Why Uber might save Lime

Intel buys Moovit, France covers bike repairs, Amazon gets real about ebikes.

May 05, 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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Last chance to register for Founder Shield’s Micromobility Panel webinar this Wednesday May 6th @ 1:00pm ET | 10am PT. They’ll be hosting Revel, Wunder Mobility, Maniv Mobility, ibott @ Apollo, and Tortoise for a roundtable discussion on the growth challenges micromobility operators face and how to overcome them.

Post-covid cities.

As urbanism and design writer Allison Arieff noted in a recent NYT op-ed, “efforts to stem the spread of the coronavirus have… offered us a rare experiment: We can see our cities for the first time without the choking traffic, dirty air and honking horns that have so often made them intolerable.”

This week, Allison and Curbed editor Alissa Walker will join the Triple M webinar to discuss what cities will look like after the Covid-19 reset and how urban design can help make dense communities more pandemic-proof.

To gain access to our weekly webinars, including this one, become a member of Triple M today. From now until June 1st, Triple M is free to try for 30 days.

Now with NPS.

The April edition of Prabin Joel Jones’s scooter app report is here.

Every month, Prabin collects data from over 150 app stores globally to see how each scooter company’s performance is changing relative to its competitors.

This month, for the first time, Prabin calculated net promoter score (NPS) to show which micromobility operators have the most loyal and enthusiastic customers.

Top takeaways, including some very interesting results for Germany-based Tier:

  • Lime had the highest global NPS in April (91.76), followed by Bird (90.06).

  • The total volume of app store reviews collapsed 86% compared to March as shelter-in-place orders spread. Grin’s activity declined the most month-over-month (-96%), followed by Lime (-95%). Tier, suffered the least, experiencing only a 16% decline.

  • Using December as a baseline, app store activity fell by at least 75% for every single operator except for Tier, whose activity went up an astounding 155%.

  • With Lime withdrawing from 99% of its markets, Tier replaced the California-based company as the most popular scooter app globally, controlling 20.1% of activity worldwide.

Prabin Joel Jones is the COO of e-motionlabs, a European mobility technology company that provides connectivity solutions for light electric vehicles.

Pod people.

Young industries have few veterans to show the way. Which is why operations leader Tarani Duncan—formerly of Motivate, Jump, and Mapbox—is such a unique fount of knowledge.

On a new episode of the podcast, she explains why she is still bullish on shared micromobility, even after all its ups and downs.

What you need to know this week.

With its core ride-hailing business in decline, Uber is reportedly in talks to lead a $170 million investment in Lime. The potential cash infusion, which would help Lime stay afloat as demand for scooters shrivels due to Covid-19, would value the micromobility company at $510 million, or 79% less than its previous valuation. In exchange for $85 million in emergency funding, Uber would significantly increase its minority stake, get the option to buy Lime between 2022 and 2024, and be able streamline its own micromobility division. From The Information:

In general, Uber’s own scooter and bike rental efforts have struggled financially more than Lime’s, and all prominent businesses in the micromobility field had significant difficulties in the pre-Covid-19 era. The move could save Uber several hundred million dollars annually in operating costs, and tens of millions of dollars more if the lion’s share of Jump’s 400 employees move to Lime or leave the company.

To that end, Uber is also said to be considering personnel cuts of 20%, or upwards of 5,400 employees.

It wouldn’t be alone if it did cut staff. Layoffs rocked several other prominent mobility companies this week, including Lyft, Lime, Careem, and Deliveroo. Gory details below.

  • Lyft let go of almost 1,000 employees, or 17% of the company, and furloughed nearly 300 more. The news was followed by an announcement that the firm is ending scooter service in Oakland, Austin, and San Jose.

  • Lime parted with 83 employees. All in, the scooter startup has cut almost a third of its staff since the beginning of the year.

  • Careem, Uber’s Middle Eastern subsidiary, slashed headcount by more than 30% and suspended its bus transport app.

  • UK-based delivery service Deliveroo shed more than 350 employees, in case you thought online delivery was supposed to be immune to this thing.

In other news, France is allocating €50 per person for bicycle repairs after its lockdown ends next week. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said that returning to pre-Covid levels of auto congestion was “out of the question.”

These are the best electric scooters to own, according to users.

NYC will stop running subways between 1-5AM for cleaning. The gap in overnight service will be filled by buses, dollar vans, and, if necessary, subsidized for-hire vehicles.

Intel is buying Israeli transit app developer Moovit for $900 million, furthering its ambitions in the mobility sector.

Amazon is hiring a leader to scale it ebike delivery program in North America.

Ford postpones AV service until 2022.

Chinese car traffic is rebounding alarmingly fast. In some cities, including Xi’an, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, congestion has not only returned to pre-Covid levels, it has grown year-over-year.

U.S. car sales showed tentative signs of recovery in April. Also pickups outsold passenger cars for the first time ever last month.

A recent paper estimates 37% of U.S. jobs could be done at home.

Uber will soon require drivers to wear face masks.

Taping off seats for social distancing could reduce bus and train capacity by 15%.

Boosted was developing ebikes and other new vehicles when it went of business. It’s unclear whether Lime, which recently acquired Boosted’s IP, will do anything with these prototypes.

AI road safety startup Nexar raised $52 million in investment from Samsung, GE, and Nationwide.

Vilnius is turning public outdoor space over to restaurants and cafes to help them keep their customers physically separated.

Related: “Thirty-six percent of Manhattan is street space. It’s the most valuable land in the world, and the city gives it away for free, provided you use it for nothing but your car. What if we instead gave it for free… to restaurants and bars?”

Odds and ends.

Around 40,000 cargo bikes are used every day in Copenhagen. Revel brought moped-rental service to Lower Manhattan and the Bronx. Cleveland asked scooter companies to temporarily leave town. Lime quit Santa Monica permanently. Brisbane is encouraging healthcare workers to ride scooters. While LA drags its feet on road closures, Portland plans to open 100 miles of street space. Spin will return scooters to Orlando, Nashville, Columbus, and St. Louis. Tier launched moped rentals in Berlin.

Jobs to be done.

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