Inside Britain’s scooter battle royale

Uber goes SaaS, Lyft goes green, and Apple goes biking

June 23, 2020

Hello and welcome to the Micromobility Newsletter, a weekly missive about mobility, mostly mobility in cities by small vehicles like bikes and scooters. The reason you’re reading this email is that you signed up on our website or came to one of our events.

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Founder Shield has just released their Sharing Economy & Insurance Whitepaper. With a focus on delivery, ride share, and on-demand services, the white paper provides insight into the legal climate, funding, and best risk management practices in the industry.

What you need to know this week

  • Seventeen companies, along with about 30 cities, have expressed interest in participating in the UK’s upcoming scooter trial. In addition to the usual suspects (Bird, Lime, Tier, Voi, Dott, Spin), the list of applicants includes a handful of surprises, including Neuron, a Singapore-based player that is not presently active in Europe, Beryl, which until now has operated only bike-share systems, Link, the new service from Superpedestrian, and Knot, a station-based provider.

  • Disappointingly, the UK’s proposed scooter guidelines would require riders to have a driver’s license. This would exclude non-motorists, a group largely comprised of young people, seniors, the economically disadvantaged, city-dwellers, and people with disabilities. Even still, the arrival of scooters is expected to greatly relieve congestion and pollution. Roughly 60% of the country’s car trips are 3 miles or less.

  • There were some big mobility-related announcements in Apple’s #WWDC keynote yesterday:

    • When iOS 14 is released, iPhone users will be able to unlock scooters without so much as opening an app by using the new App Clips tool.

    • The upgraded Apple Maps will feature cycling directions (including information about bike paths, traffic conditions, elevation changes, and if there are stairs anywhere on your route) as well as charging locations for certain makes of EVs.

    • For cities with congestion pricing, the new Maps will show where those fees apply. In Beijing, which rations road use based on an even-odd license plate system, car owners will be able to securely store their license plate number on their iPhone, and Maps will notify them whether they are allowed to drive (!) on a given day.

  • In the UK, 1.3 million consumers have bought a bike since the pandemic started. Meanwhile, US bike sales reached $1 billion in April, growing 75% year over year.

  • Ever wonder what a city built for micromobility from the ground-up would look like? Jump founder Ryan Rzepecki is interested in creating an autonomous charter city aimed at remote workers who are fleeing expensive metro areas in the wake of Covid-19. (We’re calling the hypothetical project “JAZ,” or the Jump Autonomous Zone.)

  • Relatedly, Jump bikes are coming back to Seattle. The redeployment bodes well for other US cities that temporarily lost Jump service after the company was acquired by Lime.

  • Meanwhile, in Europe, most Jump vehicles are being stored in warehouses until Lime decides whether to redeploy or sunset them. For now, it looks like service will definitely return to Paris, London, Barcelona, Rome, and Berlin, at least. “The main difference between what happened in the US and what’s happening in Europe is that Uber was responsible for the unused vehicles in the US while Lime is in charge of the unused vehicles in Europe.”

  • The number of trips by shared micromobility are back to pre-pandemic levels in Paris. Download the full report from Fluctuo on what’s going on in the French capital.

  • Bird is launching a standalone navigation app that will provide turn-by-turn bike lane directions. Bird Maps, as it’s called, was developed with the Israeli startup Trailze and will be piloted in Tel Aviv and Paris.

  • Lime expanded its subscription service to include daily and monthly passes. Tier is preparing to launch a similar offer.

  • DoorDash raised $400 million on a $16 billion valuation. The food-delivery company started laying the groundwork for an IPO in February, but those plans are now on hold due to Covid-19.

  • Over 90% of ride-share and delivery workers say the pandemic has severely reduced their income.

  • Australia’s consumer watchdog found that Lime did not disclose a known safety issue with its Gen 2 scooters’ brakes and failed to report dozen of injuries.

  • Indian micromobility provider Yulu raised $4 million in a round led by Rocketship. The startup says new signups on its platform have grown 40% a month since India’s lockdown ended.

  • Madrid will now subsidize the purchase of electric scooters, bicycles, mopeds, and motorcycles up to €750.

  • MIT is developing an autonomous bike for on-demand rentals.

  • Lyft promises to transition its entire fleet to zero-emission vehicles by 2030. Of course, since Lyft doesn’t actually own most of its vehicles, it will be up individual drivers to make the switch themselves. The ride-hail company says it will not pay for drivers to buy EVs, but it will push governments to create “incentive funds” to make the purchase more affordable. In other words, Lyft is now a lobbyist for the EV industry.

  • Daimler offloaded its struggling MaaS division, Moovel, to a Canadian company called Strategic Mapping under unknown terms. The acquisition was accompanied by massive layoffs.

  • Splyt, a UK startup that makes software to simplify ride hailing, raised $19.5 million in a funding round led by Softbank.

  • An encouraging signal for transit agencies around the world, New Zealand’s transit ridership is back to nearly 80% of pre-pandemic levels only weeks after the country mostly contained the coronavirus.

  • Through a new partnership aimed at eliminating sidewalk clutter, Tortoise will use its semi-autonomous technology to reposition scooters to Swiftmile’s charging docks.

  • Navigation app Citymapper has been quietly raising funds and looking for a buyer, potentially Apple, Google, or Uber.

  • A look at how pandemic travel patterns could reshape cities’ futures.

  • India is the latest country to experience a cycling renaissance spurred by commuters’ concerns about the coronavirus.

  • Subscription bike service Swapfiets now offers mopeds in Germany.

  • Transportation for America is tracking amendments to the INVEST Act, a major transportation bill winding its way through the US House.

  • Taiwanese moped provider WeMo raised $3.3 million in a Series A round led by AppWorks Ventures.

  • A California state appeals court ruled that Lime gig workers can pursue labor law violation claims in court.

  • Tranzito is embedding Moovit’s MaaS service into its kiosks to make multimodal travel easier for people without smartphones. 

  • Drag racing complaints in NYC have quadrupled during lockdown because fewer people are driving. Or at least fewer people were driving…

  • From LA to Berlin to Abu Dhabi, microtransit is having a moment as cities seek to fill holes in their public transport networks caused by the pandemic. Microtransit’s smartphone-first user interface could also help cities improve contact tracing.

  • Speaking of microtransit, Uber is branching into SaaS. “Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) will pay Uber a subscription fee to use its management software to facilitate requesting, matching and tracking of its high-occupancy vehicle fleet, starting with a service that operates along the Highway 101 corridor. Marin Transit trips will show up in the Uber app and let users book and even share rides.”

  • The decline in transport emissions caused by stay-at-home orders in Wuhan alone may have prevented over 12,000 deaths, or 2.5x the number of fatalities that are currently attributed to coronavirus in China.

  • The EU’s new €20 billion Mobility Package puts cycling on equal footing with EV and public transport investments for the first time.

  • Facebook has acquired Mapillary, a Swedish mapping startup that crowdsources street-level images.

  • Similar to traffic stops, jaywalking laws disproportionately target people of color. The case for why they should be abolished.

  • The high cost of bad sidewalks.

Our next guest is…

Between Bird buying Circ, Tier acquiring Coup, and Lime taking control of Jump, it is pretty clear that, in 2020, micromobility has entered its long-anticipated consolidation phase.

But while a handful of high-profile mergers between operators have dominated the news, a potentially more significant trend has been playing out in the background: the rise of vertical integrated micromobility companies. Recent months have witnessed heightened M&A activity across the value chain, as hardware, software, IoT, and operations companies join forces or expand internally to own new categories. 

Join us tomorrow at 10am PT / 1pm ET for our next subscriber-only webinar, What’s Behind the Current Wave of Vertical Integration? Our special guests will be Assaf Biderman, CEO of Superpedestrian, and Prabin Joel Jones, VP of Bond, whose companies have both absorbed new layers of the value chain in recent weeks. Together, we will examine the implications of vertical integration in the micromobility sector for cities, customers, and businesses.

Pod people

What will it take for MaaS to become the norm in trip planning? Transit app’s COO Jake Sion joins the latest episode of the podcast to break down what’s needed to get buy-in from cities, shared mobility services, and commuters.

Goings on

Who else misses talking about the future of cities with people outside of their immediate quarantine cohort?

While in-person events are mostly cancelled this summer, on June 30th and July 1st, CoMotion Miami Live is bringing together a virtual gathering of global mayors, leading technologists, public transport operators, VCs, startups, and established players to formulate a new blueprint for mobility. Featured speakers include Tembici CEO Tomás Petti Martins, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos A. Giménez, and LADOT General Manager Seleta Reynolds.

In addition, CoMotion is generously broadcasting select content from the conference for free to encourage the entire field of mobility to come together in this time of crisis.

Complimentary tickets are now available to this online-only event. Register here.

Jobs to be done

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