Startups have started a scooter revolution. Can they control it?

JUST after 7am on a recent weekday morning, Alexander Berg pulled his van – bright green, with the word “LimeBike” emblazoned on the side – over on a corner on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Berg, a thin, cheerful 31-year-old in a hoodie, pulled on a pair of black gloves and threw open the back of the van, which was filled with electric scooters. “We’ll do three here,” he said. Toby Sun, Lime’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said some chaos is be expected in the early days of a cultural shift.

“In order to change people’s behaviour, we have to change their mindsets,” he said.

But there’s been less than careful consideration of the consequences, in part because Lime itself was caught unaware by the sudden interest in scooter sharing. When it launched early last year, Lime was a bike-sharing company. Then Bird kicked off its service in Santa Monica, turning into a sudden sensation and leaving Lime scrambling to design and build its own scooters.

This month, the company officially recognised its shifting priorities by dropping the “-Bike” from its name. The rebranding happened so quickly that Lime didn’t have a chance to reflect the change on its equipment.

Bike-sharing is a deceptively complicated business. Lime had to acquire a fleet of vehicles strong enough to withstand a beating, build software to deploy them, and establish individual operations in each city. Adding scooters was just another layer of complexity.

Even transportation experts who support the sharing platforms expected them to spend years in obscurity.

“Nobody took it seriously – at least I didn’t,” said Sharon Feigon, the executive director of the Shared Use Mobility Center, an advocacy group pushing for alternative transportation. “Then all of a sudden it took off.” — Bloomberg