Movements | June 18th, 2018
Rejoice! The third issue of Movements has arrived — brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman.
Investments and M&A
Bird is raising more money | Axios
Skip, formerly Waybots, just raised a $25m round of funding. Here’s why their approach is different. | The Information
Toyota invests $1b in Grab | CNBC
RideOS raises a $9m series A from Sequoia to build a routing and dispatching service for AVs | Bloomberg
Micromobility
Bird is expanding to China. | The Information
Ofo is moving into scooters and e-bikes in the US. Interesting stat on the pace of iteration for vehicles (12 vehicles in 3 years) | Chris Nakutis Taylor
Great thread unpacking ITDP guidelines for how to set up and run a great bike share system from Asher. A few highlights:
Integrate seamlessly with payment methods for other modes of transportation
Shoot for 4–8 rides per bike per day. Less is not sustainable financially and more suggests too few bikes.
Measure costs on a per trip basis and note that they tend to decrease with greater bike density
Another great thread on the dockless bikeshare experience in China. The pace of hardware iteration is really impressive! | Oliver Bruce
Bird announces low-income pricing program ‘One Bird’, dropping the $1 unlock fee for qualified riders | Bird
New York looks to make standup electric scooters legal | NY Daily News
Uber plans to expand their dockless bikeshare service JUMP to Seattle once the city finalizes bikeshare regulations. Interesting to note: “Uber hopes to integrate public transit cards in the app down the line.” Maybe they read those guidelines!| Geekwire
TNCs
Didi is expanding to Australia where they will be competitive directly with Uber (and Ola & Taxify)| CNBC
The convenience of on-demand service and mobile apps have made para-transit as fulfilled by TNCs much more popular| Commonwealth Magazine
I hesitated about placing it in this bucket, but here we are: Waymo’s Early Rider program has been providing a free, on-demand AV taxi service to 400 Phoenix residents over the past year | Waymo
Didi is starting to test late night rides with same-sex drivers | Engadget
Uber’s CEO floats the idea of a surcharge on rides to help out medallion holders | New York Times
Analysis and longer reads
The last mile and invisible asymptotes | Social Capital
Ben Thompson writes about scooters | Stratechery
The real benefits of real-time transit data | Sidewalk Talk
Where new mobility and traditional transit are getting along | Sidewalk Talk
Fixing LA’s transportation infrastructure for the Olympics | Curbed
Products and Updates
Coord expanded their Curb Viewer to NYC. Check it out, build something cool on top of it, and get fewer parking tickets.| Curbed
Navigation apps for much more specific niches are starting to appear. HaCon just released one focused on making public transit more accessible to children. It includes a whole bunch of features that makes the system more accessible to younger riders. We’ve seen a couple of other items like this, including the Spark Capital backed Zum, which provides ridehail for kids with highly vetted drivers.| Jace Deloney
Uber launches a data-lite version of their app for developing markets | TechCrunch
To date, there have been 647 forks of OpenTripPlanner, the building blocks of any multi-modal routing experience | Interline
Apple’s mapping and routing services were down for a bit the other day. This is notable only because it highlights just how these services have evolved from a nice to have to a critical part of consumers’ urban navigation experiences. This is doubly true for mobility services that rely on these components to operate effectively.| Bloomberg
Cities
Santa Monica regulates the dockless scooters and e-bikes that cover its streets with an incredibly reasonable pilot program. 2 scooter and 2 bike firms will be issued permits with dynamic caps that allow them to add scooters and bikes as long as their utilization rate is above 3 rides per vehicle per day and data about vehicle locations and availability remain open and accessible. It also encourages experimentation with incentives to encourage proper pick up/drop off behavior. It’s hard to understate how forward thinking this is and how excited we are about this. | City of Santa Monica
Inevitably, this dynamic, utilization-based approach to regulating the number of scooters and bikes on the streets has raised the question of why we don’t do the same for cars. | Gary Kavanagh
And similar concerns are being raised about how to allocate curb space in busy urban areas.| LA Times
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the SFMTA found that presenting real-time data about arrivals and alternative routes in convenient formats had a significant impact on how customers choose to use the transit system | Transit Center
Data
NYCDOT released their June 2018 mobility report. Some key points:
Subway and bus ridership declining
Average traffic speeds in Manhattan declining
Cycling trips are increasing
44,000 For Hire Vehicles were registered in 2016 and the total has more than doubled since 2010
50% of all ride-hail app users replaced transit trips with a for-hire vehicle| NYCDOT
More
Want more? I highly, highly recommend signing up for the following newsletters that have inspired a lot of what you see here: