Scooter companies’ strategy: Act first, answer questions later

At first glance, it looked like a painful defeat. Mere weeks after they’d blanketed Miami streets, electric scooter companies disappeared overnight, sent packing by city attorneys with cease and desist letters in hand. Their preemptive approach in some ways resembles Uber’s “disruptive” playbook. That plan involves bum-rushing markets, ignoring local regulations, turning riders into voters, as well as acting first and apologizing later. In Miami – like San Francisco, Austin, Texas, before it – electric scooter companies were able to prove a market existed before they could be shut down, quickly creating loyal customers and amassing valuable transportation data before coming to the table to negotiate with city officials. The same sequence of events has played out in cities targeted by scooter companies across the country, often with victorious results. With typical Silicon Valley self-assuredness, Bird – a popular scooter start-up banished by frustrated Miami authorities – portrayed their recent clashes with city officials as less a fight than an inevitable part of the process that accompanies the introduction of innovative technology. Each time they arrive in a new city, the company admits, they’re not sure whether they’ll encounter resistance or open arms. “We enter markets where scooters aren’t prohibited and we follow the laws on the books,” Kenneth Baer, a Bird spokesman, said, noting that most cities don’t have laws regulating electric scooters. “But in most cities the laws never anticipated this technology.” Bird said it’s already working with city officials to create an ordinance regulating scooter firms. Companies like Bird and Lime expect to return to Miami in the near future, but this time around they’ll have thousands of riders on their side, as well as some prominent political backers. “I’m a big fan of the electric scooters,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said, noting that he considers himself a technology-friendly mayor. “I think they’re a first-last mile transit alternative.” “In a city as hot as Miami,” he added, “having a device that allows you to travel and get a significant distance with the breeze on your face could be a key to unlocking a transit system that has been a little bit underwhelming, to put it mildly.” From their critic’s perspective, electric scooter companies arrive like invading Mongol armies. They roll into virgin territory overnight, unleashing chaos and fear before eventually recruiting amenable locals to their ranks, filling their coffers, and moving on to the next conquest. For the perspective of their fans, electric scooter startups are a desperately-needed supplement to incomplete transportation systems. Their futuristic technology takeover is inevitable, fans maintain, and city officials need to catch up, even if initial launches feel abrasive. However bullish it seems, the act-first-answer-questions-later strategy seems to be working. After companies deposited 2,000 scooters on San Francisco streets in March, furious public officials responded by impounding the scooters and issuing cease-and-desist orders. The city is currently considering a pilot program that would allow companies to deposit 2,500 scooters on city streets beginning in July, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority. During their first 30 days in San Francisco, Bird claims 32,000 riders went on 95, 418 rides, traveling 143,725 miles total. During their brief time on the streets of Miami, more than 10,000 Miami residents and visitors took 30,000 trips on Lime Scooters, saving almost 32,000 pounds of CO2, the company said.