Am I crazy to suggest that these jumbo-size toys would otherwise have the potential to cause a transportation shake-up on the level of Uber and Lyft? The economics of micromobility businesses are remarkable. Take e-bike company Jump, now owned by Uber: It says it buys e-bikes for $1,000 a piece. The service costs $2 for a 30-minute ride, with a per-minute charge after that. During San Francisco’s Jump trial, each bike was ridden six to seven times a day, eating into Uber’s core service. The bikes pay for themselves in just a few months. Scooters appear to look even better: Alison Griswold did a quick back-of-napkin calculation that suggests a Santa Monica scooter could pay for itself in just a few weeks.





here’s also the China parallel, which offers evidence for the success of a messy rollout. Dockless bike-share companies Ofo and Mobike flooded Chinese cities with tens of thousands of bicycles, inventing a new transportation mode overnight. This helped bump the share of miles traveled in Chinese cities by bicycle from 5.5 percent to 11.6 percent. In Shenzhen, private car travel fell by 10 percent. This kind of radical change was possible only because the bikes were everywhere. A bike in Beijing, like an Uber in Los Angeles, is never more than five minutes away—and usually much closer.





And while Chinese cities have always been bike-friendly, there’s a market here too: More than 35 percent of vehicle trips are two miles or less, according to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey. In San Francisco, the only limit on the utility of electric bicycles—which started cannibalizing Uber’s car trips as soon as the company deployed them—appears to be the number of bikes and scooters that the companies can put on the street: a measly 250.

Regulators say Bird, Lime, and company got what they had coming. They would have surely stuck with Kalanick’s hardball approach if they could have. But it’s hard to imagine any city would have rolled out the red carpet on its own for a radical, messy transportation experiment.





The one exception is Seattle. As Wired reported this summer, the city has one-quarter of the nation’s dockless bikes—and something to show for it: The bikes get used three times as much as those elsewhere in the U.S.





Generally, though, the municipal backlash seems to demonstrate two things. First, city officials were humiliated by their inability to control Uber and Airbnb and are trying to make up for it. Second, local governments are conservative. They may talk a big game about climate change and pedestrian safety, but they are perfectly happy to maintain the status quo in which everyone drives everywhere all the time.





Source：https://amp.slate.com/business/2018/09/after-losing-to-uber-cities-are-squeezing-scooters-and-bike-shares.html



