Movements | November 6th, 2018

Issue #22 — special Tuesday edition! Brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman. If you’d like this newsletter delivered to your inbox every Monday, you can subscribe here.

Micromobility

Bird launched in London, in a country where scooters are illegal on public roads. The pilot will be on private land with 50 scooters and Bird will be testing anew geo-fence feature: if a rider deviates from that route, the electric motor will shut down. | Bloomberg

Surprise! Local businesses in San Francisco are upset that there’s not enough shared scooters available. Remember: SF has a 1250 scooter cap for a city of 885,000 people. | SF Examiner

It surfaced last week that Lime had to recall Segway scooter models in a few select markets after a reported battery fire back in August. Lime blamed the issue on Segway, but Segway pushed back and said their manufacturing was not at fault. However, it’s impressive how fast Lime was able to respond to the recall, they could identify, deactivate and collect all affected scooters on the streets within a matter of hours with their local ops teams and juicer network. Related: Lime is investing $3 million in a bike and scooter safety campaign. | TechCrunch

Can’t keep up with scooter launches? Well here is the most up to date map of dockless bike and scooter fleets across the US. | Smart Cities Dive

Dockless Fleets Across the USA

An interview with Lime’s Toby Sun. | Tech In Asia

Lime hires David Richter as Chief Business Officer. | WSJ

Product Launches & Updates

Coord releases their Surveyor app for collecting curb rules externally | VentureBeat

Bird, Lime, and Detroit line up behind SharedStreets — “The goal of the forthcoming dockless data standard is to give cities a universal way to collect and aggregate critical information on the operation of scooters and bikes — including trip origins and destinations, neighborhood availability, travel times and usage.” | NACTO

UPS is testing E-Bike deliveries in Seattle. | Streetsblog

Free2Move is embracing competitors by aggregating other car share, bike, and scooter services in their carsharing app | DCist

A new teardown of the improvements to Apple’s maps. The short version? Coverage is tiny but they seem to be doing a good job of extracting map details from satellite imagery. | Justin O’Beirne

Cities & Policy

This week’s must read is a blog post from Transit App that drives home the importance of an open mobility data ecosystem | Transit

After banning scooters in July, Bird sues the city of Beverly Hills, California. Our friend, Jim McPherson does a deep-dive in his new mobility law newsletter The Brief. “The ramifications if Bird wins on this issue would be huge. Motorized scooters would essentially be treated as any other motor vehicle, with the right to drive on any public roads…” | Bloomberg

Congestion pricing in NYC would cut weekly express bus commute times by hours | Streetsblog

A comprehensive atlas of AV pilot programs in cities | AVs in Cities

Stats

Segway has produced about 1 million electric scooters this year alone, about 10 percent of which were sold to Lime. | Washington Post

Charlotte shared dockless mobility ridership data for September. | Charlotte, NC

TNCs

Uber introduces a monthly subscription service. | The Verge

How Avis plans to compete with AVs and ridehailing services. | Fortune

Uber and Lyft are doing around 91,000 trips on an average day in Seattle. | The Seattle Times

Via’s publicly funded microtransit pilot in West Sacramento seems to be going well. | The Sacramento Bee

Scoop Partners with Lyft for guaranteed rides home if your carpool falls through| The Inside Scoop

OEMs

GM, yes General Motors, has announced an eBike brand with 2 models launching in 2019. Details are scant but the bikes were designed in house with a custom electric motor and a ‘on-star’ like telemetry system. | Forbes

First it was Ford, now Daimler is the second auto OEM to get into scooters via their subsidiary MyTaxi. The company plans to launch 500 scooters in a Southern European city by the end of the year. | TechCrunch

Volkswagen and Mobileye will test an autonomous EV ride-hailing services in Israel. | Times of Israel

Cadillac is ending its $1800 a month car subscription service. The service is reportedly ending because it was too costly to deliver multiple cars to customers each month. Whether delivering shared e-scooters or shared escalades, logistics is hard! | The Verge