Movements | December 18th, 2019
Autonomous scooters in Santa Monica, Winters impact on micromobility, and so much more!
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Micromobility
An analysis by Tarani Duncan and Zoba on the expected impact of winter weather on 50 micromobility operators in nearly 250 markets globally. | Zoba
Bird is ‘hibernating’ it's scooter service during the coldest months of the year in certain markets like Lyon, France. | Adrien Lelievre
Spin’s scooter operations team in San Francisco voted to unionize. | SF Chronicle
Lime scooter’s are being sold on the ‘dark web’. | Vice
A new report from Deloitte estimates that 130 million e-bikes will be sold over the next 3 years, dramatically outpacing the sale of EVs. You can probably quibble with the exact numbers quite a bit, but the fact is that e-bike sales are growing very, very quickly. | The Verge
Uber is ‘doubling-down’ on micromobility in 2020, with a focus on Europe. “Uber claims adoption of Jump’s bikes and scooters in Europe has outpaced that of the U.S. in the last eight months. It says more than 500,000 Europeans rode the vehicles in the last eight months alone, racking up 5 million trips in total.” | CNBC
Rollo is testing an autonomous 3-wheeled scooter in Santa Monica. | Nathan Pope
Product Launches & Updates
Citymapper is working on a routing feature that helps you stick to brightly lit streets while walking home at night. | Metro
Uber Eats is testing a delivery API in the Sweetgreen app. | Twitter
Daimler & BMW’s ridehailing app Free Now has launched an in-app scooter integration with Hive. | LinkedIn
The DC Metro teased an Apple Pay integration coming in 2020. | Washington Metro
Lime launches “LimePass,” a $5 weekly subscription that covers unlimited vehicle unlocks. | The Verge
Ridehailing
Ola is gearing up for a major launch in London. | CNBC
Lyft is launching a car rental product in San Francisco and Los Angeles. | The Verge
New Mobility
A great overview of the latest at Moovit: 500m users, a suite of planning and operational tools for cities, multimodal navigation features for consumers, and integrations with all kinds of bike, carpool, and ridehail services. | Times of Israel
Dollar vans in NYC are using an app called Dollaride to run their businesses more effectively. The app helps riders to find nearby vans and their destinations, while helping drivers to find passengers and accept digital payments. They also highlight unmet travel demand, particularly in transit deserts: “One major route connects Chinatowns in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Another slices through Brooklyn, while a number of smaller routes flow east from Jamaica, in Queens, like rivulets. Some routes also link Manhattan and New Jersey.” | NY Times
StreetCred launches new iOS and Android apps to help people compete to map their cities. | StreetCred
Investments & Deals
Tel Aviv-based Arbe raises a $32m Series B to continue developing high definition radar chipsets for AVs. | TechCrunch
Uber is reportedly selling its Uber Eats business in India to Zomato. The key context is that Uber Eats is in 3rd place in the Indian market, well behind Swiggy and Zomato. | Times of India
Passport raises a $65m Series D to grow their digital parking payments infrastructure. | Passport