Movements | July 16th, 2018
Issue #7! brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman. Here’s what happened last week…
Micromobility
Electrifying Ford Go Bike — an analysis of one month of electric pedal assist data by our own Michal Naka. “pedal bikes on average got up to 3 trips per day per bike, while eBikes get around 8 trips per day per bike.”
The CEO of the first European dockless biksharing company, Pony Bikes, gives a candid look at the business and market | Medium
“At peak, you could count 4 dockless bike sharing schemes competing for a 150k people city: pony, ofo, Mobike and oBike. It had no impact on the rate at which we were acquiring users.”
“Availability is a necessary condition to success but is not sufficient to win”
The average cost of a good shared-bike is $200.
Lyft may partner with Spin after Uber-Lime tie up | Axios
Bird generates 39,000 signups in 70 days of operations in Atlanta | Twitter
Uber looks to test an eBike lease model with JUMP. This might be the way they enter the European market| Financial Times
Lime is starting to use cargo eBikes for battery swapping and to haul scooters around. “we’re able to average 20% more battery swaps per shift, keeping more bikes in service and on the street.” | Lime Blog
Interview with Segway’s Tony Ho, who says they are seeing a ‘huge spike’ in retail sales in cities with scooter-share | Marketscale
New research: “E-bike use by former car commuters in an e-cycling incentive program amounted to 68% after one month and 73% after half a year of participation” | NCST Research
TNCs
Bellhop launches a TNC aggregation app in NYC, allowing time and dollar cost comparisons across 17 services offered by Lyft, Uber, Juno, and Curb (Wired). Dave Ambrose provides a great alternate take on Twitter, arguing that there’s a huge opportunity in mobility metasearch because of the complexity of the product offerings (time, distance, price, personalization) and the benefits to riders and suppliers | Dave Ambrose
Uber is expanding its Rider product team to NYC. “The Rider Platform team spans three physical locations, with sub-teams in San Francisco, New York City, and Bangalore.” | Uber
Lyft’s VP of Autonomous discusses a hybrid approach in deploying AVs: < 35 mph, no bike lanes, easy pickup and drop offs | Freightwaves
In case you needed a reminder of Uber’s (and Lyft’s) plans to own all urban transportation decision-making and fulfillment, this piece from AngelList provides a great overview. “Eventually, you’ll be able to plug in an address… and Uber will find the most efficient way to get there, combining decentralized scooters and bikes, public transit, shared carpools, car rentals — everything.”| AngelList
Product Launches and Updates
Bird is now blocking off certain areas for scooter drop offs in San Francisco | Nick Abouzeid
Uber adds ‘Pay with Venmo’ option, after 6 million transactions on Venmo last year discussed Uber | Bloomberg
Lyft is actively testing ‘self-driving’ vehicles in Las Vegas | Twitter
Uber begins continuous background checks for drives by partnering with Checkr and Appriss. “Uber will be notified if a driver is newly charged with a traffic violation or other relevant charges. From there, Uber can decide if it wants to suspend a driver from its service to prevent unsafe behavior.” | Axios
Grab announces its intent to open up GrabPlatform APIs in order to move in the direction of a super-aggregator app like WeChat | Grab
Auto OEMs
Auto OEMs are coming to the realization that standing up mobility services that consumers actually want to use is really, really hard and quite different from selling chunks of metal to dealers. | Bloomberg
Cities
Excellent breakdown of Electric Scooters regulations and overview of the market by 12 Tone Consulting| PDF
moovel product designer Jonathan Kurten takes us through designing public transit tickets for mobile and creating standards around the complexity of different cities’ fare catalogs and services offerings | Medium
A call to redesign city streets rather than ban scooters |Curbed
A DC area business group is advocating for integrated trip planning and payment | WTOP
After a wildly successful pilot, Seattle is proposing to increase their dockless bike cap to 20,000 with up to 4 vendors with room to grow from there | Curbed
San Diego is on pace to be the fastest city to break 1 million dockless rides | Lime
NACTO released a set of guidelines for Regulation and Management of Shared Active Transportation | NACTO
Startups
Radar — a location platform for mobile apps that enables contextual experiences. Here’s a good interview with the founders.
Perch — logistics for scooters
Ivee Green — Zero emission rideshare launching in Los Angeles.
Neuron Mobility — a moveable docked based scooter share system in Singapore. The docks double as moveable charging stations
Investments and M&A
GoGoVan raises $250m to grow its on demand logistics business in China | SCMP
DeepMap is raising $60m to build HD maps in China | The Information