Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Transporting Little Caesars pizza on an electric scooter

I was reading an article about the introduction of a new scooter company into the Detroit market ("A fifth e-scooter brand just landed in Detroit," Detroit Free Press).  

The firm charges $1 base fee per trip, plus 39 cents/minute, which is pretty much what the other firms charge.  I don't know if the locality adds a sales tax per trip, the way DC does for car sharing.

That means a three minute trip costs more than a bus ride, and two ten minute trips per day for one month equal the cost of a bicycle, less if purchased used.\

[added 9/2/2021] I forgot to mention you can do a member subscription for these services, usually.  The member fee of $6/month means you're not charged a per trip fee of $1.

A ten minute trip is still about $4, even without the base charge.

Recreation versus transportation.  I still think most of the uses are recreational, not transportational, based on observation ("What the e-scooter industry hasn't figured out about Santa Monica: It's recreation not transportation").  

Although there is no question a significant number of the rides are transportational.  And some people, like the people in the photo, buy their own.

Nice Ride bicycle share in Minneapolis includes e-scootersI did see that electric scooters have been incorporated into the city wide bicycle sharing program in Minneapolis.  Lyft provides the scooters.  Pricing for Nice Ride members is slightly lower per minute, and there is no base charge of $1 per ride.  Nice Ride provides some scooter stations, separately from the bike sharing stations.  

And they come with locks and the user is expected to lock them up, rather than merely discard them in the public space.

It appears that Lyft is a Nice Ride partner, providing e-bikes and e-scooters.  But the standard bike share bike is a flat rate charge, while the e-vehicles have per minute fees.

Bird shows some profitability.  I figure that's the logical route to keep such micromobility devices as part of the transportation mix, since it seems unlikely that the business can ever be lucrative for for profit firms, especially venture capital funded firms seeking big returns ("The Scooter Wars Are Coming to the Stock Market," Wall Street Journal).  From the article:

“My view is that we are going to see more and more discouragement of the car, and not just the internal combustion engine. For short journeys it doesn’t make sense to use vehicles that are so excessive to consumer needs in terms of weight and seats,” says Kristina Church, head of sustainable solutions at Lombard Odier Investment Managers. 

The problem of broken scooters littering cities has muddied the green pitch, but micromobility companies are fixing this with proprietary ruggedized designs. Bird began by buying off-the-shelf scooters that only ended up lasting three to four months under the strain of the streets. Now a life of between 18 and 24 months is typical, says Chief Executive Travis VanderZanden. 

The financial case for buying the stocks also depends in part on vehicle lifespans. Profit growth will be a function of both increasing rider numbers and reducing operating expenses, including hefty depreciation charges. The longer scooters last, the lower the costs.

I just don't see it as being a particularly profitable business, even though improvements in the vehicl and battery make profit more likely.

Metropolitan transportation associations.  The integration of for profit and public mobility options in transit systems is discussed here ("The answer is: Create a single multi-state/regional multi-modal transit planning, management, and operations authority association" and "Another example of the need to reconfigure transpo planning and operations at the metropolitan scale: Boston is seizing dockless bike share bikes, which compete with their dock-based system").

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6 Comments:

At 7:29 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

I'm seeing a lot more scooter use this year than compared to 2020 (bad baseline) or 2019.

The insane uber/rideshare prices are part of it, as well as avoiding public transport. I looked at uber from a ride to West End to U st the other day and it was over $50.

I'm still enjoying my personal scooter, although I'm tempted by one with air filled tires for a better ride although at $750 might be too steep.



 
At 11:28 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

I didn't acknowledge that people who become members, usually around $6 per month, don't pay the flat fee per trip.

Still, if it makes for a more comfortable and safer ride, it seems worth it.

Wrt transit, the research doesn't find a lot of spread that way, but I can understand people's reticence.

 
At 2:32 PM, Blogger Bill Lindeke said...

The Minneapolis nice rides aren't scooters. they're Electric-assist bicycles, I believe.

 
At 3:26 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

Off topic here but on topic for something else;

https://www.post-gazette.com/news/sept11/2021/08/30/Pittsburgh-International-Airport-terrorist-attacks-9-11-US-Airways-hub-fallout-flights/stories/202108290269


 
At 8:40 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

They have both. Through an arrangement with lyft

 
At 9:52 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

I hadn't really thought of this as fallout from 9/11 but in retrospect it's obvious that airline consolidation and retrenchment resulted. (I wrote a piece in 2015 maybe about how over time the industry as a whole never made money.)

I just didn't think about it in terms of the decline of less well connected hub and spoke, and how over time historical relations (that Allegheny had been based there) didn't matter vis a vis the need for high origin and destination traffic. Which us why TWA couldn't survive maybe, because St. Louis had the same conditions as Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh was also the first US airport to go all in on retail, which only worked because of the intra airport traffic stoked by being a connecting hub. Plus it was run by BAA, an early example of privatized foreign agencies being active in the US. (They made their bones at Heathrow.)

"DC" also lost by the merger of US Air into America West and AW shifting everything to Phoenix.

 

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