Movements | October 17th, 2019

Issue #68 -  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

Uber integrates Cityscoot’s electric moped service into their main app in Paris. “Combined with the recently announced integration of public transit to the app, the addition of electric mopeds means Paris will be home to Uber’s largest suite of mobility options. Alongside cars, scooters and bikes, the mopeds will be featured on the home screen as well as in the list of options after inputting a destination.” | TechCrunch

MRT Jakarta is working closely with GoJek to enable easier passenger pick up and drop off at their stations. The goal is to improve the accessibility of their service and increase ridership by providing flexible first / last mile options. | Jakarta Globe

Cabin CEO, Gaetano Crupii, explores the ‘opportunity cost of travel time’ in his latest blog. “A-EV cabin design should not be a linear progression from current automobile interiors. Architecting high-productivity moving spaces is a very different optimization; you are designing experiences that don’t waste time.” |Cabin

Product Launches & Updates

Skip is testing a personal scooter rental service in San Francisco for $25 dollars a week. | Bryan Weis

Ola launches their cloud kitchens and focuses on building out their own food brands. | Inc42

Uber is experimenting with “Uber Pet” product on it’s ride app. | The Verge

Uber adds Boat Taxis to its product lineup in Nigeria. | Bloomberg

Pony rolls out its micromobility operations eBike and trailer in Europe. | Pony

Micromobility

Autonomous scooter startup Tortoise anounces a first deployment in Georgia. The costs associated with fleet repositioning and collection for charging and maintenance are major drivers of profitability or lack thereof for scooter operators. Reducing those costs through autonomous solutions could be a major win for these companies. | Axios

Micromobility operators are partnering with law enforcement on sting operations to crack down on scooter theft. “Wind’s sting operation was not an isolated attempt to curb wholesale theft. Earlier in July, it began hiding secondary GPS trackers inside a small number of “dummy” scooters in cities where high rates of vehicles were being lost.” | Bloomberg

MIT released a paper on the potential impact of shared autonomous scooters.  “We show that the availability of self-repositioning capabilities can help achieve up to 10 times higher utilization of vehicles than possible in current bike-share systems.”  | Arxiv

Scooter consolidation: Spanish scooter startup Koko (acquired by Circ) reflects on the brutal competition in Europe. “Because the high number of competitors forces constant product improvement… We realised that we needed to make a big investment in order to be competitive in this capital and technology-intensive business.” | Sifted

Scooter injuries are in decline in New Zealand according to the national accident agency, as Auckland celebrates 1-year of shared scooters and over 2 million trips. | Stuff

Scooter ridership is down in San Diego as the city enforces new rules: “Ridership is down, as measured by average daily trips, from 33,000 in July to 17,000 in the first half of September.”  | San Diego Tribune

Bird’s Chief Legal & Policy Officer, David Estrada, is leaving the company. | Techcrunch

Cities & Policy

Pittsburgh is leading the way with plans for an exciting mobility as a service offering. “Their winning plan, which was one of five submissions, envisions “mobility hubs” clustered near transit stops throughout Pittsburgh. There, travelers would find some combination of bike-share stations, Zipcar vehicles, Waze carpool pickup spots, and parked and charged e-bikes and scooters from Spin to rent. The Transit app would handle route planning and ticketing services to customers, and Ford Mobility would feed data analytics back to the city.” Successfully replacing a significant number of private car trips will require collaboration across multiple services like these and city governments, so this is an exciting proof of concept for the model. | CityLab

NYC’s Transit Tech Lab expands its scope for 2020. In addition to the MTA, Amtrak, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, NJ Transit, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have joined in. This program was very successful at helping early technology companies work with the MTA in 2019, so we’re really excited to see what they can accomplish with the expanded scope. | Smart Cities Dive

NYC DOT turned 14th street into a dedicated busway, banning private cars between third and ninth avenues. The project has been a huge success so far, with average travel times on one of the city’s slowest bus routes improving by 30% with no change in average vehicle speeds on surrounding streets. SFMTA is in the process of approving similar changes to Market Street. As these projects prove successful, they will likely inspire copycats in other cities. | WSJ

A really interesting discussion of authoritative maps. How do we handle the tensions between accuracy, coverage, freshness, ownership, policy goals, and authority? | Kevin Webb

Fundraising & Deals

US Electric Moped startup Revel raises a $27.5 million Series A. | Techcrunch

Uber is making a majority investment in South American grocery delivery startup Cornership. | Dara Khosrowshahi

Wheels raises $50 million. | Techcrunch

Jobs

Our friends at Tusk Ventures are hiring an analyst in New York City. Tusk has been in the mobility space since Uber, and are Bird and Nexar investors. The team is looking for candidates with startup operating experience, no banking, VC, or consulting required! | Tusk