Movements | February 12th, 2019
Issue #34 — Brought to you by Michal Naka and Adam Feldman. Please forward this weekly mailer to friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up!
Micromobility
Grin + Yellow = Grow? The first major scooter operator consolidation is here, Mexico based Grin and Brazilian based Yellow have merged to build a super regional micromobility company called “Grow Mobility”. Although based in Latin America, Grow plans to launch in the US and Southern Europe in 2019. The combined group, operates 135,000 vehicles across six Latin countries, having completed 2.7 million trips in 6 months. | Forbes
Defining the Peskin ratio and why (some) scooter networks fail. | Nick Abouzeid
Lime stats: 34 million trips and 10 million users across 5 continents. | Lime
Bird and Lime eye expansion into 14 countries. | The Logic
Uber is betting big on micromobility as it ramps up production to 1,000 Jump bikes per day. “Between Jan. 1 and March 1 you will see tens of thousands of Jump bikes and scooters hitting the road in the U.S.” | Bloomberg
Lyft engineering details integrating scooters into their rider app. | Lyft
A year of Jump in San Francisco. “…over 63,000 JUMP SF riders took over 625,000 trips for a total of more than 1.6 million miles traveled since we launched last year.” | Ryan Rzepecki
Ridehailing
How many Lyft drivers are on the road at once? “In reality, a fraction of registered drivers are active at any given time. Moreover, Lyft’s peak hours are different from the rush hour periods we associate with the most traffic.” | Lyft
How Uber Eats is impacting apartment design. | News.com
A look into how Moscow became the biggest carsharing city in Europe. “The fleet expansion trailed a boom in users as rides more than quadrupled to 23 million.” | Bloomberg
New Funding
Despite the winter and Uber acquisition rumors, Lime raises a $310 million Series D at $2.4 billion valuation led by Bain Capital. | TechCrunch
Mobile first car rental platform Virtuo raised $22.6 million Series B to fuel expansion across Europe. | TechCrunch
Autonomous vehicle startup Aurora raises $530m from some top tier investors. | Aurora
New Products & Features
Airbnb hires a head of transportation. | TechCrunch
Google is experimenting with improving orientation and location accuracy on Google Maps by using a technique combining visual positioning service, street view and machine learning. | Google Blog
Lyft is launching an EV only feature. | FastCompany
Cities & Policy
Minneapolis and Seattle managed to actually reduce driving. The secret? Better transit, more bike lanes, and zoning that encourages. | Streetsblog
