November 29, 2018 • 37 mins
It seems like electric scooters are everywhere and dockless scooter businesses are becoming the next big thing. Where did these companies come from and why have some cities pushed back?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
staff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
I Heart Radio and how Stuff Works, and I love
all things tech. And once upon a time, not that
long ago, the only dangers I had to worry about
(00:27):
on my walks to and from work were bicyclists, slow walkers, joggers,
the occasional dude on one of those unicycle scooters, and
of course zombies because I'm in Atlanta. But over the
last several months, a new mode of transportation has become
increasingly popular along my walk. It's one that's popping up
(00:49):
in lots of cities across the world. I'm talking about
the GPS enabled rental scooters known as dockless scooters, belonging
to companies like Lime or Bird or one of a
half dozen others. So what's the story behind those scooters?
Where did this idea come from? How did it become
so popular? Well, the logic behind the companies that are
(01:13):
offering this service is actually pretty solid. Right, people need
to get around and getting stuck in traffic is a drag.
If you live in a city where there's a lot
of car traffic, you don't necessarily really enjoy getting into
your car at any given to point, and especially if
you have to go just a short distance. Meanwhile, many
(01:34):
cities in America are not terribly convenient if you happen
to be a pedestrian. Atlanta is one of those cities.
If you don't have a car in Atlanta, it's challenging
to get around. Now, my city is slowly getting better
in this regard, at least in some neighborhoods, but not
all of them. And bicycles can really help cut down
(01:55):
on car traffic plus pollution. It promotes exercise. There's been
several attempts at making bike sharing or renting infrastructure available
in various urban environments, and there are quite a few
bicycle rental companies and programs out there, apart from the
ones that you're gonna encounter in traditional spots like vacation
(02:15):
destinations where you rent a bike for a day and
you go along various bike trails. There's been a few
companies and organizations that have set up businesses and services
in various cities. A few cities, and some companies and
some colleges have experimented with providing free bicycles to a population.
They distribute bicycles across the city and people can just
(02:36):
grab one whenever they need it and ride for as
long as they want to. Google does this on their campus.
If you work at Google's campus and you need to
get across the area for a meeting, it's a pretty
big campus, so if you're in a one building and
you have to go meet in another one, that can
be a bit of a hike. So you can hop
on one of these bikes that are typically parked right
(02:56):
outside of the various buildings and you can ride it
over to your destination. Those bikes have no locking mechanisms
for the most part. A lot of these free bike
programs don't include any locking mechanisms or other preventive measures
in place because it's a little antithetical to the philosophy
behind the program. But that also means that those bikes
(03:17):
aren't protected against theft, and so you can end up
with some pretty tough distribution problems as well. Maybe people
have taken them and not return them, or maybe you
find out that all the bikes tend to end up
at the bottom of hills because no one ever wants
to ride the bikes back up a hill, so they
just leave them at the bottom of the hill, and
that's where they all accumulate. And so the bikes tend
(03:41):
to end up being away from the places where people
need them, and they collect in places where people don't
want them. That's a problem. Then there are coin operated
and automated docking station style services out there. Typically companies
that use these follow the same general plan. You as
a customer would need to go to a specific location,
(04:04):
such as a kiosk or a docking station, where there
would be bikes parked and locked in that station, and
there's the point where you would rent the bike and
it would release the bike, you could go ride it,
and when you were done, you are meant to return
the bike at a similar location. It might be a
similar kiosk or dock that's across town, but it belongs
(04:26):
to the same company and you have to take it
to that specific spot. You can't just leave the bike anywhere,
so you might pay for this rental with a smart
card or a phone map, so it makes it a
little more high tech. But this model has some fairly
big drawbacks as well, and the biggest is that the
renter has to find a spot to drop off the
bike when they're done with it. Now they can't just
(04:50):
ride it too, say their workplace and leave it outside
if their workplace doesn't have a docking station or kiosk.
But then over in China, some entrepreneurs came up with
a different approach. They went with a dockless bike model,
and that model allows riders to grab any available bike
that belongs to the company that happens to be in
(05:11):
the area, and then you unlock the bike with a
companion app in order to rent it, and then you
can ride that bicycle around and when you're done, you
would end the trip. You would pull open your app
and say all right, I'm done, and the bike would
have an electronic lock that would engage and prevent the
(05:31):
wheel or both wheels from turning, and then you would
just leave the bike wherever it happens to be, preferably
parked out of the way so it's not in the
line of traffic, but you can just leave it there.
And at the end of the day you might have
crews to go out and retrieve bicycles and then redistribute them,
or if they happen to be electronic bicycles like the
(05:53):
electric scooters are that you've been seeing popping up everywhere.
Maybe first they take them back to reach charge at
a central facility and then redistribute them later on early
the next morning. So your basic components of these bikes,
in addition to your typical bicycle parts that is, would
include a GPS receiver that is able to identify where
(06:16):
the bike is UH. Then there's some sort of transmitter
that sends this information, this location information back out to
the general system that the company uses to keep track
of all the different bikes UH. And then you would
have some sort of unique code on the bike itself.
There might be a string of characters, or it might
be a QR code, and this would be what the
(06:39):
user would input in their app to let the system
know this is the specific bicycle I want to use.
This is also a good way for the company to
make sure that if someone has rented a bike and
they're there just temporarily leaving it outside, they can keep
that bicycle locked until the UH the initial writer has
(07:01):
completely released it is that way you don't have to
worry about riding a bicycle to say a local store,
leaving it outside and then coming out and finding out
that the bike that you had rented is now gone
because someone else has rented it after you went inside
the store. Anyway, there's also the electric lock. Obviously, that's
the really important part. It can disengage or engage after
(07:22):
receiving the appropriate signal as relayed by the company's service.
So let's do a quick rundown of the major component
here of GPS, because I think it's fascinating how GPS works,
and it's been a long time since I've actually talked
about the process, and it really lets you appreciate the
(07:43):
ingenuity that went into designing the GPS navigation system. So
GPS stands for Global Positioning System, and so way above
our heads, way on space, there are a collection of
GPS satellites just whizzing around of there, and there about
thirty of them out in space. They were originally intended
(08:03):
to provide navigational data to the US military, but in
the ninety nineties, the US President Bill Clinton did away
with a policy that was called selective availability. Selective availability
would purposefully introduce errors into the positioning data. So if
you had a receiver and you didn't have the right
(08:26):
code to tune into the GPS network, you would get
location information that was wrong on purpose, not completely wrong,
but it wouldn't be accurate to within a few hundred feet.
So it wasn't really useful for anything because you wouldn't
you know it would It would be too imprecise. If
(08:48):
you were using it to get from point A to
point B. As a navigation system, it wouldn't recognize that
the turn you needed to take was a mile behind you. Well,
maybe a miles being pretty I'm exaggerating there, but you
might pass a turn and it might be several seconds
after you've passed it before your navigation system says, hey,
(09:10):
turn right at that place that was behind you. That
would be a problem. So Clinton did away with that
in the nineties, and at that point anyone could access
the accurate information. Before then, it was just the military
that could, and it was part of a strategy to
keep things safe by keeping that a military operation that
(09:36):
kind of expired in the nineties. Now anyone can use
GPS data and have it be pretty precise to within
just a few feet, So that's much more useful if
you want to do like point to point navigation systems.
So how does it work well. Each of those satellites
in that group overhead are sending out pulses of information,
and those pulses include a time stamp, which is incredibly important.
(10:00):
The time stamp indicates when the pulse is leaving the
satellite and also information about the satellites position above the Earth.
So no matter where you are on Earth, there are
at least four GPS satellites within line of sight of you.
That is, you are visible to at least four satellites.
(10:20):
A GPS receiver picks up on those signals that are
being sent out by the satellites, so it's essentially a
very high tech electronic ear And because the signals include
the satellites positional information and a time stamp, the receiver
can use that information to calculate how far away it
is from that respective satellite. The signals travel at the
(10:43):
speed of light, so you start with the time it
took from the point that the data was time stamped
to when it was received by the receiver, and then
work backward to figure out how far away the receiver
is from that satellite. So you know, if I were
to say, it takes the sound I make travels and
(11:03):
I'm just making this number of Let's say the sound
I make travels one feet every second, and it took
five seconds from the time I made a sound. Too.
When you heard it, you do some math, you say, oh,
that means I'm five feet away from Jonathan. Again, that
was just me using a very basic, completely not realistic example.
(11:24):
So the problem here is that this does not actually
tell you what your position is from one satellite. It's
one satellite alone, just tells you how far away you
are from that satellite. Doesn't tell you anything about your position,
just that you could be, in theory at any point
that is that distance away from the respective satellite. So
(11:48):
if you were to render this in a three D application,
You've got a satellite that's an orbit around Earth, and
you say, like, well, according to the this time stamp,
I must be I don't know, let's say five kilometers
from this satellite. Well, you could identify the satellite up
(12:08):
in the sky and you could draw a transparent sphere
that's five kilometers out from every direction from that satellite.
It would be like this globe surrounding the satellite. Some
of that sphere would intersect with the surface of Earth,
but that would mean that you had a whole bunch
of potential points where you could be based upon your
(12:30):
distance from that one satellite. So that's not enough to
let you know where you are, right, that's not enough information.
You could potentially be anywhere along those points of contact.
So you then have to look at more than one satellite.
If you can pick up signals from multiple satellites, you
can determine where you are. So you know you are
(12:53):
X distance from satellite A, your y distance from satellite B,
and your Z distance from satellite see. So you draw
your spheres around these three different satellites. They're all going
to intersect at a point on the face of Earth,
and that would be your location. That's the one point
that is the distance from all three of those satellites,
(13:14):
the respective distance from each of those satellites, so it
tells you where you would be. This approach, by the
way of determining your location is called trilateration. This is
different from triangulation because, as that name implies, triangulation is
all about using angles to determine your position. Trilateration is
(13:35):
about using distances from different known points. Also a word
about that time feature. This is also I think really interesting.
It's absolutely necessary for the satellites to send the time
data or else there's no way to calculate the distance
between the satellites and the receiver. But keeping accurate time
isn't an incredible challenge because you could easily have clocks
(14:00):
run out of uh, they could get desynchronized, right, This
just can happen. So GPS satellites do this. They keep
accurate synchronized time by using atomic clocks. Atomic clocks use
the resonance frequencies of atoms as the resonator. The resonator
is the part of the clock that keeps time. It's
kind of I come grandfather's clock clocks pendulum. Usually it
(14:22):
swings back once every second. That's a very slow resonator.
Atoms resonate much much much more more quickly, and more importantly,
if you have the atoms of specific stuff, they're always
going to resonate at the same frequency. They're very consistent.
I've got a little bit more to say about keeping
time with the satellites and the GPS network, as well
(14:43):
as getting back into the electric scooter land. But before
I get into any of that, let's take a quick
break to thank our sponsor. In addition to keeping accurate time.
The GPS network has to account for general and special relativity.
(15:05):
Yeah we're talking super important science here. So, according to
general relativity, the clocks on the satellites would run faster
than clocks on Earth because time runs slower if it's
in an environment that has a stronger gravitational pull. And
a clock on Earth would have a stronger gravitational pull
on it than a clock on a satellite, so the
(15:27):
clocks on Earth would run a little more slowly than
a clock in space. However, then you have special relativity.
Special relativity says that the relative speed of a given
object also determines how time will pass for that object.
The faster the object is going relative to another object,
(15:47):
the slower time will appear to pass for that uh
fast moving object. So, since satellites are moving very quickly
relative to a clock on Earth, the clocks on satellite
will appear to run more slowly than o'clock on Earth.
So they appear to run more quickly due to general relativity,
but more slowly due to special relativity. Special in general
(16:10):
relativity don't quite cancel each other out, so the GPS
network actually has to take into account both special and
general relativity when trying to make sure all these clocks
are synchronized properly, and it shows that Einstein was really
onto something and who would have thought that I could
fit in this quick discussion about relativity in an episode
that's all about electric scooters. So connected to this GPS
(16:33):
receiver on these dockless bikes and scooters as a processor
and a wireless communications device. It might be the equivalent
of like a cell phone. There's some that use three
gene networks to send information back to the general system,
but different ones may use different proprietary approaches. The nature
(16:53):
of the communications device depends upon the company, but essentially
it just comes out to being a type of wireless
ray deo that sends out information about the bike or
scooters location. The respective company or organization or whatever is
handling this receives that signal and then registers the vehicle's
location and frequently will incorporate the information into the app
(17:17):
that customers use. So if you're a customer, you can
follow up an app and you can look at a
map of your area and it should highlight the location
of available vehicles because they are constantly paying the system
with their location. This is also how the service is
able to locate these individual vehicles at the end of
(17:39):
the day so that they can redistribute them in the
appropriate places and also recharge any that run on electricity.
The electronic lock prevents people from just grabbing a scooter
or bike and taking it for a joy ride or
stealing it for themselves, and the lock prevents one or
both wheels from turning, So not much more to say
about that. It's pretty basic piece of technology. The unique
(17:59):
identify or for the bike, like I said, could be
a QR code, it could be a string of characters,
but it's unique to the bike or scooter so that
the network can send a signal for the lock to
disengage and begin the rental period for that user. Also
to alert users to the location of specific bikes, and
to keep the location of bikes that are still being
rented off of the map. Obviously, you wouldn't want to
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show the location of every single vehicle that was belonging
to that system, because some of them might be in
use and they would not be available to someone else
who wants to just grab one right then and there.
So you have to have a way of identifying each
of these and saying all right, well, this one over
here is not in use, therefore I'm going to show
(18:43):
it on the map, whereas this one over here is
being used right now by somebody, so I'm not going
to have that pop up on the map. Okay. Now,
I mentioned earlier that these companies got started in China,
or that this kind of service got started in China.
The two largest companies in China that do this kind
of thing, especially with bicycles, are called o fo Ofo
(19:04):
That one has more than two million bikes in forty
three cities in China, and another one called Mobike, which
has more than one million bikes of its own. Now,
inspired by the success of those businesses in China, several
people in America decided to give this same concept to
go and early companies to get into dockleas bike sharing
in the US where Zagster Blue Go Go, which was
(19:28):
a Chinese company, subsequently it went bankrupt. There was a
spin which was recently acquired by Ford that Social Bicycles
also known as Jump Bikes, which is now owned by
Uber Motivated Company which is now owned by Lift and
Lime or as it was originally known, Lime Bike. Many
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of those companies would pop up around the same time
around two thousand seventeen early two thousand eighteen, but in
different cities, and would rapidly expand out to other locations
as soon as the company's had secured enough funding to
do that, and funding came along pretty darn quickly. There
are a lot of different examples, but I'm gonna look
at two specifically. I'm gonna start with a line Bike
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as an example. It's admittedly a pretty dramatic example, but
I think this is an interesting topic, not just from
the text side, but also from the business side. So
line Bike started as a startup in early and it
was not the first dockless bike startup in the United States,
but it did help define the model for success. You
(20:35):
had co founders Brad Boo and Toby's son. They started
the company in San Mateo, California, and they had the
goal of creating a dockless bike rental company akin to
what was going on in China. The actual rollout of
bikes would happen in April. Like many other bike sharing
and renting companies, Linebike opted to use special tires for
(20:56):
their bikes. They didn't use the inflated tires that you
would typically find on a bicycle. Instead, they are foam
core tires. This helps cut down on maintenance and repair costs,
as those tires aren't in as much danger of ripping
apart or deflating, you know, getting a puncture. Other companies
have used similar tires, some of them are even solid
rubber tires. I imagine that these probably are a bit
(21:19):
more stiff in the ride than your typical inflated tire bikes,
but I've never actually been on once, I don't know.
The pricing model for a line Bike originally was a
dollar every half hour, and investors obviously thought that this
was a promising idea, so at launch, firms like Andrea
sen Horowitz and I d G Ventures poured twelve million
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dollars into the company, and that was just the first
round of funding, which happened in March. The following October
they had a second round of funding where they raised
fifty million dollars in investment. Then in February, line Bike
got another round of funding, this time at seventy million dollars,
and in July two thousand eighteen, they got yet another
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round of funding for an amazing three hundred thirty five
million dollars in investments, which meant that by July eighteen,
Lime had reached a valuation of one point one billion dollars,
and by then the company wasn't just offering up bikes
but also electric scooters. But that's not all. In October
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two thousand eighteen, Bloomberg reported that Lime was looking for
even more financing, and this time at evaluation of more
than three billion dollars. Rumor has it that the company
has also been in talks with Uber about a possible acquisition.
And Lime story is incredible, but it's not unique. There's
another electric scooter duckless rental company called Bird that has
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also experienced a meteoric rise. Bird was founded by a
man named Travis vander Zanden. It was launched in two
thousand seventeen in Santa Monica, California, and vanders Enden had
previously worked as an executive at both Lift and Uber,
so he had experience in this world, just in the
car world. Uh leading into this, he secured fifteen million
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dollars in funding in February two thousand eighteen. Just one
month later, a second round of funding raised one hundred
million dollars on in May, the company saw another one
hundred fifty million dollars in investment, which catapulted Bird into
the billion dollar valuation, making Bird the startup to reach
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the fabled unicorn status the fastest and start up speak,
a unicorn is a company that reaches a billion dollars
in valuation, and you hear a lot about unicorns in
tech business speak. But of course the story doesn't stop there.
In June two thousand eighteen, Bird got another three hundred
million dollars in financing that boosted the valuation up to
(23:53):
two billion, and Bird, like Lime, is seeking additional financing
and apparently is doing so at evaluation even more than
lines three point three billion dollars. Incredible. The electric scooter
trend started up around the end of and it really
began to get momentum, so to speak. In generally, the
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companies behind these business models followed a pretty brazen philosophy.
They would move operations into a city, they would secure
facilities to recharge scooters, and they would hire on staff
to retrieve the vehicles at the end of the day
and then place those scooters in strategic high traffic areas
the next morning, all without first talking to city officials
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about it. The general approach has been, don't ask for permission,
just go out and do it, and then deal with
any issues as they pop up. What just caused more
than just a few problems along the way. I'll explain
more in just a moment, but first let's take another
quick break to thank our sponsor. It's a pretty common
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thread in technology that the law tends to lag behind innovation. Frequently,
inventive people will create transformative technology that does not neatly
fit into pre existing regulatory infrastructure, and then you get
the awkward scramble as governments try to incorporate something new
into a system that doesn't always deal with new stuff
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really well. We've seen this with autonomous cars, we're seeing
it with artificial intelligence, and we're also seeing it with
these bike rental and scooter rental companies. Rather than risk
being denied the chance to do business in a city,
many of these companies bypass the tricky step of getting
permission and they just go straight into getting to work.
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But then you get a sudden flood of scooters in
a city that may or may not have local laws
dictating how such vehicles are supposed to operate, and cities
scooters might be treated like bicycles, and there may be
rules in place that say writers are supposed to wear
helmets at all times, they're supposed to stick to roads
and streets, they're supposed to stay off sidewalks. Other cities
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might have the opposite. They might say that scooters are
not street legal and people should never ride on streets
or roads and only stick to maybe bike paths, sidewalks,
that sort of thing. Some cities have no real regulations
at all for them because there are still a relatively
new form of transportation. So if you live in a
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city that has one or more of these companies that
are in operation in your area, you've likely either heard
someone complaining about them, or maybe you've done some grousing yourself.
I know I have, But in my case it tends
to be directed not towards the companies necessarily, as I
think their business model is a valid one, if not
(26:55):
questionably applied. I think that asking for the permit approach
is the more responsible way to do it, maybe not
the most profitable, but more responsible. But my ire is
directed more toward irresponsible or disrespectful customers. You can't necessarily
blame a company for the quality of its customers unless
that company is actively cultivating a customer base of jerk
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faces through its messaging, branding, and execution. But just a
quick search online for duckless electric scooters or using actual
company names like Lime or Bird or one of the
numerous other companies out there is going to bring up
tons of articles about how the scooters are causing headaches
in cities around the world. So, for example, a piece
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on NPR's website that was published in August two thousand
eighteen has the title Duckless scooters gain Popularity and scorn
across the US. The piece details how the scooters are
getting an enthusiastic reaction from users and inspiring frustration or
worse in others, and it points out that now there
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are entire social media accounts dedicated to some of the
more egregious examples of bad user behavior, such as an
Instagram account called scooters Behaving Badly. City governments are starting
to respond to this. In June two thousand eighteen, San
Francisco's government ordered all electric scooter companies to cease and
(28:21):
desist operations until those companies secured permits. The city announced
that all electric scooters from those companies would have to
be off San Francisco streets and sidewalks by June four,
two thousand eighteen. Otherwise the companies would face a one
dollars per day fine for every scooter of theirs that
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was left in a public right of way after June four.
In addition, San Francisco City government ruled that it would
only issue permits for up to five companies MAX in
a pilot program. Why did San Francisco react this way,
It was largely in response to complaints from city residents.
There were numerous incidents of scooters blocking sidewalks and ramps
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up to sidewalks, which made it harder for people to
navigate when they were just walking on foot as a pedestrian.
The city was particularly concerned about the welfare of the
elderly and those with mobility issues, because you know, you
have a scooter left on a sidewalk ramp that might
prevent someone in a wheelchair from being able to get
off the street and onto the sidewalk. In addition, there
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were concerns that writers were not operating the scooters safely
or even with common sense, in some cases, putting themselves
and others at risk. The permit program allows for a
one year trial, and that trial has some other pretty
big restrictions on it. Within the first six months of
the trial, there could be no more than one thousand,
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two hundred fifty scooters on San Francisco's streets. After that
half year period of things are looking okay like they're
still working, then the city government can bump that up
to two thousand, five hundred scooters for the entire city.
But to be considered for a permit, the companies have
to provide proof that they will operate responsibly within the city,
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which includes having a plan in place to keep sidewalks
clear of the scooters, which seems to me to be
a pretty tall order because that relies on user behavior,
and if users don't follow the rules, the companies are
the ones that suffer for it. That might not be
entirely fair, but at the same time, I don't really
know what the solution would be, as it's pretty hard
to dictate to users what they must and must not
(30:31):
do when they are unsupervised. In addition to keeping the
sidewalks clear, the companies also have to provide insurance that
to give trip data to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation agency,
and they have to prove that the companies have privacy
and security measures in place to protect customers. In October
two thousand eighteen, San Francisco began the scooter share permit
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and pilot program with just two companies. One of them
is called Scoot and the other is called Skip. These
two companies operate in relatively small regions in the city.
I mean they have to. There are only one thousand,
two d fifty scooters allowed in total between the two
of them, so it's impractical to offer wide coverage. You
(31:17):
would rarely, if ever, run across a scooter, so they
operate in pretty small areas within the city. So interestingly,
the limited availability of scooters in certain neighborhoods in San
Francisco has created a new disagreement, a new argument among
city officials. There are representatives from some of those neighborhoods
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who have complained that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authorities
approach means that the districts they represent have few, if
any scooters available, so the people who live in those
districts can't take advantage of those services. So while the
initial problem was that there were too many of these
darned scooters everywhere. Now the opposite is true. Now you've
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got people complaining that there aren't enough scooters out there,
and that's probably in the back of the minds of
many of the executives at these companies, because if they
can launch their service quickly in cities without first getting
permission from the city government, they can create a business
that at least some people are going to find useful
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and fun, and some will even think of it as
a a necessary service once they start relying on it
more frequently. And then as cities respond to complaints or
they try to get a grip on what is going
on to make sure everything is being operated in a
safe and responsible manner, the cities are the ones that
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have to deal with the backlash from customers. If they
are to remove those scooters, you're gonna have a bunch
of angry citizens who say, you're taking away something that
I use to get to and from work, for example.
So it's kind of like a parent taking away a
favorite toy from their child and then having to deal
(32:59):
with the imper tantrum, except in this case, I'm being unfair.
I think temper tantrum is really being unfair. Because for
some people, these these electric scooters really have been a
way to become independent of cars. If they're just taking
short trips between locations, then they can hop on one
of these things. They don't have to drive. They're not
(33:21):
contributing to the traffic issues or the pollution, So there
are legit arguments for using these services, even if those
services came into cities without the first, you know, getting permission.
While all this is going on, it is good to
remember that Blue Go Go, that Chinese bike sharing company
I mentioned earlier, did go out of business and went bankrupt.
(33:44):
So some analysts say that might indicate that this whole
duckless sharing model, both for bicycles and for scooters, could
be a bubble, and that there could be a bubble
burst in the future. There's also no shortage of competing
companies out there, although only a few have really seen
the monumental financial success at least from an investment standpoint
(34:06):
of a company like Bird or Lime, and as right
hailing companies like Uber and Lift get more involved, will
probably see more integrated approaches rolling forward, so to speak.
I didn't even cover issues of cities seeing a rise
in things like people getting injured, broken bones, or even
fist fights that are broken out over scooters. Things like that.
(34:30):
That's also happening. But you know that's again I can't
necessarily fault the companies for this. That's again user behavior.
So will the dockless electric scooter business models survive? I
think so. I think it's likely to continue, and we're
probably gonna see a real patchwork approach to it as
different cities respond in different ways. Some will be more restrictive,
(34:52):
some more permissive, and I doubt all the different companies
are going to stick around. I'm sure a few will
follow in Blue Go Goes Away can eventually go out
of suineness or get acquired by competitors. But at fifteen
cents per minute for a lot of these electric scooter models,
it's a pretty cheap way to get around, and when
you're scooting about at fifteen miles an hour, it's got
(35:12):
to be fun. Also, just full disclosure, I have never
ever ridden on one of these electric scooters. I suspect
I would fall off almost immediately because I'm old and
I don't have great balance. I would love to give
one a try, but I've actually seen a guy take
a really serious spill off of one of these in
a major street in Atlanta called Highland, and he did
(35:35):
a real tumble. And if that had happened to me,
he bounced up pretty quickly and seemed more embarrassed than
anything else. I would not have bounced up. I would
have crunched. I would have been embarrassed and injured. So
I don't know that I'm ever going to get on
one of these anytime soon, but they are interesting to me.
I'm curious if you guys have them in your neighborhoods.
(35:56):
Do you what what's your opinion? Do you think they're great?
Do you think they are a blight on civilization? And
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(36:16):
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(36:37):
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(36:58):
Make me panic, folks. That's what I'm saying. That's it
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for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
staff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
I Heart Radio and how Stuff Works, and I love
all things tech. And once upon a time, not that
long ago, the only dangers I had to worry about
(00:27):
on my walks to and from work were bicyclists, slow walkers, joggers,
the occasional dude on one of those unicycle scooters, and
of course zombies because I'm in Atlanta. But over the
last several months, a new mode of transportation has become
increasingly popular along my walk. It's one that's popping up
(00:49):
in lots of cities across the world. I'm talking about
the GPS enabled rental scooters known as dockless scooters, belonging
to companies like Lime or Bird or one of a
half dozen others. So what's the story behind those scooters?
Where did this idea come from? How did it become
so popular? Well, the logic behind the companies that are
(01:13):
offering this service is actually pretty solid. Right, people need
to get around and getting stuck in traffic is a drag.
If you live in a city where there's a lot
of car traffic, you don't necessarily really enjoy getting into
your car at any given to point, and especially if
you have to go just a short distance. Meanwhile, many
(01:34):
cities in America are not terribly convenient if you happen
to be a pedestrian. Atlanta is one of those cities.
If you don't have a car in Atlanta, it's challenging
to get around. Now, my city is slowly getting better
in this regard, at least in some neighborhoods, but not
all of them. And bicycles can really help cut down
(01:55):
on car traffic plus pollution. It promotes exercise. There's been
several attempts at making bike sharing or renting infrastructure available
in various urban environments, and there are quite a few
bicycle rental companies and programs out there, apart from the
ones that you're gonna encounter in traditional spots like vacation
(02:15):
destinations where you rent a bike for a day and
you go along various bike trails. There's been a few
companies and organizations that have set up businesses and services
in various cities. A few cities, and some companies and
some colleges have experimented with providing free bicycles to a population.
They distribute bicycles across the city and people can just
(02:36):
grab one whenever they need it and ride for as
long as they want to. Google does this on their campus.
If you work at Google's campus and you need to
get across the area for a meeting, it's a pretty
big campus, so if you're in a one building and
you have to go meet in another one, that can
be a bit of a hike. So you can hop
on one of these bikes that are typically parked right
(02:56):
outside of the various buildings and you can ride it
over to your destination. Those bikes have no locking mechanisms
for the most part. A lot of these free bike
programs don't include any locking mechanisms or other preventive measures
in place because it's a little antithetical to the philosophy
behind the program. But that also means that those bikes
(03:17):
aren't protected against theft, and so you can end up
with some pretty tough distribution problems as well. Maybe people
have taken them and not return them, or maybe you
find out that all the bikes tend to end up
at the bottom of hills because no one ever wants
to ride the bikes back up a hill, so they
just leave them at the bottom of the hill, and
that's where they all accumulate. And so the bikes tend
(03:41):
to end up being away from the places where people
need them, and they collect in places where people don't
want them. That's a problem. Then there are coin operated
and automated docking station style services out there. Typically companies
that use these follow the same general plan. You as
a customer would need to go to a specific location,
(04:04):
such as a kiosk or a docking station, where there
would be bikes parked and locked in that station, and
there's the point where you would rent the bike and
it would release the bike, you could go ride it,
and when you were done, you are meant to return
the bike at a similar location. It might be a
similar kiosk or dock that's across town, but it belongs
(04:26):
to the same company and you have to take it
to that specific spot. You can't just leave the bike anywhere,
so you might pay for this rental with a smart
card or a phone map, so it makes it a
little more high tech. But this model has some fairly
big drawbacks as well, and the biggest is that the
renter has to find a spot to drop off the
bike when they're done with it. Now they can't just
(04:50):
ride it too, say their workplace and leave it outside
if their workplace doesn't have a docking station or kiosk.
But then over in China, some entrepreneurs came up with
a different approach. They went with a dockless bike model,
and that model allows riders to grab any available bike
that belongs to the company that happens to be in
(05:11):
the area, and then you unlock the bike with a
companion app in order to rent it, and then you
can ride that bicycle around and when you're done, you
would end the trip. You would pull open your app
and say all right, I'm done, and the bike would
have an electronic lock that would engage and prevent the
(05:31):
wheel or both wheels from turning, and then you would
just leave the bike wherever it happens to be, preferably
parked out of the way so it's not in the
line of traffic, but you can just leave it there.
And at the end of the day you might have
crews to go out and retrieve bicycles and then redistribute them,
or if they happen to be electronic bicycles like the
(05:53):
electric scooters are that you've been seeing popping up everywhere.
Maybe first they take them back to reach charge at
a central facility and then redistribute them later on early
the next morning. So your basic components of these bikes,
in addition to your typical bicycle parts that is, would
include a GPS receiver that is able to identify where
(06:16):
the bike is UH. Then there's some sort of transmitter
that sends this information, this location information back out to
the general system that the company uses to keep track
of all the different bikes UH. And then you would
have some sort of unique code on the bike itself.
There might be a string of characters, or it might
be a QR code, and this would be what the
(06:39):
user would input in their app to let the system
know this is the specific bicycle I want to use.
This is also a good way for the company to
make sure that if someone has rented a bike and
they're there just temporarily leaving it outside, they can keep
that bicycle locked until the UH the initial writer has
(07:01):
completely released it is that way you don't have to
worry about riding a bicycle to say a local store,
leaving it outside and then coming out and finding out
that the bike that you had rented is now gone
because someone else has rented it after you went inside
the store. Anyway, there's also the electric lock. Obviously, that's
the really important part. It can disengage or engage after
(07:22):
receiving the appropriate signal as relayed by the company's service.
So let's do a quick rundown of the major component
here of GPS, because I think it's fascinating how GPS works,
and it's been a long time since I've actually talked
about the process, and it really lets you appreciate the
(07:43):
ingenuity that went into designing the GPS navigation system. So
GPS stands for Global Positioning System, and so way above
our heads, way on space, there are a collection of
GPS satellites just whizzing around of there, and there about
thirty of them out in space. They were originally intended
(08:03):
to provide navigational data to the US military, but in
the ninety nineties, the US President Bill Clinton did away
with a policy that was called selective availability. Selective availability
would purposefully introduce errors into the positioning data. So if
you had a receiver and you didn't have the right
(08:26):
code to tune into the GPS network, you would get
location information that was wrong on purpose, not completely wrong,
but it wouldn't be accurate to within a few hundred feet.
So it wasn't really useful for anything because you wouldn't
you know it would It would be too imprecise. If
(08:48):
you were using it to get from point A to
point B. As a navigation system, it wouldn't recognize that
the turn you needed to take was a mile behind you. Well,
maybe a miles being pretty I'm exaggerating there, but you
might pass a turn and it might be several seconds
after you've passed it before your navigation system says, hey,
(09:10):
turn right at that place that was behind you. That
would be a problem. So Clinton did away with that
in the nineties, and at that point anyone could access
the accurate information. Before then, it was just the military
that could, and it was part of a strategy to
keep things safe by keeping that a military operation that
(09:36):
kind of expired in the nineties. Now anyone can use
GPS data and have it be pretty precise to within
just a few feet, So that's much more useful if
you want to do like point to point navigation systems.
So how does it work well. Each of those satellites
in that group overhead are sending out pulses of information,
and those pulses include a time stamp, which is incredibly important.
(10:00):
The time stamp indicates when the pulse is leaving the
satellite and also information about the satellites position above the Earth.
So no matter where you are on Earth, there are
at least four GPS satellites within line of sight of you.
That is, you are visible to at least four satellites.
(10:20):
A GPS receiver picks up on those signals that are
being sent out by the satellites, so it's essentially a
very high tech electronic ear And because the signals include
the satellites positional information and a time stamp, the receiver
can use that information to calculate how far away it
is from that respective satellite. The signals travel at the
(10:43):
speed of light, so you start with the time it
took from the point that the data was time stamped
to when it was received by the receiver, and then
work backward to figure out how far away the receiver
is from that satellite. So you know, if I were
to say, it takes the sound I make travels and
(11:03):
I'm just making this number of Let's say the sound
I make travels one feet every second, and it took
five seconds from the time I made a sound. Too.
When you heard it, you do some math, you say, oh,
that means I'm five feet away from Jonathan. Again, that
was just me using a very basic, completely not realistic example.
(11:24):
So the problem here is that this does not actually
tell you what your position is from one satellite. It's
one satellite alone, just tells you how far away you
are from that satellite. Doesn't tell you anything about your position,
just that you could be, in theory at any point
that is that distance away from the respective satellite. So
(11:48):
if you were to render this in a three D application,
You've got a satellite that's an orbit around Earth, and
you say, like, well, according to the this time stamp,
I must be I don't know, let's say five kilometers
from this satellite. Well, you could identify the satellite up
(12:08):
in the sky and you could draw a transparent sphere
that's five kilometers out from every direction from that satellite.
It would be like this globe surrounding the satellite. Some
of that sphere would intersect with the surface of Earth,
but that would mean that you had a whole bunch
of potential points where you could be based upon your
(12:30):
distance from that one satellite. So that's not enough to
let you know where you are, right, that's not enough information.
You could potentially be anywhere along those points of contact.
So you then have to look at more than one satellite.
If you can pick up signals from multiple satellites, you
can determine where you are. So you know you are
(12:53):
X distance from satellite A, your y distance from satellite B,
and your Z distance from satellite see. So you draw
your spheres around these three different satellites. They're all going
to intersect at a point on the face of Earth,
and that would be your location. That's the one point
that is the distance from all three of those satellites,
(13:14):
the respective distance from each of those satellites, so it
tells you where you would be. This approach, by the
way of determining your location is called trilateration. This is
different from triangulation because, as that name implies, triangulation is
all about using angles to determine your position. Trilateration is
(13:35):
about using distances from different known points. Also a word
about that time feature. This is also I think really interesting.
It's absolutely necessary for the satellites to send the time
data or else there's no way to calculate the distance
between the satellites and the receiver. But keeping accurate time
isn't an incredible challenge because you could easily have clocks
(14:00):
run out of uh, they could get desynchronized, right, This
just can happen. So GPS satellites do this. They keep
accurate synchronized time by using atomic clocks. Atomic clocks use
the resonance frequencies of atoms as the resonator. The resonator
is the part of the clock that keeps time. It's
kind of I come grandfather's clock clocks pendulum. Usually it
(14:22):
swings back once every second. That's a very slow resonator.
Atoms resonate much much much more more quickly, and more importantly,
if you have the atoms of specific stuff, they're always
going to resonate at the same frequency. They're very consistent.
I've got a little bit more to say about keeping
time with the satellites and the GPS network, as well
(14:43):
as getting back into the electric scooter land. But before
I get into any of that, let's take a quick
break to thank our sponsor. In addition to keeping accurate time.
The GPS network has to account for general and special relativity.
(15:05):
Yeah we're talking super important science here. So, according to
general relativity, the clocks on the satellites would run faster
than clocks on Earth because time runs slower if it's
in an environment that has a stronger gravitational pull. And
a clock on Earth would have a stronger gravitational pull
on it than a clock on a satellite, so the
(15:27):
clocks on Earth would run a little more slowly than
a clock in space. However, then you have special relativity.
Special relativity says that the relative speed of a given
object also determines how time will pass for that object.
The faster the object is going relative to another object,
(15:47):
the slower time will appear to pass for that uh
fast moving object. So, since satellites are moving very quickly
relative to a clock on Earth, the clocks on satellite
will appear to run more slowly than o'clock on Earth.
So they appear to run more quickly due to general relativity,
but more slowly due to special relativity. Special in general
(16:10):
relativity don't quite cancel each other out, so the GPS
network actually has to take into account both special and
general relativity when trying to make sure all these clocks
are synchronized properly, and it shows that Einstein was really
onto something and who would have thought that I could
fit in this quick discussion about relativity in an episode
that's all about electric scooters. So connected to this GPS
(16:33):
receiver on these dockless bikes and scooters as a processor
and a wireless communications device. It might be the equivalent
of like a cell phone. There's some that use three
gene networks to send information back to the general system,
but different ones may use different proprietary approaches. The nature
(16:53):
of the communications device depends upon the company, but essentially
it just comes out to being a type of wireless
ray deo that sends out information about the bike or
scooters location. The respective company or organization or whatever is
handling this receives that signal and then registers the vehicle's
location and frequently will incorporate the information into the app
(17:17):
that customers use. So if you're a customer, you can
follow up an app and you can look at a
map of your area and it should highlight the location
of available vehicles because they are constantly paying the system
with their location. This is also how the service is
able to locate these individual vehicles at the end of
(17:39):
the day so that they can redistribute them in the
appropriate places and also recharge any that run on electricity.
The electronic lock prevents people from just grabbing a scooter
or bike and taking it for a joy ride or
stealing it for themselves, and the lock prevents one or
both wheels from turning, So not much more to say
about that. It's pretty basic piece of technology. The unique
(17:59):
identify or for the bike, like I said, could be
a QR code, it could be a string of characters,
but it's unique to the bike or scooter so that
the network can send a signal for the lock to
disengage and begin the rental period for that user. Also
to alert users to the location of specific bikes, and
to keep the location of bikes that are still being
rented off of the map. Obviously, you wouldn't want to
(18:22):
show the location of every single vehicle that was belonging
to that system, because some of them might be in
use and they would not be available to someone else
who wants to just grab one right then and there.
So you have to have a way of identifying each
of these and saying all right, well, this one over
here is not in use, therefore I'm going to show
(18:43):
it on the map, whereas this one over here is
being used right now by somebody, so I'm not going
to have that pop up on the map. Okay. Now,
I mentioned earlier that these companies got started in China,
or that this kind of service got started in China.
The two largest companies in China that do this kind
of thing, especially with bicycles, are called o fo Ofo
(19:04):
That one has more than two million bikes in forty
three cities in China, and another one called Mobike, which
has more than one million bikes of its own. Now,
inspired by the success of those businesses in China, several
people in America decided to give this same concept to
go and early companies to get into dockleas bike sharing
in the US where Zagster Blue Go Go, which was
(19:28):
a Chinese company, subsequently it went bankrupt. There was a
spin which was recently acquired by Ford that Social Bicycles
also known as Jump Bikes, which is now owned by
Uber Motivated Company which is now owned by Lift and
Lime or as it was originally known, Lime Bike. Many
(19:49):
of those companies would pop up around the same time
around two thousand seventeen early two thousand eighteen, but in
different cities, and would rapidly expand out to other locations
as soon as the company's had secured enough funding to
do that, and funding came along pretty darn quickly. There
are a lot of different examples, but I'm gonna look
at two specifically. I'm gonna start with a line Bike
(20:11):
as an example. It's admittedly a pretty dramatic example, but
I think this is an interesting topic, not just from
the text side, but also from the business side. So
line Bike started as a startup in early and it
was not the first dockless bike startup in the United States,
but it did help define the model for success. You
(20:35):
had co founders Brad Boo and Toby's son. They started
the company in San Mateo, California, and they had the
goal of creating a dockless bike rental company akin to
what was going on in China. The actual rollout of
bikes would happen in April. Like many other bike sharing
and renting companies, Linebike opted to use special tires for
(20:56):
their bikes. They didn't use the inflated tires that you
would typically find on a bicycle. Instead, they are foam
core tires. This helps cut down on maintenance and repair costs,
as those tires aren't in as much danger of ripping
apart or deflating, you know, getting a puncture. Other companies
have used similar tires, some of them are even solid
rubber tires. I imagine that these probably are a bit
(21:19):
more stiff in the ride than your typical inflated tire bikes,
but I've never actually been on once, I don't know.
The pricing model for a line Bike originally was a
dollar every half hour, and investors obviously thought that this
was a promising idea, so at launch, firms like Andrea
sen Horowitz and I d G Ventures poured twelve million
(21:42):
dollars into the company, and that was just the first
round of funding, which happened in March. The following October
they had a second round of funding where they raised
fifty million dollars in investment. Then in February, line Bike
got another round of funding, this time at seventy million dollars,
and in July two thousand eighteen, they got yet another
(22:04):
round of funding for an amazing three hundred thirty five
million dollars in investments, which meant that by July eighteen,
Lime had reached a valuation of one point one billion dollars,
and by then the company wasn't just offering up bikes
but also electric scooters. But that's not all. In October
(22:24):
two thousand eighteen, Bloomberg reported that Lime was looking for
even more financing, and this time at evaluation of more
than three billion dollars. Rumor has it that the company
has also been in talks with Uber about a possible acquisition.
And Lime story is incredible, but it's not unique. There's
another electric scooter duckless rental company called Bird that has
(22:47):
also experienced a meteoric rise. Bird was founded by a
man named Travis vander Zanden. It was launched in two
thousand seventeen in Santa Monica, California, and vanders Enden had
previously worked as an executive at both Lift and Uber,
so he had experience in this world, just in the
car world. Uh leading into this, he secured fifteen million
(23:10):
dollars in funding in February two thousand eighteen. Just one
month later, a second round of funding raised one hundred
million dollars on in May, the company saw another one
hundred fifty million dollars in investment, which catapulted Bird into
the billion dollar valuation, making Bird the startup to reach
(23:30):
the fabled unicorn status the fastest and start up speak,
a unicorn is a company that reaches a billion dollars
in valuation, and you hear a lot about unicorns in
tech business speak. But of course the story doesn't stop there.
In June two thousand eighteen, Bird got another three hundred
million dollars in financing that boosted the valuation up to
(23:53):
two billion, and Bird, like Lime, is seeking additional financing
and apparently is doing so at evaluation even more than
lines three point three billion dollars. Incredible. The electric scooter
trend started up around the end of and it really
began to get momentum, so to speak. In generally, the
(24:17):
companies behind these business models followed a pretty brazen philosophy.
They would move operations into a city, they would secure
facilities to recharge scooters, and they would hire on staff
to retrieve the vehicles at the end of the day
and then place those scooters in strategic high traffic areas
the next morning, all without first talking to city officials
(24:39):
about it. The general approach has been, don't ask for permission,
just go out and do it, and then deal with
any issues as they pop up. What just caused more
than just a few problems along the way. I'll explain
more in just a moment, but first let's take another
quick break to thank our sponsor. It's a pretty common
(25:05):
thread in technology that the law tends to lag behind innovation. Frequently,
inventive people will create transformative technology that does not neatly
fit into pre existing regulatory infrastructure, and then you get
the awkward scramble as governments try to incorporate something new
into a system that doesn't always deal with new stuff
(25:27):
really well. We've seen this with autonomous cars, we're seeing
it with artificial intelligence, and we're also seeing it with
these bike rental and scooter rental companies. Rather than risk
being denied the chance to do business in a city,
many of these companies bypass the tricky step of getting
permission and they just go straight into getting to work.
(25:50):
But then you get a sudden flood of scooters in
a city that may or may not have local laws
dictating how such vehicles are supposed to operate, and cities
scooters might be treated like bicycles, and there may be
rules in place that say writers are supposed to wear
helmets at all times, they're supposed to stick to roads
and streets, they're supposed to stay off sidewalks. Other cities
(26:13):
might have the opposite. They might say that scooters are
not street legal and people should never ride on streets
or roads and only stick to maybe bike paths, sidewalks,
that sort of thing. Some cities have no real regulations
at all for them because there are still a relatively
new form of transportation. So if you live in a
(26:33):
city that has one or more of these companies that
are in operation in your area, you've likely either heard
someone complaining about them, or maybe you've done some grousing yourself.
I know I have, But in my case it tends
to be directed not towards the companies necessarily, as I
think their business model is a valid one, if not
(26:55):
questionably applied. I think that asking for the permit approach
is the more responsible way to do it, maybe not
the most profitable, but more responsible. But my ire is
directed more toward irresponsible or disrespectful customers. You can't necessarily
blame a company for the quality of its customers unless
that company is actively cultivating a customer base of jerk
(27:18):
faces through its messaging, branding, and execution. But just a
quick search online for duckless electric scooters or using actual
company names like Lime or Bird or one of the
numerous other companies out there is going to bring up
tons of articles about how the scooters are causing headaches
in cities around the world. So, for example, a piece
(27:40):
on NPR's website that was published in August two thousand
eighteen has the title Duckless scooters gain Popularity and scorn
across the US. The piece details how the scooters are
getting an enthusiastic reaction from users and inspiring frustration or
worse in others, and it points out that now there
(28:00):
are entire social media accounts dedicated to some of the
more egregious examples of bad user behavior, such as an
Instagram account called scooters Behaving Badly. City governments are starting
to respond to this. In June two thousand eighteen, San
Francisco's government ordered all electric scooter companies to cease and
(28:21):
desist operations until those companies secured permits. The city announced
that all electric scooters from those companies would have to
be off San Francisco streets and sidewalks by June four,
two thousand eighteen. Otherwise the companies would face a one
dollars per day fine for every scooter of theirs that
(28:42):
was left in a public right of way after June four.
In addition, San Francisco City government ruled that it would
only issue permits for up to five companies MAX in
a pilot program. Why did San Francisco react this way,
It was largely in response to complaints from city residents.
There were numerous incidents of scooters blocking sidewalks and ramps
(29:07):
up to sidewalks, which made it harder for people to
navigate when they were just walking on foot as a pedestrian.
The city was particularly concerned about the welfare of the
elderly and those with mobility issues, because you know, you
have a scooter left on a sidewalk ramp that might
prevent someone in a wheelchair from being able to get
off the street and onto the sidewalk. In addition, there
(29:28):
were concerns that writers were not operating the scooters safely
or even with common sense, in some cases, putting themselves
and others at risk. The permit program allows for a
one year trial, and that trial has some other pretty
big restrictions on it. Within the first six months of
the trial, there could be no more than one thousand,
(29:48):
two hundred fifty scooters on San Francisco's streets. After that
half year period of things are looking okay like they're
still working, then the city government can bump that up
to two thousand, five hundred scooters for the entire city.
But to be considered for a permit, the companies have
to provide proof that they will operate responsibly within the city,
(30:11):
which includes having a plan in place to keep sidewalks
clear of the scooters, which seems to me to be
a pretty tall order because that relies on user behavior,
and if users don't follow the rules, the companies are
the ones that suffer for it. That might not be
entirely fair, but at the same time, I don't really
know what the solution would be, as it's pretty hard
to dictate to users what they must and must not
(30:31):
do when they are unsupervised. In addition to keeping the
sidewalks clear, the companies also have to provide insurance that
to give trip data to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation agency,
and they have to prove that the companies have privacy
and security measures in place to protect customers. In October
two thousand eighteen, San Francisco began the scooter share permit
(30:55):
and pilot program with just two companies. One of them
is called Scoot and the other is called Skip. These
two companies operate in relatively small regions in the city.
I mean they have to. There are only one thousand,
two d fifty scooters allowed in total between the two
of them, so it's impractical to offer wide coverage. You
(31:17):
would rarely, if ever, run across a scooter, so they
operate in pretty small areas within the city. So interestingly,
the limited availability of scooters in certain neighborhoods in San
Francisco has created a new disagreement, a new argument among
city officials. There are representatives from some of those neighborhoods
(31:37):
who have complained that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authorities
approach means that the districts they represent have few, if
any scooters available, so the people who live in those
districts can't take advantage of those services. So while the
initial problem was that there were too many of these
darned scooters everywhere. Now the opposite is true. Now you've
(31:59):
got people complaining that there aren't enough scooters out there,
and that's probably in the back of the minds of
many of the executives at these companies, because if they
can launch their service quickly in cities without first getting
permission from the city government, they can create a business
that at least some people are going to find useful
(32:19):
and fun, and some will even think of it as
a a necessary service once they start relying on it
more frequently. And then as cities respond to complaints or
they try to get a grip on what is going
on to make sure everything is being operated in a
safe and responsible manner, the cities are the ones that
(32:39):
have to deal with the backlash from customers. If they
are to remove those scooters, you're gonna have a bunch
of angry citizens who say, you're taking away something that
I use to get to and from work, for example.
So it's kind of like a parent taking away a
favorite toy from their child and then having to deal
(32:59):
with the imper tantrum, except in this case, I'm being unfair.
I think temper tantrum is really being unfair. Because for
some people, these these electric scooters really have been a
way to become independent of cars. If they're just taking
short trips between locations, then they can hop on one
of these things. They don't have to drive. They're not
(33:21):
contributing to the traffic issues or the pollution, So there
are legit arguments for using these services, even if those
services came into cities without the first, you know, getting permission.
While all this is going on, it is good to
remember that Blue Go Go, that Chinese bike sharing company
I mentioned earlier, did go out of business and went bankrupt.
(33:44):
So some analysts say that might indicate that this whole
duckless sharing model, both for bicycles and for scooters, could
be a bubble, and that there could be a bubble
burst in the future. There's also no shortage of competing
companies out there, although only a few have really seen
the monumental financial success at least from an investment standpoint
(34:06):
of a company like Bird or Lime, and as right
hailing companies like Uber and Lift get more involved, will
probably see more integrated approaches rolling forward, so to speak.
I didn't even cover issues of cities seeing a rise
in things like people getting injured, broken bones, or even
fist fights that are broken out over scooters. Things like that.
(34:30):
That's also happening. But you know that's again I can't
necessarily fault the companies for this. That's again user behavior.
So will the dockless electric scooter business models survive? I
think so. I think it's likely to continue, and we're
probably gonna see a real patchwork approach to it as
different cities respond in different ways. Some will be more restrictive,
(34:52):
some more permissive, and I doubt all the different companies
are going to stick around. I'm sure a few will
follow in Blue Go Goes Away can eventually go out
of suineness or get acquired by competitors. But at fifteen
cents per minute for a lot of these electric scooter models,
it's a pretty cheap way to get around, and when
you're scooting about at fifteen miles an hour, it's got
(35:12):
to be fun. Also, just full disclosure, I have never
ever ridden on one of these electric scooters. I suspect
I would fall off almost immediately because I'm old and
I don't have great balance. I would love to give
one a try, but I've actually seen a guy take
a really serious spill off of one of these in
a major street in Atlanta called Highland, and he did
(35:35):
a real tumble. And if that had happened to me,
he bounced up pretty quickly and seemed more embarrassed than
anything else. I would not have bounced up. I would
have crunched. I would have been embarrassed and injured. So
I don't know that I'm ever going to get on
one of these anytime soon, but they are interesting to me.
I'm curious if you guys have them in your neighborhoods.
(35:56):
Do you what what's your opinion? Do you think they're great?
Do you think they are a blight on civilization? And
if you have any other suggestions for episodes of tech Stuff,
get in touch with me. You can write me. The
email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
You can go to our website that is text stuff
podcast dot com. There are other ways to contact me
(36:16):
on that site. Don't forget to go to our store
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(36:37):
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you can vote all five of those for my show.
I would greatly appreciate it. I look forward to finding
out if I won in late January two thousand nineteen,
and uh then panicking if I have to give a speech.
(36:58):
Make me panic, folks. That's what I'm saying. That's it
for me, and I'll talk to you again really soon
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