E-Scooters.
It seems only yesterday that the story of Uber — its startup dream, services, and scandals were raised. Then along came Lyft a few years later as its main competitor in peer-to-peer ride-sharing services. The market for such ideas blew up in less than a decade. Now there is Jump, Spin, Goat, Skip, Bird, Lime (see the weird pattern?) — all changing and competing in the market of ride-sharing, bike-sharing, scooter-sharing, everything-else-sharing startups arising almost daily.
But today, I wanted to focus on one specific field of these 4-lettered-startups — electric-scooters. Chances are you probably saw one of them, whether it be someone zipping through the streets on them or standing proudly on the sidewalk waiting for its next user.
So what’s exactly the deal with these tiny, sleek rides?
Well, let’s travel back to a year before. The first species of electric scooters, Bird and Lime had just received fundings of $15mil and $12mil each for their Series A. And in classic Silicon Valley startup fashion, ignoring the laws and regulations — they put their new rides on the streets of California. It was a success (well, kind of). While on the one side, people loved riding these easy, portable rides to where they headed, and others didn’t really enjoy it — bringing up safety issues and regulations, seeing them as dangerous toys, hindrances on sidewalks. You know, the usual Valley story. The companies faced their fair share of cease and desist letters, fines, and lawsuits.
After a year and a half, it seems the companies have started to mature, offering free helmets for its users, giving safety workshops and instructions for safe riding. Yet, there will always be accidents, faults, and errors just like any other vehicle. Also, you have to be older than 18 to ride, wear safety helmets and stay off of sidewalks. It costs $1 to unlock the scooters and $0.15 for each minute you ride on it and lock it whenever you’re done. Powered by arrays of lithium-ion batteries, these ain’t your typical scooters. They can go fast, I mean really fast (15.5 mph) for its size. If you decide to ride one of these scooters, please be cautious and ride safely.
However, when it comes to these electric scooters, Bird, Lime, and other four-lettered sharing service companies aren’t your only option out there. You can actually buy one! From an OG kick-scooter company to an exponentially growing Chinese tech powerhouse, there are many brands of e-scooters to choose from. For example, Mi Electric Scooters! (They’re actually the brand that retails to Bird and Spin.)
Sleek, minimal design, long battery spans, and “foldability” are its key components. When you’re done riding, you can just *click* and carry it into your home or workplace in a matter of seconds. No more worry of traffic, search for empty parking spaces or tows when you can carry it around like this!
You may be wondering why you would be wasting your precious time on these 27-pound “beefed-up-toys”. Because these toys might end up saving that time. It’s like our smartphones, our laptops and our smart accessories — its there to increase productivity and make our lives a little less boring.
Imagine that you’re in that tight situation and a short distance to your destination, when walking or running is not enough to make it in time and waiting for an Uber and paying $10 isn’t worth it, these e-scooters can save your day. Take it from the guy who barely makes it in time to classes thanks to these electric one-man chariots. To me, to college students and to people who need these “last-mile” rides, they are perfect. Not only we can make it on time, but we’re also making it to our destinations in style.
The scooters’ size and weight is small and light enough to carry around on narrow sidewalks or stairs or to simply lock and park. Since some models are foldable, you don’t necessarily have to carry around a metal in the shape of an “L”. Its size also comes along with another advantage. During rush hour, as congestion increases and horns start blaring, you can just zip through the labyrinth of traffic with your handy vehicle.
While they are innovating our daily way of transportation and saving time, the scooters can’t always run from their downsides. They can be extremely dangerous, technical faults and well — due to human error as well.
When we’re riding on such small, electric-powered scooters, accidents are prone to happen if we’re not careful. High acceleration and deceleration on traffic-heavy roads with a 20-something-pound of aluminum alloy don’t exactly match the word “safe” to me. Due to heavy regulations, you can’t ride these bad boys on the sidewalk as well. Also, when you’re riding next to 4000-pound metal behemoths, your confidence and safety will probably be on the “concerned” side.
There have been cases where brakes weren’t functioning properly, sudden acceleration without the user doing anything, and broken parts. But rest assured, there are actually a group of people (the software developers and Bird Mechanics) who are dedicated to fixing those bugs and broken parts as soon as they catch it.
And external factors aren’t the only ones at fault here. People do some pretty dumb sh*t on these scooters. Double-riding (or even triple-riding), flashing through pedestrian-filled sidewalks, not wearing safety gear/helmets, riding under the influence… The options are endless here. There are regulations and rules for a reason and some people just don’t seem to care. I probably sound like an annoying parent when I say that be careful on these rides. Falling from one of them is not fun (trust me on this), let alone when it involves another, much bigger vehicle.
I imagine these scooters are just like any other modes of transportation. When the first motor car came to be, the situation was probably the same but with more horses and less Ubers. Some will love it, some won’t, and some will have a love/hate relationship with them. It has its advantages and its flaws. I won’t yell at everyone to ride these to their work, school and home each passing minute. Although, I would encourage you to try it out once if you pass by one of them.
If you’re interested in hearing more of scooter stories, I would recommend this 10-minute podcast at Axios, covering the story of “Scooter Wars”.
