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Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

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Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#31

Post by bagacrap »

username223 wrote: post #19

"Yet in recent months, Dallas has become ground zero for a nascent national bike-share war, as five startups armed with hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars have blanketed the city with at least 18,000 bikes." -- https://archive.is/kczBY It sounds like boom times for Dallas scrap dealers. No one who has ever been to Dallas could ever think this makes sense: Dallas and Fort Worth are about 80 km in diameter…

It's true there's an extremely strong car culture in Dallas (and the rest of Texas) for reasons of weather and geography. But the bike shares in Dallas are concentrated in the denser areas full of boutiques, restaurants, museums, etc. The idea is not to replace cars so much as allowing you to park once and then get around on the bike.

The issue that's immediately apparent to anyone who actually goes there is that the sidewalks are littered with dozens of bikes, most of which have tipped over. The docks at least force you to keep the bikes somewhat organized and out of the way.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#32

Post by decacorn »

has JUMP been profitable at all whatsoever? how can they possibly be valued at $200m? nothing against cycles or dockless sharing (love Birds), but this is just outright nonsense. another overvalued startup, another example of why Uber doesn't know how to properly use its capital resources.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#33

Post by wmblaettler »

sagichmal wrote: post #9
saudioger wrote: post #6

Does anyone know if going dockless increases ridership in any significant way? The consumer benefits seem great but it seems like such a nightmare to maintain compared to a docking system.

Data point of one here, but docked bike share programs are a novelty for me, maybe useful on occasional weekends, but dockless makes it viable for replacing almost all use of public transit and ride sharing, including (especially) daily commute. Orders of magnitude difference in my personal usage.

Dockless gives gives you closer to end-to-end or "last mile" so much more than docked systems. With docked systems, you have to walk to both the pickup dock and find a drop off dock near your actual destination for a one way ride. So your "last mile" is very nearly always walking. They are limited to n(n-1)/2 routes where n is a docking station. With dockless, it's more like a car but without the hassle of finding a parking space, you can ride right up to your destination wherever that may be, and just get off the bike leaving it there. The only walking is to the nearest available bike at the outset of the trip. Data point of one here, I've visited cities with docked systems and commented on how cool it would be to use it, but I visited Seattle and actually used one of their dockless systems for several days during my stay, from short multi-block rides to a 14 mile round trip ride. It's tremendously useful for the shorter trips that are just too far for walking. The longer trip was for the heck of if it to see a little more of the city by bike with an errand to pick up a laptop charger needed that morning for my wife.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#34

Post by maherbeg »

wpietri wrote: post #7

This is a puzzle to me. Uber faces some critical issues ahead. If they can solve them, the bikes will be a rounding error. If they can't, the bike business won't be enough to save them. Why add the complexity when they could buy or build something later? I especially can't figure out why the Jump CEO would do it. The odds of their work surviving to the 10 year mark seems so small. It reminds me of something like Dodg…

I think you may underestimate the impact e-bikes are going to have on major (non-car centric) cities. They'll likely reshape cities significantly as infrastructure gets improved for biking. You can get significant traffic density improvements by pushing bikes instead of cars, and e-bikes make this more accessible.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#36

Post by maxerickson »

toufka wrote: post #11
wpietri wrote: post #7

This is a puzzle to me. Uber faces some critical issues ahead. If they can solve them, the bikes will be a rounding error. If they can't, the bike business won't be enough to save them. Why add the complexity when they could buy or build something later? I especially can't figure out why the Jump CEO would do it. The odds of their work surviving to the 10 year mark seems so small. It reminds me of something like Dodg…

I suspect it's really good signal for setting up or optimizing routes. Those bikes show very clear underserved endpoints that might otherwise be hard to discover. Might just be a cheap and interesting peek down-market on their geographic data-layer.

The quality of the signal seems to depend heavily on the quality of the bike service. If they aren't moving bikes to where there is demand, they aren't generating any information about where people want to go (because people aren't using the bikes).

It can also miss the forest for the trees if they have a few bikes that they usually put in an okay spot (but not enough bikes to meet the real demand).

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#37

Post by valj »

wpietri wrote: post #7

This is a puzzle to me. Uber faces some critical issues ahead. If they can solve them, the bikes will be a rounding error. If they can't, the bike business won't be enough to save them. Why add the complexity when they could buy or build something later? I especially can't figure out why the Jump CEO would do it. The odds of their work surviving to the 10 year mark seems so small. It reminds me of something like Dodg…

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I imagine the key is in how you build defensibility around the core ride-sharing business.

Ride-sharing suffers from the problem of clustered networks - you can be a global player like Uber and still lose the entire city of SF to a competitor like Lyft, or feel a minnow like Juno tear into your margins in NYC.

Having bike sharing in your pocket helps you build a wider moat around these clustered networks. If I typically take a bikeshare to the subway every morning, and rarely Uber on the weekend, Uber might win 10 low-margin trips from me during the week (bikeshare to and from the subway every day), and through the use of a loyalty program incentivize me to make my 2 high-margin weekend ridesharing trips Uber trips.

So yes, it is an adjacency, and it is lower margin than ridesharing and capital intensive, but this is a difficult market and at this point in the game it might make sense.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#38

Post by sagichmal »

kasey_junk wrote: post #28
Parsnip1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only times I've used a bike share, it was because I was walking somewhere and happened to pass a dockless bike that seemed like a really good idea to just rent and use right away. These were invariable in places that would not have had a docking station.

I get that. But he mentioned that dockless made it feasible for replacing the commute. Those seem like the kinds of trips that dock based systems excel at because they are known routes.

The closest city bike docking stations are a ~10 minute walk from my apartment, and a ~5 minute walk from my office. There is always a dockless bike within a ~5 minute walk from my apartment, even during morning and evening rush hours, and I can leave it directly in front of my office door. The time spent on the bike is the same in both cases, about 10 or 12 minutes. So a docked bike commute is 25 minutes door-to-door, with a lot of time kind of "wasted", whereas a dockless bike commute is between 10 and 15, and all of the time spent feels like I'm making progress toward my goal.

It's worth noting that taking public transit (Muni bus) between these same two points takes at least 30 minutes (good day, light traffic, no mentally disturbed people interrupting the driver) and has taken as long as 55 minutes. A Lyft is also reliably slower, especially in the evening rush hour.

To be honest, the time taken is not such a huge deal. The bigger draw, by far, is that riding the electric bike is completely effortless, and usually quite fun. And it's also important that they are extremely handsome, I don't feel like a goober when I'm on them. Riding the city bikes, in comparison, is a completely different experience. You feel how big and heavy they are, you can easily work up a sweat, and they're not handsome machines, everyone looks a little bit like a doofus on them.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#39

Post by icebraining »

ggregoire wrote: post #21
gervase wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to the complexity of managing a dockless system (and in particular, their profitability), but from a UX perspective, it's a total game-changer. In my city, we started with docked, but after a dockless company arrived, literally no-one uses the docked bikes - why put up with the extra hassle of having to return the bikes for no user benefit? The prices are already so low that I can't really see them bein…

> why put up with the extra hassle of having to return the bikes for no user benefit? What about the extra hassle of finding and walking with your map to your dockless bike? (if you are lucky enough to find one close to you) Also in both cities I lived, docking stations are everywhere, it has never been a problem (maybe once or twice a year when my usual docking station was full. Still, I just needed to go the next o…

The system in Hamburg (StadtRAD) is an hybrid: you have to bring it to a dock, but if the dock's full, you can just lock the bike standalone near it.

Although, last time I mentioned it here someone said they've had problems with the position detection, such that they kept being charged despite leaving it near a dock.

Re: Uber enters dockless bike wars with Jump acquisition

#40

Post by chrischen »

mikepurvis wrote: post #26
barkingcat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you bring a bike lock and just lock the dockless bike?

I'd be pretty frustrated if I used the app to locate an available bike but then found that someone had locked it up.

I actually did find bikes like that in the wild. Luckily there were usually a group of bikes there. I'd imagine it's probably against their TOS to lock their bikes.
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