ride and less risk.
These electric scooters travel at speeds that exceed that of an average cyclist. They are not pedestrian friendly and they have no place on sidewalks. Usually you see them only on roads, bike paths or shared spaces where cars and pedestrians are both allowed, though. At least in vienna.
In bike-friendly European cities like Amsterdam and many German cities you generally have dedicated biking lanes which makes this a non-issue. On bike-unfriendly cities like Paris the sidewalks are often so crowded and filled with obstacles that merely walking fast can be challenging at times.
I can believe that it works great in American cities with very large roads and mostly deserted sidewalks but that wouldn't translate well everywhere I think.
I guess I phrased that badly. My point is about scooter sharing as an alternative/augmentation of bike sharing. No comment on personally owned scooters or bikes.
Beijing (one example) has bike sharing without stations. Just dump the bike wherever and the bike sharing guys will deal with it. This is an interesting data point, because it removes the infrastructure bottleneck entirely (but makes a mess). What we learn from it is that bike sharing is bottlenecked and that it can grow a lot by widening that bottleneck, by adding more "stations."
European cities ( early to the bike sharing game) are really unlikely to allow such mess. Scooters may be another way of achieving the same thing, because they can be extremely space saving.
In my European city (Dublin) bike stations usually take up about 4-6 parallel parking spaces and a little bit of road and sidewalk. We don't have enough of them because that amount is space is hard to come by. I think a scooter sharing station could half or quarter the required space, with the same footprint. .. especially folding scooters.
At a pinch, I think you could get a station onto a single parking space. This makes finding room for them way easier. This means we can have more of them, maybe much more.
As to the benefit of powered scooters: cheap, small, fun, carriable, effective over short distances. Cons: need power, not as fast/stable as a bike and less suitable for longer journeys.
I doubt any of these are as important as the availablility of stations near where you want to start and end your trip. I think scooters>bikes in terms of space, and space is the right problem to solve.
If I am remembering correctly these dockless bike sharing companies are in the process of expanding to USnl; as per reports Mobike has started service in 5 us cities.
I see a lot of benefits. They are more comfortable than bicycles and may therefore appeal to users who wouldn't give up their car for a bicycle. They require far less space than cars and have the potential to reduce rush hour traffic jams.
I'll stick with my bicycle but I'm happy for anyone who uses an electric scooter, rather than a car.
I think that sitting on a bike is more comfortable than standing on a scooter.
Bad wording on my side, probably. I meant comfortable not necessarely regarding the ride but, for example
- Getting it ready for the ride.
- Taking it inside your appartment/home/office, if necessary. No need to leave it outside.
- Easier to take along inside public transport, and then used as a means of traveling the last mile.
- Defenitely more comfortable if you don't want to excercise.
I have one for two reasons: a bad knee prevents me from cycling, and a bike doesn't fit in the train I take to go to work, whereas even the bulky m365 does.
I could see them in amsterdam, the place is covered in bikes and bike lanes and these type of scooters could easily mix in with that. They travel at a similar speed and can be left against some railings (or dumped in a canal) just like a bike can.
I sure hope they have safe chargers. Cheap chinese scooter and balance board chargers and batteries are a major cause of house fires, at least here in Europe (import regulations may affect this).
how can they possibly allow strangers with no background check to plug in scooters.
What could they do wrong ? Plug it backwards ?
Poe's Law.
As long as they're not doing something dangerous like hair braiding or interior decoration I think we'll be ok.
What is the reason for wanting background checks of people who plug-in scooters?
They might not even have their license to handle electrical appliances! The horror!
I wonder if the company is asking these teens, during the registration as contractors, if they have permission from their parents to charge all those scooters at home. I can imagine several parents getting angry for excessive increments in the electricity bills every month without having a clue about their children's "business". Of course, many of them will probably find the scooters in the garage in a regular morning walk around the house, but then…
- Do they [the parents] get a percentage of that money to pay for the bills?
- Is it even legal for these independent contractors to use home electricity to charge a 3rd-party business asset?
- Are damages to the house, in case of a fire, covered by their contracts?
- If the scooters are out of battery, how do these companies know where they are?
- Can these teenagers hold the scooters "hostage"?
- Can they charge extra money for dropping the scooters to places with some people can find it more convenient? Say, if I want to find one of them right in front of my house every morning, I would pay one of these teenagers some extra money for the arrangement.
- Are these houses in risk of over-charging their electricity net?
I have so many questions about all this, it seems so weird to me.
Each scooter has about a 300 Watt Hour battery, call it 60% charging efficiency (likely way more efficient than that) and you’re only talking about five cents of electricity per scooter.
Setting homes on fire seems like the highest risk -- there's no way standard domestic insurance is paying out if they know the fire is caused by business activities.
This seems like the biggest risk to me. Charging untold amounts of batteries that have been used/abused in unknown ways in my house while my family sleeps doesn't seem like a great idea.
Seems like a great idea to offload risk if you're Bird though! All those hoverboard battery explosions a year or two ago (and for example the FAA baggage bans that came as a result) really soured the image of chinese battery electronics.
Defining the heuristic now: the scooter market will truly be "mature" once Bird et al start incorporating commercial fire insurance add-ons into their charger programs, kinda like how Uber started providing commercial driver and liability insurance.
The article says that electricity cost for charging scooters is practically nothing. If we believe it or assume that electricity cost is trivial compared to the payment, then I don't see any parent that'll say no to their nearly-adult children making money on the side by such an activity.
At worst they'll ask for compensation.
* The article says that electricity cost for charging scooters is practically nothing.*
The article actually qualifies that for people in large apartment buildings with a "bike room" - so essentially these people are freeloading.
Charging a Bird doesn’t require a ton of electricity, so minus the labor cost, charging a few scooters overnight is essentially free—especially if you live in a large apartment building and can do so in your bike room
If you think about it, the scooter must stop scootering before 100% battery depletion to allow for the location electronics adequate life.
Not really. Trivial to deal with this. GPS, GSM, separate small battery. Done.
Wouldn't most parents be thrilled for their kids to earn money and learn life lessons by working a job they enjoy? Even if it costs them $20 a month?
I'm not sure if it's a requirement, but all of the individuals quoted in the article were over 18.
I don't think they were. To quote the article "“Finding the really hard ones is so awesome,” says Lucas, a young teenage Bird charger in L.A. who didn’t want his last name or his age listed since he technically hunts under his parents’ account."
> since he technically hunts under his parents’ account.
You're right, but that suggests it is a requirement. It's not Bird's fault the kid and his parents are lying about it.
This is why you didn't found a scooter startup.
The video of the guy piling six birds on one and riding away is pricelesssssss!
I see this all the time biking around Santa Monica / Venice.
I signed up to be a Bird charger in SF and it's been quite difficult to find scooters to charge. All the scooters go offline at 9pm to be charged and then have to be dropped off by 7am the next morning in order to get paid. I've encountered a ton of issues trying to find more "valuable" scooters as they tend to appear to be in unsafe areas that I don't necessarily want to be at night (most of the high value scooters tend to be in the tenderloin and I'm guessing have already been broken down, I can usually tell if it's not there due to the last known location being a few days ago)
I've started to view the expensive Birds as a way for the company to have people try and find their lost scooters, in which case $25 is a pretty great deal...
I'm surprise they haven't tried old school kick powered scooters with an additional electronic GPS unit:
http://goped.com/know-ped/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtn5kg3ZH3M
Or something like this: Micro PedalFlowhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfIzZo6ouDo
It would reduce the speed concerns too.
The speed might be a concern, but it's a selling point too. As is the lack of effort. Plus there's a goofiness value in kick-scooting.
Do the economics stack up?
"""Bird pays Brandon, a contract worker, up to several hundred dollars a night. On one particularly successful night, Brandon brought home $600."""
The article does not have many specifics but roughly Brandon seems to get 10 or so scooters on each trip, two trips a night(?). so that's something between 10 bucks and 30 bucks per charged scooter cost to Bird. Even if it's just 10 bucks that becomes the cost of the bike every quarter or so - that kind of opex must be killing them?
Lot of decent discussion and more info here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/8l12oj/electric....
It definitely doesn't stack up, they're just burning VC money it doesn't matter to them.
This sounds like something out of BladeRunner. Scavengers pulling scooters out of the trash on the fringes of town, fighting off other scavengers and thieves to collect their bounty.
Out of control? Does not seem like it.
Reminds me of bike sharing in China. Now THAT is out of control. In China, the companies pay committed employees or contractors to gather bikes, as opposed to crowd-sourcing it. There's pros//cons to that (as per the article itself).
At least in China, people don't respect the bikes. They trash them. They leave them everywhere. It sounds like a similar attitude exists with these Bird scooters. As societies/cities grow larger, people take less responsibility for things they use and spaces they exist in. I suspect it's partly a cultural thing (see Japan) but I'm pretty sure Japan has litter too. Bird has to incentivize the right behavior and disincentivize (i.e. even enforcement of charging policy) poor behavior.
so, did Bird (and other scooter companies) simply copy their business model from existing business models which had already been pioneered in China?
The idea itself sounds ok, but the article reads like a paid placement.
I saw these for the first time during my trip in SF and it just seemed crazy from first bat; maybe i'm missing something
Why don't they use removable batteries?
Seriously this would be the way to go. As part of membership they send you a small juice pack style battery which you manage the charging of and insert as needed.
Because then all of the scooters would he missing their batteries?
Why don't you just buy the damn thing ?
I owned an electric scooter a few months ago. It lasted only about two months before I put too much weight on the handlebars and permanently damaged the hub motor.
This was probably inevitably going to happen as the hub motor is constantly in direct contact with the ground, which means that a bad impact can dislodge a magnet.
I wanted to fix it myself, and the cost of the part would have had been almost the same price as just scrapping the scooter and buying a new one. Additionally, I had trouble going beyond about 5 miles, with the lights off and with conservative battery use, before running out of power.
So you don't have to store it and carry it around?
one of the advantages of living in the US. Nowhere in the world can a high school student earn 600$ a night by doing a simple, effortless side-activity. Even in countries like Germany max you can earn as a student would be less than a 1000$ per month.
You're not thinking creatively enough. Bitcoin trading, prostitution, that kinda thing. It's only a matter of time before highly VC-funded companies become more of a presence in Europe.
care to elaborate?
nice
Doesn't seem at all out of control. Seems like an awesome idea and the process needs to be refined to dissuade bad behavior. Considering the company was founded about a year ago is probably a lot of room for improvements and innovation (and angering your contractors in the process).
There headline may be a slang reference, "out of control" = "awesome" or "dope".
The title of the article used to be "Who Charges Those Electric Bird Scooters?"
Is it legal in US to use electricity at home for business purposes? In some countries that's against contract with electricity provider, as they have different tariffs for business.
Even in the regulation-stricken UK, it's fully legal to work from your private home (so called "clerical" work).
And fyi, something being against the contract is not automatically illegal.
Leaseholds often excludes business activities as does home insurance.
Yes, you can't register a company at your home address, but no one will ever deny you coverage if you do clerical work at home. At least every single insurance and rental I had in UK had a special provision for this - if you need to stay at home and work remotely, that's 100% covered. It just can't be your principal place of work.
> It just can't be your principal place of work.
Does that mean it doesn't allow 100% remote work (where you always work from home but are an employee)?
That's where it becomes fuzzy and no contract in the world will define this precisely.
Plenty of people register businesses at their home address. It entirely depends on the nature of the work as to whether it requires a change of use from the planners or invalidate insurance etc
What kind of insurance are you talking about here? Wouldn't increased presence in the home make any mishaps less likely?
You can easily get cover for working at home. But usually work is excluded from domestic policies; particularly third party liability.
Obviously the liabilities vary, if you're doing prototyping of fireworks in your garage then it's a little more risky than coding!
Insurance isn't always priced solely by risk; work-from-home insurance probably reduces claims for many people but that doesn't mean you can't charge more for it.
It would be interesting to know how occupier presence varies with claims made.
Contents & Home insurance - and I guess yes and no. Probably lowers the chance of theft claims, but increases slightly the chance of fire damage and accidental damage to contents. Don't have the actual data to back this up though.
Even if so, I doubt electric company would ever call anyone on that -- that would just be inviting black PR: "you burn coal, and prohibit charging our eco-friendly scooters", "go fix ingesting my solar power into your system first", etc. -- possibly not completely correct, but painful still.
Plus, an electric company might love this: more customers, with demand at off-peak hours that might even slightly reduce the need for energy storage.
In general business tariffs are lower, so I don't see the problem.
nope, not in Europe. Businesses have to pay a lot more than private residences.
It is the case in France and Switzerland, at least.
same in US..
I would guess so. However, the original comment I replied claimed that businesses pay even less than private citizens.
the lack of strict regulations is one of the reasons start-up businesses flourish in the US. Although I am pro-regulation in some issues, I think that European style pain-in-the-ass regulations only hinder technological advancement. Would UBER ever be successful in Europe? Nope.
...uber is successful in Europe. There are cities that banned it, but there are as many that didn't.
Conversely, Uber is not very successful in South-East Asia, but not for the abundance of regulation but for the lack of it - Grab, a local copy-paste of Uber, has become so dominant that Uber had to leave most of the markets there
And indeed Uber has been a catalyst in several EU countries for taxi deregulation. They had to leave Finland because it was illegal to be an Uber driver without having a ”traditional” taxi license; a legislation change will come into effect this summer that greatly deregulates the taxi industry. So I guess they succeeded in being disruptive, but I agree with the other commenter that Uber is probably not the best example from corporate ethics point of view.
> uber is successful in Europe.
But Europe was an expansion market for them, after they spent a while working out early kinks in the US. I think the post you are commenting on meant success as a startup, which is very different from successfully expanding there.
yeap, the ones who didn't ban are the ones who didn't apply all these useless strict regulations.
In Germany, it is still not possible to take an Uber ride, for example. Besides, if it started in Europe as a small start-up it would be killed right away with tons of regulations anyways. So the only reason that you have Uber in Europe is that it has become a giant company in the US, due fertile environment, and thus could afford all these legal battles to enter the market.
South-East Asia is a different story. It has nothing to do with regulations at all. It is just a completely different mindset there. The fact is though, businesses in those countries can easily flourish as well.
And they make a lot of direct lobbying toward local government to make sure they don't enforce existing taxi laws.
which they should, don't you think? sometimes being disruptive is the only way to go.
No, because they're just trying to get an exemption for themselves. If they were advocating for a change for all, that'd be better.
you cannot advocate for a change for all if you are the only company in that field. Uber was literally a revolution of transportation. However, as a side effect, the changes you advocate sets a precedence, thus also affects everyone, which was the case in the US. There were a few other companies who also benefited from the changes, such as Lift.
"you cannot advocate for a change for all if you are the only company in that field."
But they're not. They're a taxi company. There are tons of those around.
Here is a nice vlog on how Europe lost its tech companies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk
I'm not really convinced by his arguments, a lot of European countries have a higher free market index than the US and US taxes are more complex than a good half of European countries.
I think he overestimates the impact of regulation & "culture" (what does that even mean in a place as diverse as Europe?) and underestimates the effect of having a large market in the US where everyone speaks the same language and have more or less the same culture.
I don't think that Uber was a good example of a good company hindered by regulations...
The pain-in-the-ass regulations also save a lot of people's time and money (Theranos-style startups are much less likely to pop-up over this side of the Atlantic also).
It's a trade-off, like most things in life.
For every Theranos, there are 25 Stripes, Dropboxes, and Mixpanels.
It’s not a good trade off at all.
Unless you're one of the little people whose health was harmed in the Theranos fiasco. Or are those people acceptable sacrifices?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-patients-hurt-by-theranos-1...
I highly doubt that.
Gray area I'm sure, in this case, the electrical company wouldn't know.
Is it legal in the US to use regular cars for taxi purposes? Operating a taxi without a taxi license? Operating a hotel without a hotel license? It's companies like these, and uber, and airb&b, etc that skirt around the laws.
I think some better vetting of hunters and maybe capping the amount of people for area's to hunt for them would be a start? Seems now it's a wild west when it comes to who gets at them first.
> Seems now it's a wild west when it comes to who gets at them first.
Why’s that a problem for the companies though?
If your company decides on a PR stunt on 5th avenue by spraying the streets full of dollar bills, creating a riot, I'm pretty sure you're liable.
They end up paying more to recovery people than they're earning from people renting the things and after a few recoveries, more than the scooters are worth.
Why does it cost you more if people are competing? I think you only pay the successful one.
Gamification. Pure and simple. Even the kids liken it to "getting paid to find rare Pokemon Go". One could even go so far as to find linear optimizations for max network paths ;)
What sweetens the incentive is the "instant" cash transfer within 5 hours or so of drop-off. Mobile micro-work at scale is not only tenable. But may be the preferred operandus of labor market participants.
Out of control? Seems pretty cool that there's a company offering young people a rewarding, competitive, and productive after school activity.
Did you get to the part about violent confrontations between would-be chargers trying to claim the same scooter?
Wait until they get unionized
Never cross a picket line.
People are providing a useful service and getting paid, the madness, the madness!