Movements | March 1st, 2021
Issue [#112] - Brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman. Join thousands of others who receive this analysis and curation of emerging mobility news in their inbox every week — subscribe now.
Ridehailing
China’s ridehailing giant Didi plans to enter Western Europe in 2021. With a tough regulatory landscape and competitive market with Bolt, Uber, Freenow, and others, its difficult to not see this becoming another subsidy war. | Bloomberg
Here’s an updated look at US ride hailing data and sales as of January 2021. Lyft is quietly gaining ground in market share as rideshare recovers from the pandemic. | Second Measure
Waymo begins testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. | VentureBeat
Investments and Funding
Goldman Sachs broke down venture capital funding in mobility over the last decade: Ridehailing took 37% of funding, followed by food delivery at 23%, autonomous vehicles at 10%, and micromobilty came in at 7%. | Twitter
Direct-to-consumer eBike company RadPower raised $150 million in growth capital from institutional investors like Morgan Stanley and Fidelity. RadPower started in 2007 as a custom bike builder, but has expanded rapidly since 2015’. The company plans to double its headcount, expand its home-service repair, and develop new vehicle categories. To get the history behind Rad, checkout the founders' How I Built This episode. | Techcrunch
New Products, Features, and Data Points
Google Maps rolled out the ability to pay for parking and public transit from within their existing trip planning and navigation experiences. This comes after previous integrations with micromobility and ridehailing services. Taken together, people can now plan, pay for, and navigate through every step of their journeys from a single product without having to take out their wallets. | Google
Google Maps released detailed street level maps with crosswalks, sidewalk curbs, and streetlights in SF, NYC, London, and Tokyo. | Kasey Klimes
Ghost kitchens: DoorDash is experimenting with making food on behalf of existing top performing restaurant brands in exchange for negotiated commissions. | Matt Newberg
Swiftly released the ‘State of Public Transit’ 2021 survey results. There’re a bunch of interesting data points in here. Over 70% of agencies implemented backdoor boarding and operators changed schedules over 2x as much as 2020! What changes will we see after the pandemic? | Swiftly
An excellent deep dive on Open Street Map, the location data co-op that has served as the basic mapping layer used by Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Mapbox, and countless others. As the value of mapping data and the amount of crowdsourced inputs have grown, so too has tension over OSM’s future. | Bloomberg
Noam Bardin, the former CEO of Waze, provides a fascinating look into what it’s like to build a product within a huge organization like Alphabet. | Noam Bardin
Speaking of Waze, Apple Maps is getting crowd-sourced reporting of crashes, speed traps, and more. | Gizmodo
Micromobility
Volkswagen (VW) announced new financing and lease products for… eBikes. For corporate customers, VW Financial Services are offering company eBike packages. VW Bank is offering loans for private eBike purchases. | Cycling Industry
Bird, Lime, FreeNow, Dott, Tier, Voi, Wind, and Bolt team up in Europe to create the
“Micromobility for Europe'' coalition to help drive forward micromobility policy frameworks in cities across Europe. | Cities Today
The state of Washington is looking at a sales tax exemption for eBike purchases. | Seattle Times
Spin and Tortoise team up in an ‘exclusive alliance’ to pilot teleoperated 3-wheel scooters in Boise, Idaho this spring. | Spin
Revel, known for their shared electric mopeds, has spun up an e-bike leasing business. | WSJ