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As a resident of Portland (where the survey was conducted), the results match with my experience. Everyone seems to like them and they often replace short car t
by edaemon 8y ago
As a resident of Portland (where the survey was conducted), the results match with my experience. Everyone seems to like them and they often replace short car trips. The only complaint I've heard with any frequency is that they're left in annoying places.
Having used them a bit myself, there are four improvements I'd like to see:
1. Charging stations. While the current model where the scooters are collected and charged by people seems to get along, it's a bummer that they aren't easy to find at night. Most of them have been collected for charging. That means you can ride them somewhere and then not have one for the ride back, especially if you're in a group of people. It's also not that uncommon to be somewhere you'd expect to find one but with none nearby, or there are some but scattered over a few blocks. It would be nice if there were some stations scattered around the city where the scooters could be taken for charging but still be available for use, especially in high traffic areas and/or transit nodes like light rail stations (see #2). Even better if there's some incentive to drop them off there. That may help with the poor parking issue.
2. Integration with public transit. As it currently is, riding transit round-trip costs $5. If you use a scooter to get to public transit it costs $7 + $0.15/min of scooter riding. I'd guess that works out to around $15 total for most trips, which is plenty. To encourage their use as a supplement to public transit, it would be great if they were integrated with public transit; e.g. using public transit waives the $1 start fee, or using public transit waives the first 10-15 minutes of scooter cost, incentivized charging stations at public transit locations, etc. Portland has the Hop fastpass system which could work nicely for the first two.
3. Get rid of the helmet requirement. I don't hate it but I don't think it's effective or useful.
4. The lights need to be better. While it's not that difficult to see a scooter at night because they're all lit, the lights don't provide much visibility for the rider.
- masklinn 8y ago> 1. Charging stations. That has high up-front costs which I'm guessing is why these startups don't do it, plus it requires negotiating with the city, and assuming your customers are not selfish assholes (that's an assumption which is not going to hold). If you want charging stations, aside from the city negotiation and up-front costs you need to strongly incentivise their use and have permanent crew roaming around to move devices back to charging stations, and for high-traffic areas that's probably not going to be sufficient: your average e-k-scooter takes a couple hours to charge to 80%. Battery-swapping (gogoro & co) is a pretty good alternative there as your "charging station" becomes a large bank of batteries you can swap in/out, but it requires room for standardised user-swappable batteries, and an actual standard. Not really an option for e-k-scooters where the battery is underfoot and at least partially structural.
- edaemon 8y agoI don't blame the scooter companies for not having stations, I just think they would be an improvement. The stations could be on private property to avoid the permitting problem. I can see plenty of apartment buildings wanting a station out front. Portland would probably be receptive to permitting them, anyway. As for the incentive, a small one works pretty well with our bike share program. Full charging does take a while for a scooter but the idea with distributed stations would be to keep the scooters charged for longer, not forever. It's not really a charge problem, it's an availability problem -- the only way to charge a scooter right now makes it unavailable for the duration of a full charge. Stations would partially charge it and keep it available. I think user-swapped batteries would probably be stolen.
- c3534l 8y agoThe thing that annoys me more than anything is that people on scooters don't slow down when passing pedestrians and I've had a number of close calls.