Scooters Are an Effective — and Dangerous — Response to Our Screwed-Up Cities
Brain injuries, obesity, regulation, choked sidewalks, and the future of ‘last mile’ transit
I still remember the first time I saw a Lime scooter. It was in May of 2018 and I was walking out of a restaurant on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, and there it was — dumped unceremoniously on the sidewalk beside a No Parking sign, its sides emblazoned with logos reading “Ride now for only $1 to start!”
My immediate thought was, “Wow, that’s a fantastic business model.”
Micromobility scooters make a lot of sense. The scooters themselves are relatively cheap (wholesale prices are about $500 in bulk). Driven by low-cost batteries and Chinese manufacturing, they’ve become almost a commodity product. You can buy a fleet for under $100,000, slap on some GPS tracking equipment, build an app, and start dropping them all over a town.
Riders will stumble upon them, download your app, pay a few bucks to ride, and then leave the scooter (hopefully undamaged, and not behind a fence or underwater) for the next person to find and ride.
Scooters exist in real-world urban environments, yet they essentially generate passive revenue. You don’t need a storefront, an expensive…
