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Comment by TacticalTable | Hacker News Reader

Of the e-scooter startups I've tried, Lime is my favorite. In my smaller city (Indianapolis) we just have Bird and Lime, and Bird's restrictions on hours, locations, and parking make them very difficult to use (They turn themselves off if they leave their range, and many pieces of downtown are considered 'out of bounds'). Meanwhile, the Limes are better distributed around the city, easier to park, and have much more generous boundaries. Bird has the stronger brand recognition, but that's about it.

I'm surprised that it was warmer climate cities that underperformed in the US, because I would have expected those to have a much better chance for profit, as cold winter seasons dramatically reduce scooter usage. Too much competition?

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Too much competition, but really the infrastructure is not there in warm cities in the U.S. They also increased the price so you are more inclined to take an uber or public transport than spend $6 on a bird ride. Riding on a pothill filled gutter while cars clip you at 35mph in LA is not ideal. If there were more bike lanes that were longer than 1 block, these things would be way more popular. Not sure why these companies aren't advocating for more bike lanes as it will help their brand.

It also doesn't help that these companies let defective equipment remain in the network. After grabbing a scooter one day that had zero brakes, discovered only when I was trying to stop at a red light and not get slaughtered in the intersection, I now do an inspection of the brake lines and the wheels before I unlock. For some consumers the state these scooters are in will put them off entirely.

I didn't realize the rates were so high, I'd spend like $3k/yr if I tried to commute 5 miles on one.

As someone who spent 8 years heavily biking around LA, I'm glad I got out of there before the bike lanes became overrun with motorized drunks.

Currently far more overran with motorized uber drivers/delivery/meter maid/mailmen/police/random pricks using it as free overflow parking. The drunks prefer driving anyway.

> I'm surprised that it was warmer climate cities that underperformed in the US, because I would have expected those to have a much better chance for profit, as cold winter seasons dramatically reduce scooter usage. Too much competition?

I was surprised about this too. Though, from my anecdotal experience, there are a ton of micromobility companies operating in San Diego.

I recently visited San Diego and was absolutely blown away by how many scooter companies were operating there, and how many unused scooters I saw lying around.

There’s a ton in Denver that’s for sure.

Bird, Lime, Uber/Jump, Razor, and Lyft just off the top of my head. There’s pretty much at least one or so parked on every corner in the downtown area.

I wonder how much of this is because warmer climate cities have greater homeless and/or drug addict problems.

Here in Seattle, I saw lots of trashed Lime bikes and lots of unsavory folks using them, often with enough stuff piled onto them to imply they had forcibly unlocked them and were using them long-term. I ran into a couple of managers at Lime once and they said vandalism and theft was a big problem.

They get junked pretty fast in LA too. Sometimes the bike or scooter will be spray painted to hide the branding, sometimes not at all. They ride well enough unpowered to be useful, at least useful enough to ride back to a better place to start taking it apart. The encampment by my parking lot has a half a dozen of these stacked up in a pile with other peoples bikes. Police don't care, and neither do the companies it seems.

> Police don't care

The problem right there. It doesn’t have to be that way, its a choice.

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