Movements | December 4th, 2018
Issue #26 — Brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman. Please forward this weekly mailer to friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up.
Announcements
The Micromobility Conference is right around the corner on January 31st. Make sure to check out the agenda and speaker line up, as it is stacked with folks from all over the ecosystem. Movements readers cant receive a discount code here. We hope to see you there!
Deals
Uber is looking to acquire Bird… or Lime. Why? Well it could be to stop their hyper growth, improve Uber’s 2019 IPO story or maybe there’s more defensibility and first-mover advantage in the scooter space than most tend to believe? | The Information
SoftBank is planning to invest in ParkJockey, a startup that provides a technology-based alternative to parking garage operations staff. Notably, they plan on using the funding to acquire two of North America’s largest parking operators, Impark and Lanier. | Axios
Uber and Deliveroo talks ‘miles apart’ on valuation. | FT
Product Launches & Updates
Are you really a mobility company if you don’t offer electric scooters? Via is the latest rideshare company to add scooters to its service, following Uber, Taxify, Lyft, Grab, MyTaxi, and Cabify. | TechCrunch
New routing features for “floating transport” like scooters and bikes and combinations with public transit | Citymapper
Turo’s new dongle will let customers instantly find and unlock cars, which remove the hardest part of using the service: the time required to physically exchange keys. “Owners can opt to allow users to find, book and unlock a vehicle in as little as five minutes.” | TechCrunch
Uber has partnered with MV Transportation to bring wheelchair accessible vans to markets across the US with 15 minute or less ETAs. | Uber
Micromobility
What happens to scooters in the winter? Lime is experimenting with swapping scooters for eBikes in Salt Lake City. | The Salt Lake Tribune
Uber, Lyft joining Lime as Seattle bike share providers, which could see nearly 20,000 available bikes by spring 2019. | Capitol Hill Seattle
Bird partnered with AT&T to tackle “distracted scooter riding”. | AT&T
Mobike looks to be experimenting with a new business model in France. The dockless company partnered with Transdev to sell its bikeshare systems directly to French transit agencies. | Transdev
E-bikes are now generating $1.5 billion in annual revenue globally. | Clean Technica
Here is a great video overview of Lime’s new carsharing service ‘LimePod” in Seattle. Lime hints at a secret “small, low-speed electric vehicles that will eventually replace the Fiat 500s”. | Geekwire
Auto OEMs
GM’s president becomes CEO of Cruise, its self driving unit. | Axios
Ford released a City Data Solutions report with some neat findings. | Ford
- “by setting out two hours earlier, one of our test fleets of vans could save up to 30 hours in a typical week…” and “by beginning their rounds two-and-a-half hours earlier, a fleet of drivers can potentially reduce their time in traffic by up to 60 hours per week.”
- “around a fifth of the driven journeys around London in this study could have been faster if they’d used public transport instead.”
TNCs
Uber shut down Uber Rent after a pilot with Getraround in San Francisco. | Quartz
Lyft completes its acquisition of Motivate, commits to investing $100m in Citi Bike which will double its service area in NYC and more than 3x the size of its fleet to 40,000 over the next 5 years. | Streetsblog
Uber launched a transparency campaign around how its marketplace works in terms of pricing, matching, surge, health and more. | Uber Marketplace
UberEats is going after the grocery market with a new team in Toronto. | Uber
Uber Freight taps machine learning to give shippers rates 2 weeks in advance. | VentureBeat
Cities & Policy
Transit accessibility is increasingly critical for employers to attract talent. Case study: McDonalds relocating from a suburban office park in Chicago where 97% of employees drove by themselves to a new location downtown that is accessible by public transit and bike. It’s now easier to attract talent and 90% of employees arrive by anything other than cars. | NPR
Twelve companies applied for the Washington DC dockless vehicle permit, which could add up to as many as 6,600 scooters and 3,000 dockless bikes in the nations capital. | WTOP
The MBTA wants its new fare collection system to become the integrated payment platform for all of the travel options in Boston. “The overall tone of their presentation was that the T would be better served cooperating with rather than competing against other forms of mobility.” | Commonwealth Magazine
Seattle is awesome at increasing public transit ridership through better service according to their annual report. 67% Seattle households are now located within a 10 minute walk of 10 minute or better all day transit service. This is up from 25% in 2015.
Bikeshare, scooters, cars, trains, bridges, roads… one agency should probably rule them all. | Citylab
NYU’s Rudin Center published a report on the popularity, impact, and solutions for e-commerce and local deliveries on Manhattan and Paris.NYC’s City Council is pushing to legalize scooters and e-bikes, according to the New York Times. And, better yet, one council member is calling for the city to 4x the amount of protected bike lanes added each year to 100 miles. | Streetsblog
Instead of Parking Maximums Ban Free Parking (in New Construction). | Asher
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