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one additional problem (which I guess is a corollary of your first point): they are too expensive for the end user. in my area at least, renting a scooter to go
by leetcrew 7y ago
one additional problem (which I guess is a corollary of your first point): they are too expensive for the end user. in my area at least, renting a scooter to go a short distance is 50-75% as much money as an uber/lyft, and you might have already walked a quarter of the way there before finding one with a decent charge. over longer distances, the scooter is a lot cheaper, but also much slower. they only make sense for a narrow range of medium-length trips that are too long to walk, but still short enough to get there in a reasonable amount of time at 15mph.
I do enjoy using them sometimes when I'm feeling lazy but still want to get some fresh air, but it's not really an economical means of transportation.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe economics of scooters really suffers from being dockless. I can see the appeal from a VC-funded startup perspective, because you can get a lot of them out there quickly without having to build any infrastructure, but the ongoing daily costs of charging them all (and replacing losses) makes them expensive to operate, hence the high cost. A dockless model would allow them to be much more affordable; in NYC, for example, you can do unlimited rides on docked rideshare for an annualized cost of under 50 cents per day. There's no reason in principle that a docked scooter system, with scooters charging from docks and prevented from theft while not in use, couldn't have costs come down to a roughly similar amount.