Movements | October 2nd, 2019
Scooters in Paris, Car2go ends service, and Apple Pay Transit features!
Issue #66 - 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.
Micromobility
Lime claims the majority of their riders are locals, not tourists: “On average, 82% of survey respondents stated that they live, work, or go to school where they ride Lime.” | Lime
San Francisco announced new scooter permits for Jump, Scoot (Bird), Lime, and Spin. Each company can deploy up to 1,000 vehicles with the chance to increase their caps to 2,500 in the coming year. Ironically, all 3 companies that launched in San Francisco ‘without permission’ in March of 2018 and set off the national media firestorm were among the permit recipients. Does the ‘ask for forgiveness strategy’ work after all? | SF Examiner
Uber’s micromobility robotics team is working on sidewalk detection. | Ryan Rzepecki
“After less than one year in operation, e-scooters have reached a modal share of between 0.8 to 2.2% in Paris.” | Carbone 4
JUMP unveiled their micromobility swappable battery kiosks that are set to launch in markets in 2020. This mitigates one of the major operational pain points of running an e-bike or scooter service. | Megan Rose Dickey
Gogoro launches a new swappable battery electric commuter moped starting at $1800. Related: Gogoro now has over 1,400 battery swap stations around Taiwan. | The Verge
Ridehailing
Uber launches their official incubator to test new business ideas on the Uber platform. It’s open to both internal and external hires. | Techcrunch
Lyft blocked Transit app’s access to Citibike payments in NYC. | Transit
New Products & Updates
Apple Wallet adds native transit account management features in iOS 13 starting with the Suica transit card in Japan. Translation: You don’t need a 3rd party app to add funds to your transit card. | Ata Distance
Volvo launched their new station based carsharing brand ‘M’ in Stockholm. One of the cool things about Volvo’s carshare is that there are no logos or paint jobs on their vehicles. Leave it to the Swedes to keep a clean and minimalist design! | Volvo Car Mobility
This startup founded by two ex-airline route planners, wants US airlines to replace smaller regional jets with their new bus service. “Landline will act almost as a Sun Country Express. Customers will have everything on the same ticket, and if the bus or the flight is late, the airline and Landline will make sure the passenger still reaches the final destination”. | Skift
Uber launched a major update to their mobile app and revealed a whole range of new product features, all aimed at becoming the operating system for your everyday life. New safety features, multimodal trip planning in more cities, exclusive virtual restaurants, loyalty programs for Eats customers, and a bunch of updates for drivers. | The Verge
Cities & Policy
Car2go announces it’s ending free floating carshare service in 5 North American cities. Related: City officials in Calgary are sitting down with Car2go executives to understand their decision to pull out. | Geekwire
Phase 2 of Calgary’s eBike share program was supposed to welcome new operators and up to 10,000 eBikes. However, no companies applied for a permit. “We are seeing more people using scooters than bikes.” | Live Wire Calgary
A German policy think tank and city association put together a great report and overview on German scooter regulations (Bonus: it’s all in english!). | Agora
Jersey City partners with Via to launch an on demand bus service. “This new system creates virtual bus stops, meaning it sets up digitally the most efficient places for people to go to get picked up and dropped off,” said Brian David Platt, business administrator in Jersey City. “We’ll have a cash option, we’ll have a debit-card option. We are trying to be as accessible and available to all of our residents.” | NJTV