Movements | June 4th, 2018
There’s a ton happening in the world of mobility and transportation and it’s tough to keep up with the latest developments... err, movements. I’m going to try putting together a weekly newsletter of interesting headlines that I come across, with a focus on mobility services, software products, and infrastructure rather than AVs and Auto OEMs.
If this is interesting or helpful, let me know by following, clapping, or heckling me in the comments.
So, here’s what happened last week…
Big News
Lyft appears to be buying Motivate for around $250m| The Information.
Bird, the electric scooter startup, is raising $150m from Sequoia at a $1B valuation | Bloomberg
Uber declares its intent to power full, multi-modal trips that span their existing ride-hail service, bike-share, car-share, and public transit — the short video is worth a watch| Jon Donovan
Softbank Invests $2B+ in GM’s Cruise | TechCrunch
Waymo plans to buy up to 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica vans | WSJ
Micromobility
In China, on-demand bike trips now outpace on-demand car trips | Sam Korus
Lyft is hiring for a whole bunch of roles that suggest they might build a scooter or bike themselves | Michal Naka
Scoot launches its new scooters and shared electric bikes in Barcelona | TechCrunch
Electric scooters, they’re actually pretty great | The Atlantic
We’re rapidly approaching a world where Lyft and Uber have a profit motive to shift car trips to bikes and scooters | Streetsblog
Motivate’s Ford GoBike is launching dockless, electric bikes in San Jose | Michael Ducker
Product Launches and Updates
Coord releases a multi-modal routing API that combines public transit with docked and dockless bike-share to | TechCrunch
Google’s Area 120 releases Pigeon, a Waze for NYC public transit | The Verge
Mapbox launched a whole bunch of things at their Locate event | Mapbox
- An updated Navigation SDK for unified navigation and dispatch
- A partnership with Mobileye that includes using ADAS systems as sensor nodes and delivery of their RoadBook data via Mapbox’s vector tiles
- Mapbox is distributing Foursquare’s POI Data
More transit payment integrations are likely coming to the iPhone in the near future | The Information
Ridecell raises a series B and unveils a developer platform | Mark Thomas
Uber is starting to gather sign ups for their Uber Rent service, powered by Getaround | Business Insider
Cities
NYC DOT will run a dockless bike-share pilot (including e-bikes!) in the outer boroughs, outside of the Citi Bike service areas, starting in July | 6sqft
LADOT is developing a data standard for shared mobility services like bikeshare, ride-hail, etc. | Open Cleveland
California’s state legislature is getting involved with the scooter situation | Asher
The International Transport Forum published a report suggesting that optimizing curb space to accommodate pick up and drop off behavior over parking would increase traffic speeds and decrease vehicle miles travelled | Andrew Salzberg
