Movements | April 29th, 2019
Issue #45 — 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
Company employees are starting to expense scooter trips. Bird accounted for 46% of the segment vs Lime at 42%, while the average cost per ride for Bird was $5.01 and Lime was $5.86. | PYMNTS
Bird’s ‘Community Mode’ reporting feature averages 700 reports per day and half of which come from people who don’t use scooters. Another interesting tidbit from Santa Monica on dockless paking zones: “We have seen improvement. Users can park the devices anywhere, but we have seen that when you do offer the locations, and because there’s more than 100 of them throughout the city and they’re very visible, we find that people do want to be good stewards and put the devices in a designated area.” | GovTech
San Francisco readers: Join Mapbox’s ‘Conversations in Micromobility’ panel tomorrow night at Mapbox HQ in SF. | Mapbox
“We see Tesla and BMW as competition, not other bike companies.” says the co-founder of eBike maker VanMoof. The Dutch company sold over 11,000 units of its newest eBike model last year. | Forbes
Bird is starting to team up with law enforcement to crack down on charger fraud and vehicle vandalism. | The Rideshare Guy
Lime hits the 50 million trip mark, as the company’s COO, Joe Kraus, says their goal is to “make scooters safer than a bike”. | Bloomberg
Sao Paulo police partner with Grow Mobility to train on electric scooters to patrol their bike lanes. | Marcelo Loureiro
Micromobility operations platform Zagster hires former Chariot CEO & Maven COO, Dan Grossman, as its new CEO. Related: Spin (acquired by Ford) partnered with Zagster to run its operations in the US. | Zagster
Portland starts to turn its Lyft/Motivate bikeshare stations into hybrid dockless mobility hubs as scooters return. The city joins a host of other cities creating dockless mobility parking spots including Austin, Santa Monica, San Diego, Columbus and more. | John MacArthur
Ridehailing & Delivery
Softbank’s Latin America fund is close to making a $1 billion investment in Colombian delivery app Rappi. The company has over 50,000 couriers and is active in 35 LATAM cities. The couriers exclusively use bikes & motorbikes, meaning Rappi is generating a treasure trove of micromobility mapping data for the region. Related: Rappi partners with scooter startup Grin. | Bloomberg
Here’s a New York Times profile of Uber’s European rival Bolt (formerly Taxify). “Uber’s ‘becoming more dominant is not going to happen,’ he said. ‘There isn’t any geography in the world where they will have a monopoly.” | NYT
Uber tops the list of the most downloaded ridehailing & taxi app worldwide for Q1 2019. | SensorTower
Product Launches & Updates
TransitCenter launched Transit Insights, an interactive tool for exploring funding and performance statistics for US transit agencies. Give it a try! | TransitCenter
Uber integrates public transit data in London. | The Verge
Lyft is expanding their Grocery Access program that provides discounted rides to the grocery store in food deserts. | The Verge
Cities & Policy
The interesting cost dynamics of replacing transit with ridehail. | CityLab
Vancouver offers an excellent case study in how to reduce reliance on private cars. The share of trips by walking, cycling, and transit has increased from 48% to 53% in the last year. | City of Vancouver
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