Movements | October 15th, 2018
Issue #19! 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.
Product Launches & Updates
Citymapper quietly unveiled their “SmartRide Platform”, a complete demand responsive system targeted at transport operators and cities. | Citymapper
Members Electric launched a monthly scooter subscription that includes maintenance, bi-yearly upgrades and an app where you can lock/unlock the scooter or lend it to friends. | Members Electric
‘Wheels’ launched a sharing service in San Diego last week, offering a new micromobility form factor to the public. The vehicle offers a seat, 25 mile range and 18 mph top speed. | Aatish Nayak
Waze launches their carpool service across the US. Give it a try! | The Verge
Motivate, the national bike-share operator that runs systems like Citi Bike and Ford Go Bike, launches a new feature to allow members to purchase group rides for their friends. | Streetsblog
Micromobility
Last week Bird announced their ‘Bird Delivery’ service where riders can get a scooter delivered to their doorstep by 8am and have it available to them throughout the day. It turns out that this service is intended to help get around hard fleet caps regulations: “This should be viewed no differently than if you decide to rent a Hertz rent-a-car for a day.” | CNN
Here’s a question: How do you build a single bike model that can serve the most people, in the most urban environments? Take a look inside JUMP’s vehicle design process. “To keep the bikes adaptable to changing technology, Foley says that he’s made nearly all of the parts of the bike disparate and interchangeable.” | Wired
We’ve been impressed with scooter OEM Razor’s execution with its electric sharing service: “Razor Share”. The company launched its 5th US market with 1000 scooters in Dallas, Texas. Related: Razor was spotted testing a new scooter design with a seat in San Diego. | Dallas News
Scootermania in Europe: Lime launched in the bike capital of the world Copenhagen, but quickly retreated after heavy fines mounted. Bird has generated over 250,000 miles with 50,000 unique riders in Paris, France. | Forbes
Vanity Fair interviewed Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden. Here are some highlights:
Bird is preparing to test a retractable ‘lock-to’ device, enabling riders to lock a scooter to a bike rack or a post.
Safety is Bird’s ‘top priority’ and the company is ‘willing to help pay for protected bike lanes if cities take the money’.
TNCs
Careem hints at staying independent after Uber and Didi expressed acquisition interest. | Arabian Business
Is Uber a substitue or compliment to public transit? A new study finds “that Uber is a complement for the average transit agency, increasing ridership by five percent after two years.” | Science Direct
Former transportation secretary Anthony Foxx, joins Lyft as Chief Policy Officer. | Lyft
Auto supplier Bosch launches a vanshare service in Germany. | Autonews
Daimler and Geely are working on a ridehailing JV in China. | Autonews
Investments
Coord, a Sidewalk Labs spin-out, raises a $5m series A from Alliance Ventures, Trucks, Urban.US, and DB Digital to help mobility services better integrate into cities. | TechCrunch
Microsoft invests in SEA ridehailing firm Grab as part of a partnership to collaborate around AI products. “Grab will work with Microsoft to explore mobile facial recognition, image recognition and computer vision technologies to improve the pick-up experience”. Related: Apple invested in Didi back in 2016. | Reuters
Cities & Policy
Dallas released a dockless mobility program update: from July 1 to September 20th, the city saw 450,000 scooter trips compared to 32,000 bicycle trips. | Dallas
A suggestion that Massachusetts consider a more varied fee structure to align rideshare usage with policy goals: “A new fee structure should start by allowing municipalities to designate congestion zones — central business districts that meet objective criteria for high transit availability and high levels of congestion. These are places where the negative impacts of rideshare are most acutely felt. In these places, a per-ride fee of a dollar or more should be assessed to encourage consumers to choose alternatives like transit or bikeshare.” | CommonWealth
Large employers are taking an increasingly large role in planning and funding mobility services that make their facilities accessible to workers. Amazon stood up an Amazon Ride team to work “with transit agencies to identify opportunities to bring new service or improve existing service to our sites based on head counts and shift schedule to help with the planning process… Amazon is fully or partly funding transit services in places including Joliet, Ill., Shakopee, Minn., Robbinsville, N.J., Breinigsville, Pa.” | WSJ
Uber worked with Fehr and Peers to develop an equation to measure curbspace productivity, presumably with the goal of using this as a policy lever to lobby for more space devoted to passenger loading rather than parking. | Wired
NYC is considering legalizing electric scooters as they grow in popularity | NY Daily News
A San Francisco judge denied Lime’s request to block electric scooter deployment. “Lime said that it didn’t file the lawsuit in order to halt the operations of rival companies but rather to expose what it characterized as a ‘biased and flawed process’ on the part of the SFMTA.” | TechCrunch