So what are the problems?
Our observations this past couple of months suggest user behaviour has changed. Some unruly behaviours we saw in the first few days seem have given way to new social norms.
Parking behaviour is improving. Riders cannot lock the scooter (and stop paying for it) where it might cause a nuisance. They are both encouraged to park out of harm’s way and forced to submit a photograph of their parking attempt. Park poorly a few times and Lime will suspend your account.
Lime emphasises the need to ride safely and follow the rules.
There are some issues, however.
Guidance provided to riders about where you can legally ride, whether on the departmental website, news media, the system app or its website, is at times missing, contradictory or just confusing. Fixing that should be easy enough.
Brisbane has not built much bicycle infrastructure in the past five decades, a few notable bridges and riverside paths aside. Nor have we reduced local street speeds to 30kmh, as is now standard European practice. There aren’t obvious safe routes to use when scootering through parts of the central city.
Fixing these issues will be more challenging, but quiet nonpolluting escooters are clearly preferable to a city centre clogged with cars. — theconversation.com.au
Benjamin Kaufman is a PhD scholar in transport at Griffith University and affiliated with The Pedestrian and Bicycle Transport Institute of Australasia. Matthew Burke is an associate professor at the Cities Research Institute at Griffith University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Queensland Government Department of Transport and Main Roads, the Motor Accident and Insurance Commission, Transport for NSW, Gold Coast City Council and Queensland Airports Ltd. He is affiliated with the Australian National Heart Foundation, the Australasian Transport Research Forum and PedBikeTrans.
IT’S the hottest new job in the gig economy: becoming a ‘‘juicer’’ for Lime — collecting the company’s escooters, recharging them at home, then returning them to the wild.
But is there any money in the scramble for scooters, and are we seeing the turf wars and breakins that have reportedly hit Lime contractors in the United States?
This is the experience of two Auckland juicers.
Will, a 30something with a day job as a software developer, became a juicer after seeing a Facebook ad promising up to $20 to collect and recharge a scooter (or ‘‘harvesting’’ in Lime parlance).
But he says most scooters have a $7 or $8 bounty; the most he’s ever seen is $11.
Student John Mailley says most scooters pay $7. The highest he’s seen is $14.
Customers find the escooters using a smartphone app and GPS. Juicers use the app in a special ‘‘juicer’’ mode, which displays scooters with flat batteries on a map, each with a price on its head. The bounty depends on where a scooter has been dumped by its last user, and how depleted its battery is.
Once a scooter pops up on the app’s screen, juicers race to claim it.
‘‘It’s like Pokemon but with cash,’’ Will says.
He was once about to claim a scooter when a rival sprang over the fence and seized it. Another night he raced up a final stretch of a hill on foot, as scooters chirped ahead (juicers can use the Lime app to make a scooter beep, which aids final location after GPS gives the general area). ‘‘I could hear other juicers hoofing it up the hill behind me,’’ he says.
‘‘It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a punchup one day, but at the moment it’s competitive but friendly.’’
Scooters with completely flat batteries can be picked up at any time. But after 9pm, any scooter that’s only partially charged can be picked up. ‘‘That’s when it’s all on. The app lights up like a Christmas tree,’’ Will says.
He says he averages six or seven scooters an evening.
The toughest part is when another juicer beats him to a scooter. It’s a close race ‘‘an amazing amount of the time’’, he says.
Recently he drove from his home, zeroing in on a scooter left at the Devonport wharf. But just as he had it in sight, another juicer pulled up and grabbed it.
‘‘It was a 40minute round trip for nothing.’’
A juicer has to charge a scooter at their own home. Lime tells them a charge, which takes about four hours, will add about 68c, depending on their electricity plan. Juicers bear the cost.
Charged bikes have to be dropped off at designated ‘‘serving’’ points — typically the footpath near a bus stop — before 7am.
Will sets his alarm to 5.15am to ensure he can drop off scooters at serving points near his home. Only four scooters can be left at each point. If Will sleeps in, he has to drive around looking for serving points with one or more free slots.
$30 an hour
Scooters have to be placed a foot apart, with handlebars turned to the left. A juicer must take a smartphone pic of their handiwork before they get paid.
Mailley says the trick is to drive around in loops in a tight geographical area, and to grab as many scooters as possible in one trip in his hatchback, although he plans to coopt his father’s van. One radio station listener reports seeing a dieselbelching truck collecting Lime scooters en masse — not quite in keeping with the company’s green image.
Mailley has 12 Lime chargers at home (the maximum the company will allow). He says his record for one session, of about four hours, was collecting 17 scooters (equating to roughly $30 an hour). When we spoke to him on a Wednesday evening, he had already collected and recharged 60 scooters for the week, earning about $450.
Will laments that the Lime incentive scheme in the US, which gives a $US150 ($NZ230) bonus for signing up a friend as a juicer and collecting a set amount of scooters within a target timeframe, has not made it to New Zealand.
After being beaten to the punch by rival juicers nabbing scooters as he parks his station wagon, Will has taken to bringing his brother along to ride shotgun. It’s a much more effective system to have someone ready to immediately spring out of the car and grab a scooter, but it also means half the money to go around.
Tax responsibility
Lime seems to run things with a light touch. Mailley says he signed up online, supplying his driver’s licence details.
He was then invited to a briefing at Lime’s Auckland headquarters (an unmarked warehouse in Kingsland). Container loads of new Lime scooters were being unwrapped in the background. Mailley says no record was kept of who was taking how many chargers, which were handed out free. He initially took eight, but then thought ‘‘what the heck’’ and grabbed another four.
The juicers at Mailley’s briefing session were told paying tax was their responsibility.
As an archetypal ‘‘gig economy’’ citizen — he already juggles work as a musician, wedding photographer and real estate photographer amid his studies — Mailley says he’s used to taking responsibility for organising his own tax payments as a casual contractor. But he wonders if others will be cluedup.
The student has refined his technique. He now collects a batch of scooters early in the afternoon, so he can do at least one dropoff before 9pm.
Will fears the money is too good. He’s anticipating there will be more juicers signing up as word spreads about the money in harvesting.
Lime did not immediately respond to a query about how many juicers are currently on its books. — The New Zealand Herald