Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works, and I love all things tech and I thought maybe we should do a little update about electronic scooters. For those of you who have been listening to the show for a while, you might remember that back in November two thousand eighteen, it's a little less than a year ago, I did an episode about where these East scooter companies came from and how they were forming their business models, and how they were popping up in cities all across the world, and how those cities were reacting to them. And since it's been about a year, I thought we should revisit that. And part of the reason I decided to do this, it's actually because there have been some high profile tragedies on fortunately in two thousand nineteen with regards to UH these eat scooters, UM, some of which have happened here in Atlanta. We've had UH three or four accidents with East scooters recently in Atlanta News, including a couple with fatalities, which is a horrible horrible tragedy obviously, and it raises a lot of questions about what do we do to make sure that these scooters, if we're going to have them in our cities, that people are using them appropriately, that we're having all the right legislation in place so that people know what the rules are, and that we can make sure that if in fact they're here to stay, that no one is going to have a tragedy like that, again, to the best of our ability, knowing that we can't prevent everything. And there have been other accidents as well. There was a very high profile accident in London where a YouTuber was in involved in a cry fashion around about and she sadly passed away from her injuries. And I should add that in London it's against the law to ride east scooters at all. You can't. You're not supposed to ride them on the roads or on the sidewalks or pavements as they say. So in this episode, we're gonna look a little bit about what's been going on in the scooter world over the last year, some of the challenges that the industry faces and the ways that they're trying to go about meeting those challenges. So before I jump into all that, I want to talk about my own personal experience, not writing scooters, because spoiler alert, I have not done that. I have not hopped on one of these scooters, but my experience navigating a world in which these scooters play a large part. Now Here, in Atlanta we have specific law regarding scooter use. I don't know how widely understood or unknown they are, but in Atlanta it is technically against the law to ride a scooter on the sidewalk or pavement. This is not unusual. There are a lot of cities that have similar laws. And if you are riding a scooter, you are supposed to do it either on a road, preferably in a bike lane if there is one. Atlanta has a shortage of those, or you can ride it on a kind of a special pathway. There are a few of those in Atlanta. Big one is called the belt Line, and the belt Line is part of this pedestrian walkway and bicycle lane and and now scooter lane as well that stretches a good way around downtown Atlanta. And the office that I work in is right off the belt line, so I walk to and from work and about a mile of my walk is along this particular pathway, and on nice days it gets fairly congested with lots of people who are out there to enjoy the day. Perfectly understandable. And the thing that really prompted me to talk about this today happened on the Saturday before I record this episode. Typically on a Saturday, you wouldn't find me anywhere near the belt Line because I would probably be playing video games at home, or running errands with my wife for walking my dog, or something called on those lines. But on this particular Saturday, I had decided that I needed to go to the gym, which is in the same building as where my office is. So I took the three mile walk to get here, and that last mile was torture. It was so crowded. It was a nice day, and there were tons of people on the belt line and about half of them were on scooters. And it was odd to be in a traffic congestion situation where the vehicle in question wasn't a car and it wasn't even a bicycle, but it was this, you know, just this huge number of scooters. And in Atlanta we have quite a few of those companies represented. You know, you have Lime, you have Bird, and you've got a bunch of others. Um Lift has some scooters around town as well, So, uh, this was you know, there's no shortage of of representation on the belt line. And as I was walking there and watching people wobble around on these things, some people going quite well, but you couldn't know one could go fast because there's just too many people out there on the belt line that it it occurred to me that we need to have some deeper discussions about safety and responsibility and accountability as far as these scooters are concerned. And UM, I also saw a lot of people violating some of the rules for scooters, one of them being that it's only supposed to be one person per scooter, and I saw quite a few cups doubled up, and uh, that's against that's against the law in Atlanta, folks. For those of you who are in Atlanta and listen to this show and also write scooters, just want to let you know that you're you're you're breaking the law there. It's also against the law and a lot of other places. So let's talk about some of the challenges that scooters have faced in the past year. UM and one of the big ones that I think I should cover is just the challenge of the business model itself. For the business model to work, this is pretty common sense stuff. But you've got to make sure you're bringing in more money than you're spending. I mean, that's just typical business, right, there's nothing special about that. You have to make more than it costs to operate the business, otherwise you're in a money losing situation and sooner or later you have to go out of business. And Bird, one of the big companies doing this, was is in a situation where some people were questioning whether or not the company was going to survive. It had raised something like seven hundred million dollars in investment funding, and it apparently had lost a hundred million dollars in the first quarter of two thousand nineteen and was in uh some serious trouble and was already looking at its next round of fundraising in order to stay in business. Now on to get the full picture here. The CEO of Birds said one that hundred million dollars actually represented it right off, and it was a rite off for older scooters that didn't have the durability that they needed for this business model. To work, and two that they were actually making a profit on a per ride basis of more than a dollar per ride. So they were saying this is representative of a business that can scale and it will be profitable in the long run. But there are investors who questioned this and ask does it actually cost more to maintain, to repair, replace, to ship over all these scooters, not to mention to ensure them in some cases. Also in a lot of cities, you have to apply for a permit to operate that business within the city, which could be several thousand dollars. All these costs start to add up, and if they add up too much, then you cannot make money off that business. You will just be constantly trying to raise funds while you try to dial in your business plan to complicate matters. There's all this competition in the field, so if you were the only game in town, then you could presumably start to raise the prices on the per ride basis for your customers and they would either pay that or they'd be walking or taking a bike or taking a car everywhere because there's nowhere else to go. But because you have all this competition in this space, there's also the opportunity for these different services to kind of undercut each other on price in the hopes of waiting out their competitors and get them out of the market. So if I'm running my own e scooter business and I've got a decent enough cushion financially to land on, I might say, well, you can use my service, and it's cheaper. So you can use the exact same sort of scooters. They just have my branding on them. They go the same speed. You will be able to use them just as frequently as you would any other and it's going to cost you less money. I might be able to win over some of the other customers. They might actually seek out my scooters as opposed to someone else's and then exacerbate the problem of a company that's already having some issues. Whether or not Bird really is in financial trouble is a matter of debate. Uh, they are looking to raise more money, they are the leader in the space, and um, it's possible that everything's working out just fine now. If in fact their new scooters are more durable and they need you were repair and maintenance costs, it might be fine. But it's one of those questions that has remained unanswered in the investment world, in the tech world, and it is entirely possible that what we're seeing is just a scooter bubble and that it's going to fizzle out, not because of any regulation issue, but simply through an economic barrier that they can't surmount. What is not in question is the the enthusiastic corresponse among users on the East scooter market. I mean, it's clear that they're a hit, so we know at least there's a demand for it. The question is will the demand and the supply workout, Will it with the economics workout so that it makes sense to operate as a business. That part remains to be seen. So that's one update, is just the fact that we still don't know whether or not this is this is a business that's going to stick around. Uh. It also is, of course encountering lots of potential resistance. Um that's tricky as well, because laws are not uniform on the industry across the world, let alone across not even in in in the country, it's not even across the countries. So in the United States, there's no federal law that mandates how these companies must perform. How they must behave, or even how you must operate an e scooter on US roads that falls to a city by city basis, so we're talking city governments, which means you might be following all the rules in Atlanta, for example, when you rent one of these, and then you may go visit another city like Austin, Texas, or San Francisco, California, and you might not even be aware that you're violating local laws because they're different. There there's no unifying set of regulations and laws that oversee this, so that makes it a very tricky situation as well. Then you have places, like I said in London where you can buy these e scooters, but technically you can't write them anywhere, at least not in public, and uh, that is causing confusion. Not everybody knows about this, and there's a lot of questions about who is ultimately responsible for learning all these things as up to the individual writers, is it up to the companies. Most of these companies have user agreements that you're supposed to click through or you can actually rent one of the scooters, but we all know nobody reads those agreements, and some of them are incredibly long. One of them had more than eighteen thousand words. That's too long if you're ready to rent a scooter. I don't know anyone in Atlanta who is going to put on their reading glasses and page through eighteen thousand words in order to fully understand the agreement that they are signing on too before they hop onto a scooter and jet down the belt line. Anyway, that's just the beginning of the challenges around East scooters. I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of the other issues in just a second, but first, let's take a quick break. Okay, let's talk about some of the challenges around scooters. Besides the fact about the confusion around laws, we don't really know how the business model is going to fan out. Let's talk about some of the complaints a lot of people have, whether they are people who are using these scooters or more likely the people who aren't using the scooters, so grouchy old people like me. Uh And I fully admit I'm a grouchy old person who doesn't use scooters, and I have a lot of thoughts about scooters in particular. Now, to get it out of the way, I do think these scooters are a good idea. I like the idea of people having an alternative for that last mile problem of getting around those short distances, and I would much prefer to see them using something like a scooter than a car to do that. But it's not really certain that that's what people are doing. If people were in fact replacing car rides with scooter rides, then you could argue this is alleviating traffic issue. It's got a lower environmental impact, it's kind of lower wear and tear impact on the infrastructure. You would think of that as a good thing. But according to at least some surveys, that doesn't appear to be the way a lot of people are using these devices. There was a survey and Raleigh, North Carolina where they were asking people who were using the scooters why were they using it, like, for what purpose? And about a third of them answered that they were using them for trips that they would otherwise use a car to do. But two thirds of them we're using them for either just you know, just to go out and have fun on a scooter because they are fun to ride. That they from what I understand, I haven't done it personally, but you can really zoom around on those things, and once you've got your balance, it's apparently pretty addicting to go out there and just kind of have fun. So there is an appeal there, so some people will just ride them just to ride them. They're not riding them in order to get from point A to point B. It's all about the journey, not the destination. But that means that you're not saving anything by doing it right. You're not sparing the city another car ride. Maybe you would have just stayed home instead of getting on that scooter. In other cases, it may be that they were replacing a trip that they would have otherwise taken, either by foot or on bicycle. Well, here's the downside to that is that, yes, E scooters have a lower curbon footprint than a car, but they have a higher carbon footprint than walking or bike riding. And this is where we have to remember that environmental issues are very complicated. You have to look at the big picture. You can't just look at an individual action and then judge everything on that. So in the case of EA scooters, you might say, well, where's the carbon footprint? These are electronic scooters, They're using electricity, they're not burning fossil fuels, so there's no exhaust that you're giving out or anything like that. But you have to look at the full picture of what it takes for the East scooters to work, and that includes manufacturing, maintenance, repair, and just the the operation of the business itself. So let me explain that. With manufacturing, you're talking about, you know, manufacturing the aluminum frames, you're talking about the lithium ion batteries, which have their own environmental impact, and then you have the shipping from overseas because almost all of these are made in China, so there's that part that's also in the overall carbon footprint for the scooters. Those ion batteries apparently aren't the best. They have to be replaced every three d to one thousand charges, sometimes less than that, so a replacement typically is required every one to three months. So we're going through these lithium ion batteries pretty quickly. So you think about that every three months or so, you're replacing the lithium ion batteries on your fleet of of scooters. And if you have thousands of scooters, that's thousands of these lithium ion batteries you have to ditch. Now, ideally you would have to find some way to recycle those because lithium ion batteries contains stuff in them that you don't want to get out into the environment. In general, you want to be responsible with how you dispose of those, but electronic recycling is pretty limited. I've done episodes about E recycling and how E waste is a huge problem. It's very tricky. There are organizations out there that are all about E recycling. Some of them are less than um reliable or ethical. Uh. There have been reports of recycling centers that end up just shipping everying overseas to a different country where they'll handle it much more cheaply than you would see here in America or in other parts of of the world, and that ends up creating its own problems. Really, you're just shipping this potentially hazardous stuff to a different place and making those people deal with it. So that's not great. On top of that, the general operation of these eat scooters, especially that you know, we're really talking about the dackless east scooters, the kinds where you can pick up and ride and then drop off wherever you want within the operating area of the service. UM. A big problem with that is that at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, you have crews going around. At the end of the day, they're picking up scooters from all over the place and bringing them back so they can be recharged. At the beginning of the day, they're dropping them off in different locations, um usually by the the high traffic of use. So you'll see a lot more being delivered at places like the belt line, for example, than in a corner on my street where I live. There's we never see them there, but they're always at the belt line. Um well, those cars that are being operated, it's typically being operated by private contractors who are working from their own personal vehicles, and most of those are fueled by fossil fuels. So you're still using cars with these scooters to deliver and pick up all those scooters. And yeah, that's not the direct operation of the scooter itself, but is in the operation of the scooter business. So you still have to count it with the carbon footprint for the business itself. And you have to also factor into the idea that those are car rides that wouldn't exist without those scooters, right, I mean, the whole reason why the people are going out there to pick them up or drop them off. Is because the scooters. Without the scooters, there's no reason for those trips, so those are added trips with a fossil fuel burning vehicle that wouldn't have existed otherwise. The bottom line is, at least according to some estimations, a scooter ride creates about half the carbon footprint of a car ride when you take in all the factors together, and that to me is shocking. I I am very curious to find out more about the methodology of determining that figure. It is hard for me to believe that it's that much. But with the requirement of replacing that lithium ion battery every three months, maybe you know, when you measure the length of the average lifespan of a scooter, maybe that's how it all shakes out. Anyway, that's a real drawback. That's a real challenge for these scooters is that they're being marketed as eco friendly, but when you take a closer look, you realize it's not that eco friendly, at least not more so than walking or biking would be. Assuming you're not riding a electric bike that would have some of the same issues as an electric scooter. So that's another issue. Beyond that, you've got all the things that are irritating people, like the fact that you'll see people using these dockless e scooters and then they'll just drop them off wherever, either or not even parking them, because I see them just laying down everywhere where no one bothered to, you know, use little kickstand to keep them standing up, or uh. Worse than that, they'll be blocking sidewalks. So let me tell you another story, one that is from personal experience. I was walking home not very long ago when I saw about half a block ahead of me there was a scooter that had been left and it was essentially blocking about half the sidewalk. Now, for me, that's not a big deal. Right when I walk up there, I could just walk around it. But between me and this scooter, also heading in the same direction I was going, was a woman on who was using an electric wheelchair. And so here's a woman who is in a wheelchair that takes up a good amount of the sidewalk and she's zoomed ahead of me. She actually managed to maneuver around the scooter before I could get to it. My plan was to run up there and move it out all the way for her, but she actually ended up going a little bit off the sidewalk, off to the edge and around. Now that doesn't sound like a big big deal either, but it had been raining in Atlanta not long before that, and her wheel was spinning for a little bit while she was trying to get around this thing, so she had a possibility of getting stuck out there. Um, and you start looking at things like this and like this is just one example in one day of how the scooter, which presented a minor inconvenience to me, could be a real issue for somebody else. This is something that a lot of cities are trying to deal with right now. There's generally rules and just about every city that has allowed these businesses to operate about where you can and cannot leave these scooters. Not that I think most people are paying too much attention to it, because I never really see a lot of adherence to those rules. That makes me wonder if those rules are actually being communicated out to the people who are using these scooters. I would like to think that most people would say, oh, you know what, that was fun, we had a good time. Let's just make sure these are tucked off to the side and we stand them up properly, rather than that was fun. This isn't mine. I don't care what happens to it. Let's just let it hit the ground and lay wherever it is, and then we'll just keep on going on our married a little way. Um, maybe that's me being too hopeful, but it's something that we definitely need to address because the more of these inconvenient and inconsiderate incidents that happened within the community, the more likely you're going to have people opposing them from being there in the first place, and the more likely you're going to see actions on a civic level against these companies, thus making it even harder to have a working business model. And that means eventually you'll see these dockless East Scooters go away if those things actually happen, And I think that would also be a shame, because I think they can provide a valuable service. It's just that in the implementation as it stands, that's not what's happening. Well, I have a few more final thoughts on this sort of rambly update episode to East Scooters, but before I jump on all that, let's take another quick break. Okay, I know this is a bit rambley. It's largely because this is more of an extemporaneous episode than when I typically do. But um, I wanted to talk also about something that Tarry and I were talking about off Mike. Actually was on Mike, but she probably edited all that part out because you would only hear me anyway then you just hear me get increasingly frustrated at my producer. No, we were having discussions about the feasibility of these East scooters on roads as opposed to sidewalks, and that's largely because Atlanta, I mean, Atlanta is one of those cities where you really kind of need a car to get around effectively, and only a small percentage of the roads in Atlanta have something like a bike lane. And if it does have a bike lane, that's what you're supposed to ride these scooters in. If you're on one, you're supposed to be in those sort of lanes to try and stay all the way of the main flow of traffic. But there are very few of those lanes in Atlanta, and that raises some additional problems. The East scooter writers are supposed to follow the sact same rules of the road as a motorist. So that would mean that you would have to come to a complete stop at a stop sign or stop at an intersection where there's a red light. You are supposed to stay on the road. You're not supposed to drive through the crosswalk. You're not supposed to drive on the sidewalks at all. And that's scary. Like these scooters offer no protection between you and the traffic that's around you. So those of us who have studied physics know that four sequels mass times acceleration. Well, the acceleration and the mass of a car is much greater than that of someone on a scooter, and thus we have this potential for a disaster. Even if the person writing the scooter is being careful, accidents can happen, and when they do happen, it's always going to end up much worse for the person on the scooter than it is a person in a car. Um this is a real challenge. You would argue it makes more sense to ride on the sidewalk to stay out of the flow of traffic, but then you also have the issue of pedestrian safety, and there's also a problem in Atlanta of sidewalk stability. I would argue certain areas of Atlanta do not have the best sidewalks. Then again, certain areas of Atlanta don't have the best roads either. Case in Point pontsti Lean Avenue, which are offices off of about half of it is under steel plates at the moment, just waiting for those potholes to get filled. But this raises a real issue you start looking at this last mile solution. But there are other elements to the problem that the last male solution does not address. Scooters are not acceptable to ride on all road conditions, and yet the laws of the city state you can only ride them on the road. And like I said, there are a lot of other cities that follow the exact same pathway. There are also these rules that you have to follow, the rules of traffic that again, I think a lot of the scooter operators don't know, not not the companies renting them out, but the people actually using them. And as far as I know, there's no education program from any of these companies to alert people to actually follow those rules. And it's usually in those terms of service where one of the thousands of words that's in there, not one phrase will say make sure you follow all local rules and regulations for the use of east scooters. Well, if you don't know what those are, and if you're not reading these terms of service because you don't have an hour and a half to dedicate to it, that doesn't do much good. And then we end up seeing these other kinds of situations pop up. There are cities in Asia, for example, in Japan in particular, where you actually have to have a license to ride one of these scooters, which means you have to go through the whole process of of training and to demonstrate that you are capable of operating one of these vehicles safely and accountably. And that to me is interesting. It's it's essentially putting you through the same sort of process as getting a driver's license for a car UH, and the scooters are required to have stuff on them to indicate things like turn signals and UH and other elements that are standard on motor vehicles. I don't think we're necessarily going to see that translate over to the United States or other parts of the world. I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily, although it obviously starts to restrict who can use them, and part of the appeal of these services, is that anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can essentially use one of them, uh, despite local laws that restricted So we're on an impass here. This is one of those issues where business and technology has outpaced regulations and law, and in the meantime, there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of frustration, there's a lot of resistance and various communities around the world when it comes to these East scooters. My personal opinion is that there does need to be some form of training that has to happen before you can actually use one of these vehicles. I would make that part of the app, but that comes with its own challenges because you're going to have to make sure that you have versions of that app that are specific to particular municipalities. You would have to have an app that is applicable for Atlanta versus San Francisco, versus Portland versus Boston, and that does mean that you have to have a larger investment on the part of the companies that are renting these things out. Obviously, the more you're asking the companies to invest, the more it's going to take for them to see a return on that investment. And we already talked about how this is a business model that is questionable as far as whether or not it can actually maintain profitability. So there are a lot of things you have to balance. Ultimately, I want, I think people's safety is the thing we have to be concerned about most. After that utility and availability should fall in there somewhere. But if we aren't concerned about safety, we're going to keep seeing incidents where accidents are going to result in people having, you know, tragic outcomes. I saw one statistic that stated that on average, it was you would see an accident with every five thousand miles driven on these scooters collectively. That is and that is a terrible, terrible accident. Right, if you're talking about cars, accident rates tend to be in the hundreds of millions of miles driven. You start talking about accidents on that scale rather than on the thousands of miles. So that tells us that people aren't being terribly careful or they're in situations that just lead to more accidents, So we need to be more cognizant of that. On top of that, you know, some of these cities have helmet laws associated with these scooters. But when you're grabbing a dockless scooter, chances are there's no helmet there either, which means they're either having to carry a helmet with you everywhere you go, or you're just doing without in defiance of local regulations. And that's a real problem too. So what's the solution here, I think, again, following Japan's lead a little bit, maybe not to that crazy. I shouldn't say crazy that extreme extent where you're requiring a full licensing procedure. Um. Some thing along those lines, though, I think would be helpful. Otherwise, I worry that these scooters are going to cause more problems than they solve, And since people are not actually using them frequently to replace card trips, you could argue they're not really solving a problem at all at the moment, at least not a real one. There giving people opportunities to have fun, which I think, you know, we need, but I don't know that that's enough to justify having these scooters everywhere cluttering things up, causing potential safety issues. I'm very curious what you guys think. Um, yeah, I realized that again I'm coming across as the grouchy old man here who doesn't use scooters. I do recognize their utility from certain from a certain point of view. UM, I just haven't been sold on it. But maybe you are a passionate evangelist for scooters. Maybe you have of your own personal experiences that show the real use case for these scoots scooters and why they should be everywhere. If so, then I think you should get in touch with me. Let me know what you think. I would really like to hear your thoughts on it, and if you have thoughts on how they can be deployed in a way that's responsible and safe and is going to meet the needs both of the users and not cause huge headaches on a city level. I would love to hear your thoughts, so you should email me. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line by popping on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our past episodes, including the e scooter episode that prompted this update and everything else, as well as our presence on social media, and you also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it. An upcoming episodes, I'm going to have some friends of the show on to talk about some interesting stuff, which is, by the way, why this episode is so rambily in the first place. Uh, full disclosure, peek behind the curtain. I'd been working on an episode, was really excited about it. Realized I knew the perfect person to have on the show after I had already done quite a bit of work on it. Reached out and they agreed to be on the show. So that's gonna be awesome. But it also meant that I spent a whole lot of time working on something that I couldn't actually record today. So that's why we get the update to East scooters, and also the recent stories in Atlanta of the accidents kind of prompted it. I also had a weirdly enough a ride with a lift driver who told me that because I have a voice in media, I should speak out about this more of vehemently, and uh, I'd be lying if I said that wasn't weighing on me a little bit. It did. Um. Although I still think that the scooters definitely have a place, we just have to figure out the right place for it and I'm not convinced we've done that yet. Anyway, keep an ear out for those episodes. They'll be coming out over the next couple of weeks. One of them will feature Car Stuff's Scott Benjamin, who's going to come on and talk about Formula one race cars in the near future. So if you've got any curiosity about that, it will be satisfied in the short future, like within a couple of weeks. And that's it for me for today, So enjoy. If you're gonna be writing on a scooter, be safe and I'll talk to you again. Releasing text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works, and I love all things tech and I thought maybe we should do a little update about electronic scooters. For those of you who have been listening to the show for a while, you might remember that back in November two thousand eighteen, it's a little less than a year ago, I did an episode about where these East scooter companies came from and how they were forming their business models, and how they were popping up in cities all across the world, and how those cities were reacting to them. And since it's been about a year, I thought we should revisit that. And part of the reason I decided to do this, it's actually because there have been some high profile tragedies on fortunately in two thousand nineteen with regards to UH these eat scooters, UM, some of which have happened here in Atlanta. We've had UH three or four accidents with East scooters recently in Atlanta News, including a couple with fatalities, which is a horrible horrible tragedy obviously, and it raises a lot of questions about what do we do to make sure that these scooters, if we're going to have them in our cities, that people are using them appropriately, that we're having all the right legislation in place so that people know what the rules are, and that we can make sure that if in fact they're here to stay, that no one is going to have a tragedy like that, again, to the best of our ability, knowing that we can't prevent everything. And there have been other accidents as well. There was a very high profile accident in London where a YouTuber was in involved in a cry fashion around about and she sadly passed away from her injuries. And I should add that in London it's against the law to ride east scooters at all. You can't. You're not supposed to ride them on the roads or on the sidewalks or pavements as they say. So in this episode, we're gonna look a little bit about what's been going on in the scooter world over the last year, some of the challenges that the industry faces and the ways that they're trying to go about meeting those challenges. So before I jump into all that, I want to talk about my own personal experience, not writing scooters, because spoiler alert, I have not done that. I have not hopped on one of these scooters, but my experience navigating a world in which these scooters play a large part. Now Here, in Atlanta we have specific law regarding scooter use. I don't know how widely understood or unknown they are, but in Atlanta it is technically against the law to ride a scooter on the sidewalk or pavement. This is not unusual. There are a lot of cities that have similar laws. And if you are riding a scooter, you are supposed to do it either on a road, preferably in a bike lane if there is one. Atlanta has a shortage of those, or you can ride it on a kind of a special pathway. There are a few of those in Atlanta. Big one is called the belt Line, and the belt Line is part of this pedestrian walkway and bicycle lane and and now scooter lane as well that stretches a good way around downtown Atlanta. And the office that I work in is right off the belt line, so I walk to and from work and about a mile of my walk is along this particular pathway, and on nice days it gets fairly congested with lots of people who are out there to enjoy the day. Perfectly understandable. And the thing that really prompted me to talk about this today happened on the Saturday before I record this episode. Typically on a Saturday, you wouldn't find me anywhere near the belt Line because I would probably be playing video games at home, or running errands with my wife for walking my dog, or something called on those lines. But on this particular Saturday, I had decided that I needed to go to the gym, which is in the same building as where my office is. So I took the three mile walk to get here, and that last mile was torture. It was so crowded. It was a nice day, and there were tons of people on the belt line and about half of them were on scooters. And it was odd to be in a traffic congestion situation where the vehicle in question wasn't a car and it wasn't even a bicycle, but it was this, you know, just this huge number of scooters. And in Atlanta we have quite a few of those companies represented. You know, you have Lime, you have Bird, and you've got a bunch of others. Um Lift has some scooters around town as well, So, uh, this was you know, there's no shortage of of representation on the belt line. And as I was walking there and watching people wobble around on these things, some people going quite well, but you couldn't know one could go fast because there's just too many people out there on the belt line that it it occurred to me that we need to have some deeper discussions about safety and responsibility and accountability as far as these scooters are concerned. And UM, I also saw a lot of people violating some of the rules for scooters, one of them being that it's only supposed to be one person per scooter, and I saw quite a few cups doubled up, and uh, that's against that's against the law in Atlanta, folks. For those of you who are in Atlanta and listen to this show and also write scooters, just want to let you know that you're you're you're breaking the law there. It's also against the law and a lot of other places. So let's talk about some of the challenges that scooters have faced in the past year. UM and one of the big ones that I think I should cover is just the challenge of the business model itself. For the business model to work, this is pretty common sense stuff. But you've got to make sure you're bringing in more money than you're spending. I mean, that's just typical business, right, there's nothing special about that. You have to make more than it costs to operate the business, otherwise you're in a money losing situation and sooner or later you have to go out of business. And Bird, one of the big companies doing this, was is in a situation where some people were questioning whether or not the company was going to survive. It had raised something like seven hundred million dollars in investment funding, and it apparently had lost a hundred million dollars in the first quarter of two thousand nineteen and was in uh some serious trouble and was already looking at its next round of fundraising in order to stay in business. Now on to get the full picture here. The CEO of Birds said one that hundred million dollars actually represented it right off, and it was a rite off for older scooters that didn't have the durability that they needed for this business model. To work, and two that they were actually making a profit on a per ride basis of more than a dollar per ride. So they were saying this is representative of a business that can scale and it will be profitable in the long run. But there are investors who questioned this and ask does it actually cost more to maintain, to repair, replace, to ship over all these scooters, not to mention to ensure them in some cases. Also in a lot of cities, you have to apply for a permit to operate that business within the city, which could be several thousand dollars. All these costs start to add up, and if they add up too much, then you cannot make money off that business. You will just be constantly trying to raise funds while you try to dial in your business plan to complicate matters. There's all this competition in the field, so if you were the only game in town, then you could presumably start to raise the prices on the per ride basis for your customers and they would either pay that or they'd be walking or taking a bike or taking a car everywhere because there's nowhere else to go. But because you have all this competition in this space, there's also the opportunity for these different services to kind of undercut each other on price in the hopes of waiting out their competitors and get them out of the market. So if I'm running my own e scooter business and I've got a decent enough cushion financially to land on, I might say, well, you can use my service, and it's cheaper. So you can use the exact same sort of scooters. They just have my branding on them. They go the same speed. You will be able to use them just as frequently as you would any other and it's going to cost you less money. I might be able to win over some of the other customers. They might actually seek out my scooters as opposed to someone else's and then exacerbate the problem of a company that's already having some issues. Whether or not Bird really is in financial trouble is a matter of debate. Uh, they are looking to raise more money, they are the leader in the space, and um, it's possible that everything's working out just fine now. If in fact their new scooters are more durable and they need you were repair and maintenance costs, it might be fine. But it's one of those questions that has remained unanswered in the investment world, in the tech world, and it is entirely possible that what we're seeing is just a scooter bubble and that it's going to fizzle out, not because of any regulation issue, but simply through an economic barrier that they can't surmount. What is not in question is the the enthusiastic corresponse among users on the East scooter market. I mean, it's clear that they're a hit, so we know at least there's a demand for it. The question is will the demand and the supply workout, Will it with the economics workout so that it makes sense to operate as a business. That part remains to be seen. So that's one update, is just the fact that we still don't know whether or not this is this is a business that's going to stick around. Uh. It also is, of course encountering lots of potential resistance. Um that's tricky as well, because laws are not uniform on the industry across the world, let alone across not even in in in the country, it's not even across the countries. So in the United States, there's no federal law that mandates how these companies must perform. How they must behave, or even how you must operate an e scooter on US roads that falls to a city by city basis, so we're talking city governments, which means you might be following all the rules in Atlanta, for example, when you rent one of these, and then you may go visit another city like Austin, Texas, or San Francisco, California, and you might not even be aware that you're violating local laws because they're different. There there's no unifying set of regulations and laws that oversee this, so that makes it a very tricky situation as well. Then you have places, like I said in London where you can buy these e scooters, but technically you can't write them anywhere, at least not in public, and uh, that is causing confusion. Not everybody knows about this, and there's a lot of questions about who is ultimately responsible for learning all these things as up to the individual writers, is it up to the companies. Most of these companies have user agreements that you're supposed to click through or you can actually rent one of the scooters, but we all know nobody reads those agreements, and some of them are incredibly long. One of them had more than eighteen thousand words. That's too long if you're ready to rent a scooter. I don't know anyone in Atlanta who is going to put on their reading glasses and page through eighteen thousand words in order to fully understand the agreement that they are signing on too before they hop onto a scooter and jet down the belt line. Anyway, that's just the beginning of the challenges around East scooters. I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of the other issues in just a second, but first, let's take a quick break. Okay, let's talk about some of the challenges around scooters. Besides the fact about the confusion around laws, we don't really know how the business model is going to fan out. Let's talk about some of the complaints a lot of people have, whether they are people who are using these scooters or more likely the people who aren't using the scooters, so grouchy old people like me. Uh And I fully admit I'm a grouchy old person who doesn't use scooters, and I have a lot of thoughts about scooters in particular. Now, to get it out of the way, I do think these scooters are a good idea. I like the idea of people having an alternative for that last mile problem of getting around those short distances, and I would much prefer to see them using something like a scooter than a car to do that. But it's not really certain that that's what people are doing. If people were in fact replacing car rides with scooter rides, then you could argue this is alleviating traffic issue. It's got a lower environmental impact, it's kind of lower wear and tear impact on the infrastructure. You would think of that as a good thing. But according to at least some surveys, that doesn't appear to be the way a lot of people are using these devices. There was a survey and Raleigh, North Carolina where they were asking people who were using the scooters why were they using it, like, for what purpose? And about a third of them answered that they were using them for trips that they would otherwise use a car to do. But two thirds of them we're using them for either just you know, just to go out and have fun on a scooter because they are fun to ride. That they from what I understand, I haven't done it personally, but you can really zoom around on those things, and once you've got your balance, it's apparently pretty addicting to go out there and just kind of have fun. So there is an appeal there, so some people will just ride them just to ride them. They're not riding them in order to get from point A to point B. It's all about the journey, not the destination. But that means that you're not saving anything by doing it right. You're not sparing the city another car ride. Maybe you would have just stayed home instead of getting on that scooter. In other cases, it may be that they were replacing a trip that they would have otherwise taken, either by foot or on bicycle. Well, here's the downside to that is that, yes, E scooters have a lower curbon footprint than a car, but they have a higher carbon footprint than walking or bike riding. And this is where we have to remember that environmental issues are very complicated. You have to look at the big picture. You can't just look at an individual action and then judge everything on that. So in the case of EA scooters, you might say, well, where's the carbon footprint? These are electronic scooters, They're using electricity, they're not burning fossil fuels, so there's no exhaust that you're giving out or anything like that. But you have to look at the full picture of what it takes for the East scooters to work, and that includes manufacturing, maintenance, repair, and just the the operation of the business itself. So let me explain that. With manufacturing, you're talking about, you know, manufacturing the aluminum frames, you're talking about the lithium ion batteries, which have their own environmental impact, and then you have the shipping from overseas because almost all of these are made in China, so there's that part that's also in the overall carbon footprint for the scooters. Those ion batteries apparently aren't the best. They have to be replaced every three d to one thousand charges, sometimes less than that, so a replacement typically is required every one to three months. So we're going through these lithium ion batteries pretty quickly. So you think about that every three months or so, you're replacing the lithium ion batteries on your fleet of of scooters. And if you have thousands of scooters, that's thousands of these lithium ion batteries you have to ditch. Now, ideally you would have to find some way to recycle those because lithium ion batteries contains stuff in them that you don't want to get out into the environment. In general, you want to be responsible with how you dispose of those, but electronic recycling is pretty limited. I've done episodes about E recycling and how E waste is a huge problem. It's very tricky. There are organizations out there that are all about E recycling. Some of them are less than um reliable or ethical. Uh. There have been reports of recycling centers that end up just shipping everying overseas to a different country where they'll handle it much more cheaply than you would see here in America or in other parts of of the world, and that ends up creating its own problems. Really, you're just shipping this potentially hazardous stuff to a different place and making those people deal with it. So that's not great. On top of that, the general operation of these eat scooters, especially that you know, we're really talking about the dackless east scooters, the kinds where you can pick up and ride and then drop off wherever you want within the operating area of the service. UM. A big problem with that is that at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, you have crews going around. At the end of the day, they're picking up scooters from all over the place and bringing them back so they can be recharged. At the beginning of the day, they're dropping them off in different locations, um usually by the the high traffic of use. So you'll see a lot more being delivered at places like the belt line, for example, than in a corner on my street where I live. There's we never see them there, but they're always at the belt line. Um well, those cars that are being operated, it's typically being operated by private contractors who are working from their own personal vehicles, and most of those are fueled by fossil fuels. So you're still using cars with these scooters to deliver and pick up all those scooters. And yeah, that's not the direct operation of the scooter itself, but is in the operation of the scooter business. So you still have to count it with the carbon footprint for the business itself. And you have to also factor into the idea that those are car rides that wouldn't exist without those scooters, right, I mean, the whole reason why the people are going out there to pick them up or drop them off. Is because the scooters. Without the scooters, there's no reason for those trips, so those are added trips with a fossil fuel burning vehicle that wouldn't have existed otherwise. The bottom line is, at least according to some estimations, a scooter ride creates about half the carbon footprint of a car ride when you take in all the factors together, and that to me is shocking. I I am very curious to find out more about the methodology of determining that figure. It is hard for me to believe that it's that much. But with the requirement of replacing that lithium ion battery every three months, maybe you know, when you measure the length of the average lifespan of a scooter, maybe that's how it all shakes out. Anyway, that's a real drawback. That's a real challenge for these scooters is that they're being marketed as eco friendly, but when you take a closer look, you realize it's not that eco friendly, at least not more so than walking or biking would be. Assuming you're not riding a electric bike that would have some of the same issues as an electric scooter. So that's another issue. Beyond that, you've got all the things that are irritating people, like the fact that you'll see people using these dockless e scooters and then they'll just drop them off wherever, either or not even parking them, because I see them just laying down everywhere where no one bothered to, you know, use little kickstand to keep them standing up, or uh. Worse than that, they'll be blocking sidewalks. So let me tell you another story, one that is from personal experience. I was walking home not very long ago when I saw about half a block ahead of me there was a scooter that had been left and it was essentially blocking about half the sidewalk. Now, for me, that's not a big deal. Right when I walk up there, I could just walk around it. But between me and this scooter, also heading in the same direction I was going, was a woman on who was using an electric wheelchair. And so here's a woman who is in a wheelchair that takes up a good amount of the sidewalk and she's zoomed ahead of me. She actually managed to maneuver around the scooter before I could get to it. My plan was to run up there and move it out all the way for her, but she actually ended up going a little bit off the sidewalk, off to the edge and around. Now that doesn't sound like a big big deal either, but it had been raining in Atlanta not long before that, and her wheel was spinning for a little bit while she was trying to get around this thing, so she had a possibility of getting stuck out there. Um, and you start looking at things like this and like this is just one example in one day of how the scooter, which presented a minor inconvenience to me, could be a real issue for somebody else. This is something that a lot of cities are trying to deal with right now. There's generally rules and just about every city that has allowed these businesses to operate about where you can and cannot leave these scooters. Not that I think most people are paying too much attention to it, because I never really see a lot of adherence to those rules. That makes me wonder if those rules are actually being communicated out to the people who are using these scooters. I would like to think that most people would say, oh, you know what, that was fun, we had a good time. Let's just make sure these are tucked off to the side and we stand them up properly, rather than that was fun. This isn't mine. I don't care what happens to it. Let's just let it hit the ground and lay wherever it is, and then we'll just keep on going on our married a little way. Um, maybe that's me being too hopeful, but it's something that we definitely need to address because the more of these inconvenient and inconsiderate incidents that happened within the community, the more likely you're going to have people opposing them from being there in the first place, and the more likely you're going to see actions on a civic level against these companies, thus making it even harder to have a working business model. And that means eventually you'll see these dockless East Scooters go away if those things actually happen, And I think that would also be a shame, because I think they can provide a valuable service. It's just that in the implementation as it stands, that's not what's happening. Well, I have a few more final thoughts on this sort of rambly update episode to East Scooters, but before I jump on all that, let's take another quick break. Okay, I know this is a bit rambley. It's largely because this is more of an extemporaneous episode than when I typically do. But um, I wanted to talk also about something that Tarry and I were talking about off Mike. Actually was on Mike, but she probably edited all that part out because you would only hear me anyway then you just hear me get increasingly frustrated at my producer. No, we were having discussions about the feasibility of these East scooters on roads as opposed to sidewalks, and that's largely because Atlanta, I mean, Atlanta is one of those cities where you really kind of need a car to get around effectively, and only a small percentage of the roads in Atlanta have something like a bike lane. And if it does have a bike lane, that's what you're supposed to ride these scooters in. If you're on one, you're supposed to be in those sort of lanes to try and stay all the way of the main flow of traffic. But there are very few of those lanes in Atlanta, and that raises some additional problems. The East scooter writers are supposed to follow the sact same rules of the road as a motorist. So that would mean that you would have to come to a complete stop at a stop sign or stop at an intersection where there's a red light. You are supposed to stay on the road. You're not supposed to drive through the crosswalk. You're not supposed to drive on the sidewalks at all. And that's scary. Like these scooters offer no protection between you and the traffic that's around you. So those of us who have studied physics know that four sequels mass times acceleration. Well, the acceleration and the mass of a car is much greater than that of someone on a scooter, and thus we have this potential for a disaster. Even if the person writing the scooter is being careful, accidents can happen, and when they do happen, it's always going to end up much worse for the person on the scooter than it is a person in a car. Um this is a real challenge. You would argue it makes more sense to ride on the sidewalk to stay out of the flow of traffic, but then you also have the issue of pedestrian safety, and there's also a problem in Atlanta of sidewalk stability. I would argue certain areas of Atlanta do not have the best sidewalks. Then again, certain areas of Atlanta don't have the best roads either. Case in Point pontsti Lean Avenue, which are offices off of about half of it is under steel plates at the moment, just waiting for those potholes to get filled. But this raises a real issue you start looking at this last mile solution. But there are other elements to the problem that the last male solution does not address. Scooters are not acceptable to ride on all road conditions, and yet the laws of the city state you can only ride them on the road. And like I said, there are a lot of other cities that follow the exact same pathway. There are also these rules that you have to follow, the rules of traffic that again, I think a lot of the scooter operators don't know, not not the companies renting them out, but the people actually using them. And as far as I know, there's no education program from any of these companies to alert people to actually follow those rules. And it's usually in those terms of service where one of the thousands of words that's in there, not one phrase will say make sure you follow all local rules and regulations for the use of east scooters. Well, if you don't know what those are, and if you're not reading these terms of service because you don't have an hour and a half to dedicate to it, that doesn't do much good. And then we end up seeing these other kinds of situations pop up. There are cities in Asia, for example, in Japan in particular, where you actually have to have a license to ride one of these scooters, which means you have to go through the whole process of of training and to demonstrate that you are capable of operating one of these vehicles safely and accountably. And that to me is interesting. It's it's essentially putting you through the same sort of process as getting a driver's license for a car UH, and the scooters are required to have stuff on them to indicate things like turn signals and UH and other elements that are standard on motor vehicles. I don't think we're necessarily going to see that translate over to the United States or other parts of the world. I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily, although it obviously starts to restrict who can use them, and part of the appeal of these services, is that anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can essentially use one of them, uh, despite local laws that restricted So we're on an impass here. This is one of those issues where business and technology has outpaced regulations and law, and in the meantime, there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of frustration, there's a lot of resistance and various communities around the world when it comes to these East scooters. My personal opinion is that there does need to be some form of training that has to happen before you can actually use one of these vehicles. I would make that part of the app, but that comes with its own challenges because you're going to have to make sure that you have versions of that app that are specific to particular municipalities. You would have to have an app that is applicable for Atlanta versus San Francisco, versus Portland versus Boston, and that does mean that you have to have a larger investment on the part of the companies that are renting these things out. Obviously, the more you're asking the companies to invest, the more it's going to take for them to see a return on that investment. And we already talked about how this is a business model that is questionable as far as whether or not it can actually maintain profitability. So there are a lot of things you have to balance. Ultimately, I want, I think people's safety is the thing we have to be concerned about most. After that utility and availability should fall in there somewhere. But if we aren't concerned about safety, we're going to keep seeing incidents where accidents are going to result in people having, you know, tragic outcomes. I saw one statistic that stated that on average, it was you would see an accident with every five thousand miles driven on these scooters collectively. That is and that is a terrible, terrible accident. Right, if you're talking about cars, accident rates tend to be in the hundreds of millions of miles driven. You start talking about accidents on that scale rather than on the thousands of miles. So that tells us that people aren't being terribly careful or they're in situations that just lead to more accidents, So we need to be more cognizant of that. On top of that, you know, some of these cities have helmet laws associated with these scooters. But when you're grabbing a dockless scooter, chances are there's no helmet there either, which means they're either having to carry a helmet with you everywhere you go, or you're just doing without in defiance of local regulations. And that's a real problem too. So what's the solution here, I think, again, following Japan's lead a little bit, maybe not to that crazy. I shouldn't say crazy that extreme extent where you're requiring a full licensing procedure. Um. Some thing along those lines, though, I think would be helpful. Otherwise, I worry that these scooters are going to cause more problems than they solve, And since people are not actually using them frequently to replace card trips, you could argue they're not really solving a problem at all at the moment, at least not a real one. There giving people opportunities to have fun, which I think, you know, we need, but I don't know that that's enough to justify having these scooters everywhere cluttering things up, causing potential safety issues. I'm very curious what you guys think. Um, yeah, I realized that again I'm coming across as the grouchy old man here who doesn't use scooters. I do recognize their utility from certain from a certain point of view. UM, I just haven't been sold on it. But maybe you are a passionate evangelist for scooters. Maybe you have of your own personal experiences that show the real use case for these scoots scooters and why they should be everywhere. If so, then I think you should get in touch with me. Let me know what you think. I would really like to hear your thoughts on it, and if you have thoughts on how they can be deployed in a way that's responsible and safe and is going to meet the needs both of the users and not cause huge headaches on a city level. I would love to hear your thoughts, so you should email me. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line by popping on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of all of our past episodes, including the e scooter episode that prompted this update and everything else, as well as our presence on social media, and you also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it. An upcoming episodes, I'm going to have some friends of the show on to talk about some interesting stuff, which is, by the way, why this episode is so rambily in the first place. Uh, full disclosure, peek behind the curtain. I'd been working on an episode, was really excited about it. Realized I knew the perfect person to have on the show after I had already done quite a bit of work on it. Reached out and they agreed to be on the show. So that's gonna be awesome. But it also meant that I spent a whole lot of time working on something that I couldn't actually record today. So that's why we get the update to East scooters, and also the recent stories in Atlanta of the accidents kind of prompted it. I also had a weirdly enough a ride with a lift driver who told me that because I have a voice in media, I should speak out about this more of vehemently, and uh, I'd be lying if I said that wasn't weighing on me a little bit. It did. Um. Although I still think that the scooters definitely have a place, we just have to figure out the right place for it and I'm not convinced we've done that yet. Anyway, keep an ear out for those episodes. They'll be coming out over the next couple of weeks. One of them will feature Car Stuff's Scott Benjamin, who's going to come on and talk about Formula one race cars in the near future. So if you've got any curiosity about that, it will be satisfied in the short future, like within a couple of weeks. And that's it for me for today, So enjoy. If you're gonna be writing on a scooter, be safe and I'll talk to you again. Releasing text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.