The streets, bike lanes and sidewalks of NYC are an absolute mess and I’ve seen the same thing happening all over the country.

 

The micromobility revolution has turned our streets into a hodgepodge of bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, booster boards, and even electric solowheels. It’s like the Wild West. An insane amount of traffic that follows no rules. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

• Each of these 2-wheeled vehicles is going super fast (often 20-25mph), running red lights, and definitely not stopping for pedestrians.
• CitiBike’s daily ridership increased by 8% last year so daily bike commuting is clearly getting more popular.
• Add cars and trucks to this crazy mix and it gets really dangerous. So far this year, 10 cyclists have been killed in NYC – that’s more fatalities than all of last year. And many were hit-and-runs.

And for all you potential e-scooter riders, consider this latest update from the CDC. (Source: ArsTechnica)

• One in three people injured on e-scooters gets hurt during their very first ride.
• In Austin Texas, over a 3 month period, there were 192 e-scooter injuries requiring emergency room visits.
• Half of the accidents resulted in head injuries. Only one of the riders was wearing a helmet.
• 70% of injuries were to arms, shoulders, wrists, and hands
• 55% resulted in injured legs, knees, ankles and feet
• 35% broke a bone; 19% broke more than one
• 50% resulted from road conditions such as potholes.
• More than a third crashed while going too fast
• 19% claimed their scooter malfunctioned
• 55% were injured in the street, one-third on the sidewalk
• 18 to 29-year-olds were most likely to get injured

Washington, DC, has limited the number of scooters to 400. Nashville currently has more than 4,000 scooters on the streets but a ban is coming after 43 scooter injuries in April and a fatality last week.

And yet, according to Grand View Research, Inc., the global e-scooter market is expected to hit $41.98 billion by 2030. Really?

 

Read on below for more data on scooter economics from NPR.

 

Will Bird Economics Fly? (Source: NPR)

It takes about four to six months for companies to break even on scooters, and there’s a big problem: the scooters aren’t lasting that long.

• They’re typically dead in less than a month.
• They get abused by riders who have no incentive to maintain them.
• They’re vandalized by people who hate them. The Instagram account Bird Graveyard documents scooter destruction. It has 85,000 followers.
• There’s a limit to how high scooter rental prices can go. Those who really love scooting everywhere, can buy a $300-$600 scooter and save money.

Scootermania isn’t just about scooters. It’s about this entire bubbly era of tech.

• The money being poured into money-losing companies is driven by an ideology — sometimes called “blitzscaling” — that values growth over profit.
• It’s a belief that achieving scale is important because competitors won’t be able to catch up. But it’s not really evident that the scooter business is winner-take-all, especially because spotting them on the street and downloading a free app is relatively easy. Even the CEO of Bird acknowledged this, telling The Information that he doesn’t believe market share is important for scooter profitability. Instead, he says, what’s important is to actually stop losing money every time they buy and rent out a scooter.
• Venture capitalists are now subsidizing consumers with billions and billions a year with the hope that the money-losing companies they back will become the next Google or Facebook. That’s the only reason you can rent a scooter for a couple of bucks – it’s all courtesy of rich investors.

 

Bottom Line.

It’s gotten so congested and crazy on the roads and bike paths that I’m considering canceling my Citibike membership.

I’d rather walk, take a subway or use Via (at least until that VC money dries up and the rates increase).

How did we get to this crazy place?