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We’re excited to announce Skip, a new company dedicated to creating accessible, fun, and reliable last-mile transportation services. We’re currently operating our shared dockless electric scooter service in Washington, DC, and we’re excited to begin expanding to new cities.

Our story begins in 2011 when a group of us started Boosted, where we built the world’s first personal electric vehicle. It was the first time that a small chassis (a bamboo longboard) was combined with modern electric motors and EV-grade lithium batteries to achieve portability and performance, and it was also the first vehicle of its kind designed to last for thousands of miles through the daily beating of a commute. Today, Boosted has received rave reviews for the third generation of electric boards and is about to begin shipping to excited riders in 34 countries.

Since 2011, we’ve become even more confident that the solution to moving within our cities has to be more than just cars. Personal electric vehicles are an incredible opportunity for cities and neighborhoods to improve short-distance or “last-mile” trips. They use 1/20 the energy per mile traveled of a car, they connect to and extend the reach of public transit, and they take a tiny fraction of the footprint to park or store. When we can make trips with these vehicles quicker and more affordable than the same trip with a car, we all win.

The right kind of vehicle technology

We are excited to bring our experience in using and designing personal electric vehicles to our shared fleet of stand-up electric scooters. The scooters we are testing with today have the largest battery of any in service, which means our riders can count on them well into the afternoon and evening. We have dual headlights and taillights and even brake lights for improved visibility. And our full suspension chassis and wide floorboard mean more confidence in the bike lane, where these vehicles belong.

Skip scooters are safe, dependable, and insanely fun

We’ve also invested in the onboard vehicle technology stack. Accurate location tracking sensors and software mean the vehicle is where you expect it to be. Advanced remote diagnostics and fleet management tools help us keep our system running in the best possible condition and share the most detailed data possible with cities.

Working with cities

In early January, we started working with the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) in Washington, DC to create the first legal pilot program for electric scooter sharing. DDOT has been a progressive voice for transportation innovation and was one of the first US cities to create a dockless bikeshare pilot program. Their team worked closely with us to create rules to begin a similar pilot for our scooters, and we began testing under the name Waybots in February.

Perhaps surprisingly given news from around the country, we’ve received a warm welcome from the community in Washington, DC. Instead of criminal complaints or cease-and-desist notices, the city has come to us with constructive feedback on how to improve our services. We’ve met with them regularly and share anonymized data reports. The vast majority of our riders have been courteous and respectful with few community complaints, all while our system has been operating at an average of 7 trips per vehicle per day. We are thrilled to share that this approach can work, and we’re excited to continue to work closely with cities as we expand.

Thank you to our earliest users

Finally, a thank-you to all our Skip/Waybots users over the past several months in Washington DC. You’ve provided incredibly helpful feedback and we look forward to serving you with better and better systems over time. We can’t wait to make Skip (and all types of personal mobility) a daily part of our cities and neighborhoods.