prathmann

No, those things don't doom a business to failure - but they also don't magically rescue a business that was otherwise doomed to fail. Franchising generally works by first showing that you can run a nice profit at a few locations and then selling others the rights to use your brand and letting them establish their own stores taking advantage of the favorable name you've initially established. If the first store is a bust then you never get to the franchise stage. Likewise insurance works only when you initially get your risks under control so you can convince the insurance company that your reasonable premiums will cover their costs in the long run and give them a decent profit in addition. Insurance doesn't usually actually save the individual money over the long term - but it's useful in changing the possibility of a large, unexpected loss into a manageable series of monthly premium payments.

The idea of having large numbers of franchise owners in each town who are responsible for their own handful of bikes or scooters strikes me as terribly inefficient. If we're talking about the electric scooters then I'd have to go out each day and drive all over town finding my 10 scooters to recharge and/or service them. In the process I'd probably be driving right by large numbers of other people's scooters but couldn't touch them. Far better to have a single company that owns all the scooters so they can send a truck to each neighborhood and service all the scooters that happened to end up in that vicinity.

2manybikes

That's exactly what I was going to say!!

2manybikes

badger1 beat me to it.

tandempower

Yes, but what I'm saying is that the single company doesn't have to be the owner of the scooters. The scooters can be owned by independent franchises and the company can act as a dispatch service and insurer of the bike/scooter population as a whole. That way you as a franchise owner wouldn't have to be responsible for your own 10 or 20 bikes/scooters directly. You could perform your share of maintenance by servicing/charging whichever 10 or 20 bikes/scooters are nearest to you and that would give you credit, which would cover the people who took care of your 10 or 20 bikes/scooters.

Basically it would be a service co-op. You could even have owners who farmed out their service duties to others by paying them. That would basically just be like buying shares of a company. I.e. you buy 20 shares by buying 20 bikes/scooters at $100 each plus the same number of service plans at, say, $100 each. Now you've spent $4000 and your bikes/scooters are guaranteed and serviced for a certain period of time. In effect, it is the same thing as buying stock in a company, except you directly own a certain amount of the company hardware because you bought it from them, the way a franchise buys hardware from the mother company.

I think the first part of your post just gets bogged down in assumptions like the notion that a franchise has to start small and grow. Obviously these bike/scooter shares don't need to start small because their business edge is the fact they can produce a large run of bikes/scooters and then deploy them throughout an area to provide convenience of access at all the stops within a transit network. This is a solution of the last-mile problem where there are a lot of 'last miles' and to attract people to relying on transit exclusively, you need consistency throughout the service area. If you have share bikes/scooters at some transit stops and not others, people are going to have to figure out before taking transit that they can rely on a share bike/scooter at their destination. If, however, they can trust there will be a bike/scooter to use wherever transit takes them, it solves the last mile problem and makes transit more time-efficient and thus attractive.

badger1

Sigh. If that is true, then it is sadly very clear: you, like me, have either succumbed entirely to the dark, evil forces of what those who know about such things refer to as 'Car/Automotivist Culture' OR you are a malicious agent of the mysterious forces who manipulate that 'culture' to their own ends -- little gnomes in Zurich standing on 'grassy knolls', that sort of thing. You can read all about this 'truth' on the interwebz ... apparently.

If you are such an agent, you have of course been sent here to the LCF sub-forum intentionally to mock, belittle, and disrupt the quiet conversations of those who know better and who stand united on the side of Truth and Goodness and stuff.

Either way, you like me must be

cooker

In situations that support it, like downtown Chicago, you will check the app and see if any bikes are located near you, or else you will happen upon an available one outside the subway entrance or beside your favourite cafe and decide on the spot to use it. If you are in a less popular area and you don't see a bike located nearby, you will travel by some other means.

2manybikes

The Russians did not interfere with this post. There is no collusion. Fake news.

badger1

P&R

... but then, that's nothing new around here. Sub-forum should be sub-titled 'P&R Lite', imo.

Mobile 155

Mobile 155

cooker

Scooters are a lot more portable than bikes. If you use your own bike for a trip you have to commit to using it for the whole trip or locking it somewhere and returning to it. WIth docked or dockless bikes you use them for any part of the trip that suits you and then forget about them. Youmight walk to the bus stop, go downtown, and then decide to bike home, or the other way around. Or you might drive downtown and circle for 20 minutes before you can park in front of a store, then discover they don't have what you want but they tell you another store half a mile away might have it. It would be a huge pain to drive there and search for another parking spot, but you didn't think to bring your Devinci, so you hop on a share bike, go get what you came for and return to your car to drive home.

prathmann

A heavy ill-fitting bike located just down the block is a better option than some superior bike locked up securely miles away at your home. I am one of very few people in our bike club who regularly uses a bike for regular transportation functions. Most of their bikes 'with top-rated components' stay securely at home except when used for a recreational ride where the bike is never out of sight.

The feasibility and utility of docked bike systems seems pretty well established, at least for dense urban areas like New York City. An advantage of these systems is that the renter has some responsibility for keeping the bike safe and undamaged while it is away from a docking station and the docking stations can be designed to minimize the chance of theft and/or vandalism while bikes are stored there. Dockless systems strike me as inherently far more problematic for both the city/public with bikes potentially left in hazardous or inappropriate locations and for the system operator due to problems with theft, vandalism, and increased maintenance issues.

Mobile 155

cooker

Next time you're in LA will you have any of your own bikes with you?

Mobile 155

Machka 

Given that the mods are not car free ...


Given that the organisation who owns this forum (Internet Brands) is a car organisation ...

I-Like-To-Bike

Also given that most of the posters on this list are not car free; "car light" includes almost every car owning person in North America who does not drive in his/her personally owned motor vehicle 24/7.

Heck, one of the regular posters on this list owns/drives an F350 while proudly waving his "Car Lite" banner on this list.

noglider 

Purism, shmurism. This reminds me of people who criticize vegetarians for wearing leather or eating dairy.

I-Like-To-Bike

Would you sing the praises of living car free and take on airs about it, while still owning and driving a personally owned motor vehicle?

noglider 

Putting on airs is rude. If I reduced my car driving, yes, it would be worth mentioning. Come to think of it, I've reduced my car use drastically in recent years, and my life feels much better. Did I just say something bad?

tandempower

You can own a motor-vehicle without being proud of it the same as you can do anything else out of pragmatism without embracing it as an ideal.

Doohickie

I will just leave this here: