Cars lead bikes in one key way

Spoiler: It’s scrap

This week, Uber’s micromobility bet is growing faster than its ride-hailing biz, rumor has it Bird has agreed to acquire Scoot, and SF and Lyft butt heads over exclusivity, but first…

Forget Bike Mountain, Meet Automobile Everest

If you’re the kind of person who subscribes to this newsletter, then you’ve probably seen photos like the one below showing a sea of brightly colored bicycles heaped in a mass graveyard, handlebars twisted and axles bent as far as the eye can see.

Taken in the wake of China’s bike-sharing bust, these snapshots illustrate a vivid cautionary tale about shared mobility and environmentalism: Tech companies win over communities with big promises of cheap, accessible zero-emission transportation, flood the streets with vehicles overnight, and then, when the going gets tough, dump their rides in a landfill and vanish.

And its not just China. Ofo may have junked more hardware than any third-wave micromobility provider, but even high-growth, VC-backed startups in Europe and the U.S. burn through vehicles at an astonishing rate. Your average kick scooter in California can only endure a few months of fleet use before it has to be retired.

Throwaway culture at its worst, right? Not quite. When it comes to scrap, bikes and scooters still have nothing on cars.

Before we go further, if you’re not following Micromobility podcast co-host Oliver Bruce on Twitter, do yourself a favor.

This week Oliver offered a tweet-by-tweet break down of why the mountains of discarded bikes you’ve seen on the news are not as scary as they look. Here’s a sample of his characteristically keen analysis…

The average Chinese bikeshare bike weighed 15-20kgs. There were 25 million of them deployed over the last few years and are mostly scrapped by now. But here's the thing. In aggregate, those 25m were made from steel that weighed about half a million tons (25m*20kg=500k tons).
— oliver bruce (@oliverbruce)
May 31, 2019

Your average car weighs 1600kgs/3500lbs. So all of the Chinese bikes that have been produced equate to around 300,000 cars. For reference, that's only about 1-2% of what the US will *scrap* THIS YEAR. Man, if you worry about this waste, I have a pile of used cars to show you.
— oliver bruce (@oliverbruce)
May 31, 2019

Plus, we are trying to deploy scooters and e/-bikes that were largely designed for consumer use into shared use cases where they get thrashed. They're very fragile. We don't have 100 years of evolution and refinement like the car has had. It's understandable the tech sucks.
— oliver bruce (@oliverbruce)
May 31, 2019

You can see this in the new designs from Bird and Lime - they're building scooters that will last 6-12-18 months now. They need to do this to improve the unit economics (if you're spending your VC money replacing scooters all the time, your business is going to succccccck).
— oliver bruce (@oliverbruce)
May 31, 2019

But it's largely useless to look at the waste now and try and compare it to where things will be in even 12-24-36 months from now. The quality of vehicles is going to improve super quickly. Waste will minimise as we refine the use cases and better design for them.
— oliver bruce (@oliverbruce)
May 31, 2019

Full #thread here. Can’t recommend it enough.

Achtung!

Don’t forget to buy your tickets to Micromobility Europe (Berlin / Oct 1) before the Spring Special deal (almost 50% off) ends.

This discount won’t last forever. Team Micromobility is in Berlin this week and it’s already starting to feel a lot like summer 🌞

Reserve your spot here

Home of Micromobility Europe
— James Gross (@James_Gross)
Jun 4, 2019

What You Need to Know This Week

With San Francisco seeking new dockless bike-share operators, Lyft threatens a legal challenge over an exclusivity agreement to operate the Ford GoBike program. | SF Chronicle

Big week for Flash. The Berlin-based micromobility company rebranded itself as Circ, revealed that it had hit 1 million rides in 4.5 months since launch, and acquired the Spanish scooter rental startup Koko. | TechCrunch

… meanwhile, Circ’s hometown rival Tier unveiled a hard-wearing new e-scooter that is designed to last at least 12 months in operations. The company also announced it had hit 2 million rides. | TechCrunch

After one of its scooters caught fire in D.C. last week, Skip suspended service in the U.S. capitol as well as San Francisco. The company has investigated the incident and will re-deploy its fleet this week. | SF Examiner

According to a new study, separated bike lanes make cities safer not just for cyclists but for drivers as well. | StreetsBlog

California needs to reduce its vehicle miles traveled. EVs aren’t helping. | Curbed

At Uber, micromobility services and Uber Eats are growing faster than the core ride-hailing business. | TechCrunch

You know the two-sided digital display ads on top of old-school taxis? A new startup has raised $30 million to put them on Ubers and Lyfts. | Venturebeat

Bird has unveiled a two-seater, moped-style electric bike, the Bird Cruiser, which is rumored to be a collab with Juiced Bikes. | CNET

Electric cargo bikes are replacing delivery vans in London. | Forbes

Is consolidation coming to the crowded scooter market? Word on the street is that Bird will acquire Scoot. The move would make sense for a number of reasons, most notably, Bird does not operate on-demand scooter service in any of Scoot’s markets, including San Francisco and Barcelona. | TechCrunch

Goings On

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