I live in a typical US city with rain, four seasons, and lots of cars.
No one in my city thought this business model would work. The only reason it raised so much money is because VCs are idiots who don't understand how society works outside of California.
There's nothing interesting about the fact that everyone in a typical US city thinks some business model won't work. They always think that. You can't really get any useful information from that. Equivalent to a stopped clock.
I’ve always wondered why they didn’t absolutely plow VC money into lobbying for bike infrastructure across the US (or maybe they did and it wasn’t successful?) Forget app features, focus on the other half of the equation - the roads you expect your scooters to ride on.
My impression is that my fellow Americans are way too pessimistic about city improvements, and also that Bird did the world’s worst job of getting cities to meet them halfway.
Edit because I just thought of something else - if they were truly savvy, they would have made an industry consortium to lobby for shared infrastructure, to split the shared costs and increase their chances of getting favorable laws passed.
In 2024 pretty much every country has a scooter rental service. (Including very northern countries with seasons much more pronounced than any in the U.S.)
Near Ithaca, NY we have a lot of rain and (usually) snow in the winter. I think a hardy person could commute on a bicycle much more than 80% of the time.
It rains a lot in the Netherlands and people ride bikes a lot anyway; I think it is not so cold, I hear it is unusual that it freezes enough for people to skate on their canals these days.
Northern European countries have people ride bikes all year long because they invest in keeping the infrastructure rideable.
In the U.S. the moment it snows the governments will send out a bunch of people and equipment to clear out the roads. In Northern European countries they will do the same for the bike lanes as well.
Agree, it seems to assume that the unit of mobility is something larger, like a car. When the fundamental unit of human mobility is just that, a human, since they are inherently mobile. We would do better to describe cars as macro mobility than scooters and bikes as micro. Pipe dream, I know.
Speaking only for "micro mobility", it seems useful to distinguish allowing someone to travel within a city from between cities from between continents. Sure, it's mobility, but there are different kinds or degrees of mobility.
No one in my city thought this business model would work. The only reason it raised so much money is because VCs are idiots who don't understand how society works outside of California.