221–230 of 315 posts
Of course Uber's doing another shitty thing. Dockless bicycles in Melbourne are being thrown into the river at an alarming rate, because people are sick of companies relying on littering in public as a business model. So of course Uber is joining the party.
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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.
That would take a lot of political will to do something like that though and it would take YEARS! I don't think the US is a great market (right now) for city-bikes. Outside of maybe Manhattan & SF I can't think of any major city where a bike would take you places faster/better than another way of transportation would. When you consider all the hassles that biking as a transportation comes with, I doubt this has any l…
It's also a great fit because traffic SUUUUCKS and there are a lot of healthy people who buy into the concept.
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…
While it still takes a leap of faith to buy, the argument is sound. And using some other posters' terminology, we can put it like this:
If this works, it will drive significant revenue growth and consolidation of both the rideshare and bikeshare markets.
If it fails, meh. It's just "rounding error."
Seems like a low-risk, high reward proposition to me, the way you stated it.
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As an additional data point: https://www.statista.com/statistics/397765/electric-bicycle-... ebike sales are growing rapidly and in general will start to shape cities in europe very rapidly. That will trickle over to the US in a lot of the big cities that are already dense, and then shift over to the less dense but flatter cities (think LA!)
Living in SF these days and up until a week ago I thought the same way. I serendipitously had an opportunity to try a Bird electric scooter. I was heading to a meeting a few blocks away and one happened to be parked outside of the building I was leaving. It was far enough that I would have normally used Uber to get there but not far enough that I couldn't have walked if I didn't have to rush over. Long story short, I…
I've rode a personal electric scooter for over a year now and I can say a helmet is a must. The biggest dangers I've seen is clueless uber/ lyft drivers cutting you off (happens a lot) and pot holes / cracks in the pavement. They travel at 10+ mph so if you hit a big enough pot hole your going to eat it.
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Strongly agree on Uber's side; this seems like both a distraction and a rounding error even if it's successful. As for Jump; https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ... They just announced a $10M series A in January. To cash out at a $100M valuation doesn't seem like a bad outcome; after just doing just a series A, the founders' stake is likely to be in the 25-50% range (I'd guess in the lower end…
Yes and it's not like their 2nd iteration of Dodgeball (Foursquare) was that successful. They've pivoted to business analytics, but I doubt their investors are that happy.
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 remember my time as a freshman, getting a bike from Walmart became a necessity after the first couple weeks.
After every winter, I had to fix or buy a new bike just because parts got rusty, broked or vandalize.
So I would totally be happy to just use a shared bike if it was available back then.
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I've been cycling in SF for more than a decade and am a SF Bike Coalition member, so I doubt I'm underestimating it all that much. But even if you are right I don't understand why Uber is eager to buy in now . If this takes off so much that Uber is obliged to get in on the action, they can wait. It strikes me as like Apple with MP3 players or smartphones or smartwatches: it's cheaper and easier to let somebody else p…
Also a cyclist, and I think one of the reasons share bikes haven't taken off as much in SF is the terrain. Bikes are a convenient way to get from place to place, but who wants to get sweaty and scared riding around SF hills?
Self-driving bikes probably have a lower fatality rate than cars. Maybe this gives them some breathing room to improve their AI under-the-radar, so to speak.
I think these bikes miss the mark on two major fronts: - Why do they need to be electric? Bicycles are phenomenally efficient, even for people who aren't in "good shape." In SF you can find routes around the really crazy hills. Furthermore, electric bikes reduce the barrier to entry for douches to "go cruising". Every day (NYC) I almost get hit by one of these things buzzing around. I'm sure these bikes are less powe…
I use Jump regularly to run errands when I'm downtown and it's much easier to pickup/drop off bikes than it would be worrying about my own expensive bike getting stolen. These aren't quite dockless as they have to locked up properly and are tracked by the app/gps.
would be interesting to see what lyft does. spin? $8m raised, based in sf, founded by lyft exec and yc alum