Shared Scooters Don't Last Long (substack.com) 196
Alison Griswold, writes on her newsletter Oversharing: I took a look at data on scooter rides in Louisville, Kentucky, shared online as part of the city's open data policy. The latest data is available here. The data set I used was older and included monthly data on scooter trips from August through December. It also included a unique "ID" for each scooter, a detail that was key to my analysis and has been stripped out of subsequent data sets published by Louisville. The data doesn't differentiate between Bird and Lime, but as Bird started operations in August 2018 and Lime that November, you can assume it skews toward Bird.
With that preamble, here are some things I found: The average lifespan of a scooter in Louisville from August to December was 28 days. Median lifespan was 23 days. If you stripped out scooter IDs that first appeared in December, to focus on older vehicles, the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days. Still stripping out scooter IDs that started in December, the median scooter took 70 trips over 85 miles.
Scooter lifespan is a key factor in scooter unit economics, as you may recall. The more trips and miles a single scooter can cover, the better for shared scooter companies, which have to recoup the cost of each vehicle before they can start making any money. In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter with a goal of reducing that cost to $360. At the time, I said that meant Bird needed five rides a day on a $551 scooter for 5.25 months just to recoup the initial cost. The picture painted by the Louisville data is even worse.
[...] So, our scooter company walks away with $2.32 in revenue per day from the average scooter in Louisville. As we said at the beginning, Louisville data indicates that the average scooter was around for between 28 and 32 days. That means the typical scooter generated something like $65 to $75 in revenue for the company after most operating costs over its lifetime.
With that preamble, here are some things I found: The average lifespan of a scooter in Louisville from August to December was 28 days. Median lifespan was 23 days. If you stripped out scooter IDs that first appeared in December, to focus on older vehicles, the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days. Still stripping out scooter IDs that started in December, the median scooter took 70 trips over 85 miles.
Scooter lifespan is a key factor in scooter unit economics, as you may recall. The more trips and miles a single scooter can cover, the better for shared scooter companies, which have to recoup the cost of each vehicle before they can start making any money. In October, The Information reported that Bird was spending $551 per scooter with a goal of reducing that cost to $360. At the time, I said that meant Bird needed five rides a day on a $551 scooter for 5.25 months just to recoup the initial cost. The picture painted by the Louisville data is even worse.
[...] So, our scooter company walks away with $2.32 in revenue per day from the average scooter in Louisville. As we said at the beginning, Louisville data indicates that the average scooter was around for between 28 and 32 days. That means the typical scooter generated something like $65 to $75 in revenue for the company after most operating costs over its lifetime.
i bet landfills will be filled (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i bet landfills will be filled (Score:5, Insightful)
all refuse should be recycled as much as possible because we cant survive by turning the planet in to a dump
Flag as Inappropriate
Honestly I think recycling is the wrong focus. Recycling is often energy intensive process with frequently very mixed results to produce raw materials that than have to be turned into something useful again via manufacturing which is often another energy intensive process. Both operations likely produce their own wastes and byproducts.
If we want get serious about protecting the environment at least where electronics, batteries and machinery are concerned, we need to focus elsewhere. Specifically we need to work on lengthening the service life of products. We need to look at reuse and re-manufacturing.
Re:i bet landfills will be filled (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle."
There's a reason "recycle" is last in that list.
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reddit is leaking again.
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That falls under reuse, doesn't it?
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Other stuff, I'm not sure why people are recycling. Paper is made from carbon plants pulled out of the air. Disposing of paper in landfills sequesters that carbon underground. OTOH, recycling paper reduces the need for new paper, discouraging people from planting new trees (to chop do
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You know who shop at Walmart? The fucking AMISH. Nobody can claim that THEY are living a disposable lifestyle, throwing things away before their time.
You can still darn a Hanes sock, patch a pair of Wrangler jeans, tighten the binding on a Mr.Clean broom and much more.
You say "They don't make 'em like they used to"? You aren't fixing them like they used to.
We are living in a time where the "Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness" is r
Re:i bet landfills will be filled (Score:5, Interesting)
Terracotta Army (Score:5, Funny)
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Speaking of armies, did anybody else read that headline initially as "Scared shooters don't last long"? My eyes popped out of my head for a moment, before I reread it. I was half expecting some pop psychology discussion of school shootings or gang violence or something.
This is the disadvantage of reading that right after the story about China's social credit system....
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That 2nd picture looks like a rosemary bush with miniature buildings around it. Then you realize it's bikes. It was worthwhile scrolling to the bottom. Amazing pix.
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As someone pointed out below, there's a non-zero chance that they get monthly maintenance, and are reassigned a new UUID after. There just isn't a use-case to stick a permanent ID on a scooter, or a part of a scooter. You just need to track it when it's out of the shop, and tie it to the users.
It's quite possible that this whole article is based on that simple misunderstanding by the author, who does not seem to have discussed their finding with the entities involved to any reasonable level. There is one qu
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Yeah I think the numbers here are bullshit. Here's a Wired article that mentions that Lime scooters last about 6 months: https://www.wired.com/story/li... [wired.com]
That's still pretty shot of course, but we need to keep in mind that the utilization rate would be much higher than for a privately owned scooter. Like if somebody drove your car 24/7 it'd crap out in a year too.
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Wired is what product managers and SEO influence facilitators read if they find New Scientist too taxing.
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The best case scenario is that cities are confiscated them and selling them to recoup violation fees.
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They should make them from wood or very small stones, and then they'd float.
And if they don't, burn them!
Deep 6 (Score:5, Interesting)
They did a trial of the scooters in Portland (which has a river running thru downtown) and there is speculation about just how many of the scooters ended up at the bottom of the river. They were able to trace a few of them to that watery grave.
The biggest concern here was riders without experience and who did not use helmets. There was an uptick in ER visits for scooter accidents.
Re:Deep 6 (Score:4, Insightful)
News flash: people don't take care of shit they didn't have to purchase or get emotionally invested in.
Re:Deep 6 (Score:5, Insightful)
News flash: people don't take care of shit they didn't have to purchase or get emotionally invested in.
This is why communism doesn't work.
It is too bad that Karl Marx didn't run a scooter company before he wrote Das Capital. That would have saved us all a lot of trouble.
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Austin has also seen them in the river. I believe the city is charging Lime/Bird if they fish one out. ER visits are also up here as well. I believe scooter accidents are now exceeding bicycle accidents. If the article is true, it does not even factor in scooters are not paying for the free rent on sidewalks/private property when they are not in use.
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Each day in Austin, 20+ people on scooters wind up in the ER.
As for underwater visits, if you passed Waller Creek near Red River in Austin, you would see at least several Lime or Bird scooters a day in the drink, especially around UT, where people just yo-heave-ho them as a way to silence the constant noise they make when tipped over.
Scooters have a bad rep. Mainly because people use them in buildings, park them behind cars. The people who charge them in the morning sling them on private property, on hand
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If more people are using something then there will be an uptick in ER visits because of such something.
The biggest problem with a Sharing and Service Economy. Is the lost of Pride of Ownership. When you Own something especially if it is something you have sacrificed to buy. You tend to treat it better and more carefully, when something is rented, or paid with your tax dollars, you don't feel it is yours, and more apt to abuse it, just to get the most out of your buck that you can during that time. So you
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A previous business partner on mine used to deadpan "What's the only kind of car that does not need careful driving and maintenance?" to which the answer was of course "A rental car."
(He was observing, not endorsing.)
Rgds
Damon
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Wooooosh!
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30 years ago on the U-Mich campus, somoene started a thing called "The green bike is not locked!" They introduced dozens of used bikes painted an ugly green. The idea was you would ride one somewhere on campus and leave it there and someone would ride it back going the other way.
In short order they were all stolen.
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Anti-environment assholes think that destroying private property is funny.
And, pray tell, what gives you the right to store your private property on public property?
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Most businesses and other places have bike racks and whatnot for their visitors.
Who is running around saying that part of it is wrong?
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what gives you the right to store your private property on public property?
The community council that decided a cheap and easy form of transportation is beneficial for the community as a whole?
My community has large areas that are not covered by mass transit very well the scooters are definitely beneficial to many that use them.
Author assumes the scooters are recycled after? (Score:1)
Sure, they last about a month on the street. Does the idiot who wrote this assume they are then tossed in the garbage? No. They come into a shop for a couple hours of repair work, and go back out on the street. What a fucking moron.
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But why would repairing the scooters change their ID?
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Plenty of good reasons for that. One, it's effectively a different scooter or a chimera at that point. Anything you'd want to track by ID would be useless after it goes through repair anyway.
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Plenty of good reasons for that. One, it's effectively a different scooter or a chimera at that point. Anything you'd want to track by ID would be useless after it goes through repair anyway.
Occam's razor: A simpler explanation is that they fucking break.
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Ah, the old Scooter of Theseus argument...
mod parent up (Score:2)
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Call me low-tech, but If I was in that business I'd go round smacking competitors' machines with a hammer,
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The VIN of a car is usually engraved on a plate attached to some part of the bodywork that you aren't likely to replace. With scooters the repair shop may end up taking the deck of one, the forks of another and the motor of a third to make a working Frankenstein jobby.
Longtime database designer here. (Score:5, Interesting)
These scooters likely get stripped down to parts, which are completely interchangeable, so there's no point in tracking individual parts that "go together". This leaves you with the Sacred Galley of Athens question -- is it the same boat after you've replaced every single part? If you completely disassemble a dozen schooters and reassemble a dozen scooters from randomly selected parts, what happens to the "identity" of the scooters that were taken apart? The answer is you don't need it anymore.
If it were firearms, we associate the identity of the firearm with the receiver -- the metal housing into which the barrel and moving parts of the firearm are assembled. But that's purely conventional; you could just as reasonably define the identity of the firearm by the barrel. But why even have a concept for the "identity" of a firearm? Really one only: to track ownership and custody of a firearm, you have to have some kind of database. Databases require identifiers. Seventeenth century gunsmiths didn't stamp serial numbers on their guns because nobody was tracking them.
You could take the same approach as firearms to scooters by declaring that the identity of a scooter sticks to, say, the scooter's deck. But what *function* would that serve? The function of a rental scooter's id is to track user custody of company property and determine when a scooter needs to be serviced. Once the scooter is brought in for repair the need to track that ID disappears. If you insisted on having an id that persists through the rebuild process it would do something that only bad database designs do: constrain physical operations to serve the record keeping system.
In my experience every database design can be invalidated by expanding the universe of questions it must answer (or equivalently, processes it must support). This is the problem with identity in the relational model; it's *implicitly* tied to the questions the designer anticipates. That's why UUIDs are such a robust solution to many identifying tasks: their uniqueness is not tied to any particular set of questions you might want to answer, or to any context (i.e., they are unique *between* databases).
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It's actually surprisingly useful to have a basic foundation in things like ontology, just to realize how futile the overblown goals of many database projects are.
Ultimately, if you can support the processes and decisions a customer needs supported in the immediate and near future, you're doing well.
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GP probably thinks a person's social security number is unique, and if it isn't then surname concatenated with birth date absolutely has to be.
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They come into a shop for a couple hours of repair work
Hey Anonymous Coward, it would be interesting to see the cost calculations behind this.
If we assume a "couple hours of repair work" costs the scooter company $200 in labor, parts and overhead expenses then it's likely cheaper to throw the scooter away after its first repair.
Off the cuff (Score:2)
With that much scooter "turnaround" that just seems ... wasteful.
-Miser
Have trouble believing it's really that short (Score:5, Interesting)
the average lifespan increased slightly to 32 days and the median lifespan to 28 days.
I can believe the scooters would last that long before being pulled for servicing.
But I can't believe scooters after a month are so trashed you cannot repair them and get them back out in the field. Even with rough use and vandalism, you should be able to have the units in service for at least half a year...
That doesn't account for outright theft but I don't think so many are taken outright is affects the overall stats.
Re:Have trouble believing it's really that short (Score:5, Insightful)
Even half a year wouldn't be enough to recoup costs, and you have to include the price of maintenance too.
My guess is that they are either hoping to monetize the location and user data they gather, or the whole thing is just a scam to suck up investment money for a few years before it all collapses.
It costs money to do the repairs (Score:2)
As it stands Bird and Lime shift the blame for failed maintenance
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In the urban neighborhood where I work we have had scooters from at least five different companies for at least a year. They all look like they've been in a war zone and repaired multiple times.
This is horrible for the environment, not to mention an eyesore for the neighborhood.
Yes, even with rough care though... (Score:2)
There's not much on a scooter to easily brake. It can only accelerate so fast according to design, so you can't really overwork the motor. The scooters I've seen have pretty sturdy bodies, with engines (the only expensive part) pretty well protected.
I could go way beyond simple mistreatment of a scooter - say attack it with a baseball bat, or throw it against a wall - and it should be usable for field use with some replacement parts and repainting.
It is at the very least a question I did not see the artic
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Funny, as I was reading my original post before I read your response I noticed that typo instantly. You deserved some +1funny mods for that with such a great handover...
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The point he should make is that ownership brings an incentive to use relatively gently. If you own a car, you're not going to slam it from drive to reverse at 60 mph, because that's your investment you'd be trashing. But a scooter that you have no responsibility for? Pffft. Take a club to it, throw into a lake, what do you care? It's not costing you anything.
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Logically, they would. The evidence is overwhelming that they do not.
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It won't be very long before weight is added to your Good Little Communist rating and you are denied services.
shoe sharing (Score:5, Funny)
I'm thinking of starting a shoe sharing service so people can walk from one place to another without getting their socks dirty. They'll have an app where they can locate a nearby pair of shoes in their size.
I'll call it "Shoeme" or something stupid like that.
Taking investment money now....
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I'm thinking of starting a shoe sharing service so people can walk from one place to another without getting their socks dirty. They'll have an app where they can locate a nearby pair of shoes in their size.
I'll call it "Shoeme" or something stupid like that.
Taking investment money now....
You should call it 'Shü'
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Atlanta seemed to have a lot of potential when I moved there in 2016... after a year living in tree-covered Midtown, even with work being within walking distance, I had to go. That city is a mess...
Not as bad as crypto mining (Score:1)
Crypto mining economic are far worse... crypto entices miners with "today's profit" without telling them about the exponential decay in revenue. It always looks like you can ROI in x time but the reality is that you never ROI..
Ima buy all the scooters I can though because there's probably going to be a mad rush into scooter rental because on paper it looks awesomely profitable.
Now, where did I put those tulip bulbs?
Scooters are physical cryptocurrencies. (Score:1)
The bubble will pop and your ass goes pop too as you crash them.
What was the point anyway? (Score:1)
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In other news (Score:4, Insightful)
unnecessary buzzword (Score:4, Informative)
The lesson here is (Score:3)
This doesn't make sense... (Score:3)
Either both companies have moronic leadership or there's some other scam going on. That includes all the weird (and oddly almost always negative) attention in the press these things get.
Re:This doesn't make sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
Both Bird and Lime should know this data already themselves and yet they're still jumping into markets (ergo losing more money that they'll never recoup). Either both companies have moronic leadership or there's some other scam going on. That includes all the weird (and oddly almost always negative) attention in the press these things get.
How long has Uber been bleeding a billion dollars a quarter? It makes sense because the end game is to sell the money losing business at a profit to the unwitting public in an IPO. You know, like Uber, that is supposedly going public with $120 billion valuation all the while losing $4 billion a year. Unfortunately for these scooter companies, I don't think their total sales will ever scale like Uber and people might think twice about buying a rental service that tries to charge people to replace walking.
Just To Avoid Mild Exercise... (Score:3)
There are these things called Bicycles.
Great for short trips, No DRM, and fairly inexpensive.
But you might have to move your legs a little and go less than 5 MPH on a sidewalk.
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REPAIR (Score:5, Insightful)
Did the author stop to consider that they directly list "repair costs". Maybe, just maybe, when a scooter is taken out of circulation for repair, then put back in, that it is assigned a new ID number?
People don't respect things not theirs (Score:2)
You did not got the business model (Score:2)
You don't understand modern economies... (Score:2)
It's not the DotCom era over again, this is NEW! Yeah, they lose money on each unit, but they will make it up with volume! It's how you can lose billions of dollars buying customers, and then become a hundred-billion-dollar valued entity!
Silicon Valley has "rediscovered" that you can sell and infinite number of $1.00 bills for $0.90 each...
Need to last six months to recoup costs (Score:3)
They changed their design. (Score:2)
The early scooter designs had some issues, so Bird changed the design significantly (different battery pack layout is the most obvious), so it is probably just a design changeover, not reflective of the scooter actual durability.
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Just don't rent ones that old or you can be stuck with the bill for a new one.
Re:A lifespan of only 23 to 32 days?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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That is what happens when you use a consumer product for commercial purposes.
Yeah. Decades ago I ran across the expected lifetime of my newly purchased CD player: 5,000 hours. Don't know if it was the LED or what that broke. I also ran across a commercial player that was considerably more expensive.
I wondered why radio stations didn't use the cheaper version, so I did a calculation: 5,000 hours / 24 / 30 = 7 months. So while it was cheaper for the standard unit, you've be replacing it twice a year with the fun downtime and swapout event that would occur.
"We'd play you the l
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Same goes with tools. Please don't get me going on Harbor Freight. Put it this way.
Plenty of odd tools I've used once or twice (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a bunch of tools here that I've used for one or two projects. They are ready to go if I need to them a third time. No point in paying 10 times as much when these Harbor Freight tools last ten times as long as I need them for.
The rotary hammer I bought cheap at Harbor Freight might well wear out after only drilling 600 holes in concrete. In four years, I've drilled six holes. So at this rate it should last me about four hundred years.
I wouldn't nornally buy a Harbor Freight ratchet because I plan to use the ratchet thousands of times. Same with my cordless drill. I use that all the time, so I bought one that will last through many uses.
Heck, even my air compressor (still running fine after six years) is from Harbor Freight. It turned out that I used my bench grinder more often than I expected, so after several years my $15 Harbor Freight bench grinder eventually wore out. Still, if I were to replace a $15 bench grinder every five years, that's a better value than replacing a $120 bench grinder every fifteen years.
Use the right tool for the job, and if you're only going to do the job once or twice (or ten times), a Harbor Freight tools might be the right tool.
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Re:A lifespan of only 23 to 32 days?! (Score:5, Informative)
I am a volunteer at a local electronics museum. We use tesla coils and van de graf generators for demonstrations. We learned long time ago that you don't use consumer hobby grade stuff for public demonstrations. During my three year (so far) tenure there, we went through three cheap van de graf generators before settling on one that is more institutional grade; costing about twice as much. That unit is still going strong.
It generally pays to buy quality. My blender is much more expensive than many you see in stores but blends stuff that would strip a cheaper one's gears in a second. That doesn't necessarily mean buying the absolute best when a high quality less expensive item will work, it's a cost tradeoff and at some point the added value is less than the added costs.
Same goes with tools. Please don't get me going on Harbor Freight. Put it this way. A jewelry maker told me that he will not be caught dead inside a Harbor Freight store.
While I am in wholehearted agreement with you in tools and have had a "Buy quality once or cheap forever" mentality ingrained by my mechanic father; Harbor Freight has its place. It's perfect for when you need a cheap one time use item. For example, I built a fence using a HF nail gun. I ran quality nails through it and it lasted throughout the project, in fact it still works but is basically relegated to hanging on the wall. For about $60 it was cheaper than a rental and way cheaper than a quality nailer that would drive nails long after the HF tool died. I would not use a HF tool for something I made my living on and needed to run reliably and the cost of lost productivity exceeded the tool's cost.
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Where is the most common failure? That is my biggest question.
32 Days seems much too short. I can see maintenance every 32 days though.
Re:A lifespan of only 23 to 32 days?! (Score:4, Insightful)
In Kentucky? I suspect SUD (Slow Unplanned Disassembly) by meth addicts is how most of these scooters are meeting their ends.
That, and target practice.
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Fat of the land.
Do you know what an RC enthusiast pays for batteries/year. If I was a kid, I'd already be hooning a home made electric car powered by scooter batteries.
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32 Days seems much too short. I can see maintenance every 32 days though.
The ID in the database changed every 32 days. That doesn't necessary mean the entire scooter was replaced. It just means the component with the RFID chip changed, or was reset to a new value.
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Ownership doesn't. Liability does. There's a reason rental cars that you have to return in working conditions or else the person working at the desk will have you pay for it last longer than scooters that the automatic return station accepts as long as it can somehow still read the ID, independent of the state the scooter is in.
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Liability is simply a term for "owning the consequences". His point stands.
Re:A lesson on socialism (Score:5, Insightful)
Ownership matters.
What on Earth gave you the idea that cheap rental scooters are anything like Socialism? Bird and Lime are private companies, trying to provide a service.
404: Socialism not found. This is pure Capitalism my friend; with all the externalized costs that entails.
Re:And it gets worse (Score:5, Insightful)
The city of Corpus Christi wanted at last check, a dollar of day PER UNIT. That's murder on any operation, large or small.
People oppose an outright ban, so an onerous tax is as close as they got. Nobody (majority anyway) wants these things around. They clutter up the neighborhood, ruin accessibility, and have plenty of bad riders. The sooner they run out of VC money the better. Their business model is probably not that much more viable than MoviePass anyway.
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MoviePass did not have a business plan. It was a pump-and-dump stock scheme to enrich insiders who cashed out on the stock. These insiders were a mix of Indian and Floridian conmen.
https://www.businessinsider.com/moviepass-owner-emerged-from-indian-company-accused-of-massive-fraud-2018-7 [businessinsider.com]
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The city of Corpus Christi wanted at last check, a dollar of day PER UNIT. That's murder on any operation, large or small.
People oppose an outright ban, so an onerous tax is as close as they got. Nobody (majority anyway) wants these things around. They clutter up the neighborhood, ruin accessibility, and have plenty of bad riders. The sooner they run out of VC money the better. Their business model is probably not that much more viable than MoviePass anyway.
Yea. You quickly grow tired of hearing someone yell excuse me as they try to zip past you or having one whip right by you a few inches away while you are walking on the sidewalk. The faster they disappear the better, and it seems like Adam Smith's invisible hand will smack them down at some point; probably after an IPO. I wonder if the scooter companies asked Louisville to strip ID data to prevent analysis such as in TFA which shows how fast they are burning cash and the steep hill to just become profitable
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You treat your apartment like this? Or the rental car?
You probably lose a lot of money on deposits, right?
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The difference is, if you damage your apartment or rental car, the owners will make you pay for any damages you've caused so you tend to treat those things better. These scooters are just parked at wherever the last renter needed to go, and any Tom, Dick, or Harry can then come up and destroy them. There's no way to tie the damage to the scooter to the person who breaks it.
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In other words, people don't care about whether it's theirs, what they care about is whether they have to pay for a replacement.
Re:Socialist scum do not respect property (Score:4, Insightful)
this is capitalism in action. People pay for using it, and they want to get the most value for money.
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Revenue after operating costs is income. Income is not profit. You still need to pay off your purchase price for example.