Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
What makes you think 100 (or any other number of) rental scooters are in operation at any time, anywhere in the U.S.? Or that they have any specific number of paying customers? Because you saw a few in operation in a Portland riverfront park?
Have you seen any statistics about paying customers or rental earnings released by or about any of these start-up rental scooter outfits? I have only seen breathless reporting on how much they are allegedly "valued at" based on money invested by speculators/"investors", but nothing about earnings, expenses, or customers, let alone expectations or predictions of earning any profit now or in the future.
Apparently the program was pretty new when I was up to Portland this summer, so that may have given them a bit of a boost.
Notes are that I think Portland was targeting around 2000 e-scooters distributed among 3 different vendors.
While I saw several of them in the riverfront park, I did also note several in use on downtown streets. And, I was only looking at the ones close to me.
Of course, I saw lots of Lime bikes parked in strategic areas. The Bird bikes... and was there another brand? They all seemed a bit more haphazardly located, as if they had been ridden and parked.
Also, the reports of charging seem to indicate the company only schedules pickups when they actually need to be charged, and at least in other communities, there are apparently quite a few people retrieving scooters to recharge.
Portland is apparently taxing the scooter rentals, so I would hope they will actually release data at the end of the summer.
Anyway, there seemed to be at least a fair amount of use, even if one sees quite a few just parked.
At some point, the better companies will build HEAT maps somewhat like Strava, and will position the scooters near where they are needed.