The scooter-sharing apocalypse is coming
When a cluster of brightly colored dockless Mobike bicycles suddenly appeared on the street where Paul Strauss lives in the center of Washington, D.C., he was tempted to go for a ride.
He downloaded the app on his smartphone, the necessary first step to unlocking one of the bikes, then stopped short when he had to enter his credit card information.
Strauss, a 53-year-old lawyer who serves as a shadow senator for the district, says he thought, “Heck, I don’t have a helmet.” Then other doubts crept in. Who was the company behind this, anyway? How would he shower when he got to work? Though he talked himself out of it, he’s since noticed a proliferation of shareable bikes and electric scooters around the city — sometimes piloted by gleeful users, other times parked like phantoms in the middle of sidewalks, or leaning against buildings.
From D.C. and Dallas to Seattle and San Diego, the dockless apocalypse, or “wheelmageddon,” has dawned. Just as Wi-Fi untethered Internet users from dialing up for service, new technology allows would-be riders to locate bikes or scooters scattered on city streets without searching out a tethered docking station.
And, unlike with traditional municipal bike-share services, dockless riders can then just park the bike or scooter at their destination, virtually lock it back up with their smartphone, and get on with their days. When they need to ride again, the app points them to the closest available bike.
Since September, the nation’s capital has allowed five similar companies to deploy their vehicles on city streets, all competing for users. This pilot program is set to end this month.
But that doesn’t mean the end of it. Officials in the nation’s capital wanted to see if pay-perminute dockless service would complement the city’s existing docked Capital Bikeshare program by bringing in new riders and making shared bicycles available to underserved parts of the city. So far, it seems they have.
Biking and scooters are “better for traffic, better for the environment, better for the body,” said Jonathan M. Rogers, a policy analyst with the district’s Department of Transportation, who rides his own bike to work each day.
The biggest challenge, he said, has been maintaining safe access to sidewalks. Even when riders follow the rules and leave a mandated five-foot clearing around the vehicle, the mere presence of the vehicle can pose a challenge — particularly for the sight-impaired or otherwise disabled.
Indeed, frustrated citizens around the country have taken to online neighborhood communities and social media to crusade against such indiscretions.
The tagline of Twitter’s Dockless-Bikeshare-Is-The-Devil sums up the issue: “The problem with dockless bike-share is people park them wherever they want.”
As nearly twenty thousand dockless bikes appeared on the streets of Dallas late last year, Josh Miller, 40, who works in investment banking, started the dallasbikemess account on Instagram, both as a joke and to vent steam. Almost instantly, he began to attract followers and to receive snapshots from people angry at the sight of bicycles languishing like pigeons on the sides of the road and piled up on lawns.
In some ways, we can thank China for the dockless invasion. Dr. Daniel Sperling, founding director of the University of California-Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, said venture capitalists in this country only began to invest in American companies when they saw the success of shareable, dockless bikes there over the last few years. Chinese startups Mobike and Ofo have attracted more than $1 billion in investment and launched millions of bikes in dozens of cities.
“The VC world is seeing for the first time in history that there’s an opportunity in the transportation world,” said Sperling, the author of the new book, Three Revolutions: Steering Automated, Shared and Electric Vehicles to a Better Future.
Nor does the VC world seem daunted by troubles with bikeshare in places like France, where Hong Kong-based firm Gobee recently pulled out of Paris, citing destruction of its fleet.
Ryan Rzepecki, the founder of an early electric bike share company, Jump, said that in addition to the investment allure, better technology is the other reason dockless is infiltrating the zeitgeist.
When he first started in the business over a decade ago, he said, cellular modems that allowed the company to keep track of bikes cost over a hundred dollars. Now, they’re less than $20. Today, Uber is said to be considering a $100 million acquisition of Jump, though a company spokesperson wouldn’t comment.
For his part, Miller, aka dallasbikemess, is waiting for May, when city officials in his city are scheduled to pass regulations on shared transportation. He said he’s happy for any small part he might have played in bringing issues around the bikes to light. After the rules are revealed, he’ll likely dial back, or even retire, his Instagram activism. Then, he plans to look for a shared bike in the neighborhood where he works so he can ride to lunch.