TechStuff Gets Scooting

of course zombies because I'm in Atlanta. But over the last several months, a new mode of transportation has become increasingly popular along my walk. It's one that's popping up in lots of cities across the world. I'm talking about the GPS enabled rental scooters known as dockless scooters, belonging to companies like Lime or Bird or one of a half dozen others. So what's the story behind those scooters? Where did this idea come from? How did it become

so popular? Well, the logic behind the companies that are offering this service is actually pretty solid. Right, people need to get around and getting stuck in traffic is a drag. If you live in a city where there's a lot of car traffic, you don't necessarily really enjoy getting into your car at any given to point, and especially if you have to go just a short distance. Meanwhile, many cities in America are not terribly convenient if you happen to be a pedestrian. Atlanta is one of those cities.

If you don't have a car in Atlanta, it's challenging to get around. Now, my city is slowly getting better in this regard, at least in some neighborhoods, but not all of them. And bicycles can really help cut down

on car traffic plus pollution. It promotes exercise. There's been several attempts at making bike sharing or renting infrastructure available in various urban environments, and there are quite a few bicycle rental companies and programs out there, apart from the ones that you're gonna encounter in traditional spots like vacation destinations where you rent a bike for a day and

you go along various bike trails. There's been a few companies and organizations that have set up businesses and services in various cities. A few cities, and some companies and some colleges have experimented with providing free bicycles to a population. They distribute bicycles across the city and people can just grab one whenever they need it and ride for as long as they want to. Google does this on their campus.

If you work at Google's campus and you need to get across the area for a meeting, it's a pretty big campus, so if you're in a one building and you have to go meet in another one, that can be a bit of a hike. So you can hop on one of these bikes that are typically parked right outside of the various buildings and you can ride it over to your destination. Those bikes have no locking mechanisms

for the most part. A lot of these free bike programs don't include any locking mechanisms or other preventive measures in place because it's a little antithetical to the philosophy behind the program. But that also means that those bikes aren't protected against theft, and so you can end up

with some pretty tough distribution problems as well. Maybe people have taken them and not return them, or maybe you find out that all the bikes tend to end up at the bottom of hills because no one ever wants to ride the bikes back up a hill, so they just leave them at the bottom of the hill, and that's where they all accumulate. And so the bikes tend to end up being away from the places where people need them, and they collect in places where people don't

want them. That's a problem. Then there are coin operated and automated docking station style services out there. Typically companies that use these follow the same general plan. You as a customer would need to go to a specific location, such as a kiosk or a docking station, where there would be bikes parked and locked in that station, and there's the point where you would rent the bike and it would release the bike, you could go ride it, and when you were done, you are meant to return

the bike at a similar location. It might be a similar kiosk or dock that's across town, but it belongs to the same company and you have to take it to that specific spot. You can't just leave the bike anywhere, so you might pay for this rental with a smart card or a phone map, so it makes it a little more high tech. But this model has some fairly big drawbacks as well, and the biggest is that the renter has to find a spot to drop off the

bike when they're done with it. Now they can't just ride it too, say their workplace and leave it outside if their workplace doesn't have a docking station or kiosk. But then over in China, some entrepreneurs came up with

a different approach. They went with a dockless bike model, and that model allows riders to grab any available bike that belongs to the company that happens to be in the area, and then you unlock the bike with a companion app in order to rent it, and then you can ride that bicycle around and when you're done, you

would end the trip. You would pull open your app and say all right, I'm done, and the bike would have an electronic lock that would engage and prevent the wheel or both wheels from turning, and then you would just leave the bike wherever it happens to be, preferably parked out of the way so it's not in the line of traffic, but you can just leave it there.

And at the end of the day you might have crews to go out and retrieve bicycles and then redistribute them, or if they happen to be electronic bicycles like the electric scooters are that you've been seeing popping up everywhere. Maybe first they take them back to reach charge at a central facility and then redistribute them later on early

the next morning. So your basic components of these bikes, in addition to your typical bicycle parts that is, would include a GPS receiver that is able to identify where the bike is UH. Then there's some sort of transmitter that sends this information, this location information back out to the general system that the company uses to keep track of all the different bikes UH. And then you would have some sort of unique code on the bike itself.

There might be a string of characters, or it might be a QR code, and this would be what the user would input in their app to let the system know this is the specific bicycle I want to use.

This is also a good way for the company to make sure that if someone has rented a bike and they're there just temporarily leaving it outside, they can keep that bicycle locked until the UH the initial writer has completely released it is that way you don't have to worry about riding a bicycle to say a local store, leaving it outside and then coming out and finding out that the bike that you had rented is now gone because someone else has rented it after you went inside

the store. Anyway, there's also the electric lock. Obviously, that's the really important part. It can disengage or engage after receiving the appropriate signal as relayed by the company's service. So let's do a quick rundown of the major component here of GPS, because I think it's fascinating how GPS works, and it's been a long time since I've actually talked about the process, and it really lets you appreciate the

ingenuity that went into designing the GPS navigation system. So GPS stands for Global Positioning System, and so way above our heads, way on space, there are a collection of GPS satellites just whizzing around of there, and there about thirty of them out in space. They were originally intended to provide navigational data to the US military, but in the ninety nineties, the US President Bill Clinton did away with a policy that was called selective availability. Selective availability

would purposefully introduce errors into the positioning data. So if you had a receiver and you didn't have the right code to tune into the GPS network, you would get location information that was wrong on purpose, not completely wrong, but it wouldn't be accurate to within a few hundred feet. So it wasn't really useful for anything because you wouldn't

you know it would It would be too imprecise. If you were using it to get from point A to point B. As a navigation system, it wouldn't recognize that the turn you needed to take was a mile behind you. Well, maybe a miles being pretty I'm exaggerating there, but you might pass a turn and it might be several seconds after you've passed it before your navigation system says, hey, turn right at that place that was behind you. That

would be a problem. So Clinton did away with that in the nineties, and at that point anyone could access the accurate information. Before then, it was just the military that could, and it was part of a strategy to keep things safe by keeping that a military operation that kind of expired in the nineties. Now anyone can use GPS data and have it be pretty precise to within just a few feet, So that's much more useful if you want to do like point to point navigation systems.

So how does it work well. Each of those satellites in that group overhead are sending out pulses of information, and those pulses include a time stamp, which is incredibly important. The time stamp indicates when the pulse is leaving the satellite and also information about the satellites position above the Earth. So no matter where you are on Earth, there are at least four GPS satellites within line of sight of you. That is, you are visible to at least four satellites.

A GPS receiver picks up on those signals that are being sent out by the satellites, so it's essentially a very high tech electronic ear And because the signals include the satellites positional information and a time stamp, the receiver can use that information to calculate how far away it

is from that respective satellite. The signals travel at the speed of light, so you start with the time it took from the point that the data was time stamped to when it was received by the receiver, and then work backward to figure out how far away the receiver is from that satellite. So you know, if I were to say, it takes the sound I make travels and I'm just making this number of Let's say the sound I make travels one feet every second, and it took

five seconds from the time I made a sound. Too. When you heard it, you do some math, you say, oh, that means I'm five feet away from Jonathan. Again, that was just me using a very basic, completely not realistic example. So the problem here is that this does not actually tell you what your position is from one satellite. It's one satellite alone, just tells you how far away you are from that satellite. Doesn't tell you anything about your position, just that you could be, in theory at any point

that is that distance away from the respective satellite. So if you were to render this in a three D application, You've got a satellite that's an orbit around Earth, and you say, like, well, according to the this time stamp, I must be I don't know, let's say five kilometers from this satellite. Well, you could identify the satellite up in the sky and you could draw a transparent sphere that's five kilometers out from every direction from that satellite.

It would be like this globe surrounding the satellite. Some of that sphere would intersect with the surface of Earth, but that would mean that you had a whole bunch of potential points where you could be based upon your distance from that one satellite. So that's not enough to let you know where you are, right, that's not enough information. You could potentially be anywhere along those points of contact. So you then have to look at more than one satellite.

If you can pick up signals from multiple satellites, you can determine where you are. So you know you are X distance from satellite A, your y distance from satellite B, and your Z distance from satellite see. So you draw your spheres around these three different satellites. They're all going to intersect at a point on the face of Earth,

and that would be your location. That's the one point that is the distance from all three of those satellites, the respective distance from each of those satellites, so it tells you where you would be. This approach, by the way of determining your location is called trilateration. This is different from triangulation because, as that name implies, triangulation is all about using angles to determine your position. Trilateration is about using distances from different known points. Also a word

about that time feature. This is also I think really interesting. It's absolutely necessary for the satellites to send the time data or else there's no way to calculate the distance between the satellites and the receiver. But keeping accurate time isn't an incredible challenge because you could easily have clocks run out of uh, they could get desynchronized, right, This just can happen. So GPS satellites do this. They keep accurate synchronized time by using atomic clocks. Atomic clocks use

the resonance frequencies of atoms as the resonator. The resonator is the part of the clock that keeps time. It's kind of I come grandfather's clock clocks pendulum. Usually it swings back once every second. That's a very slow resonator. Atoms resonate much much much more more quickly, and more importantly, if you have the atoms of specific stuff, they're always going to resonate at the same frequency. They're very consistent.

I've got a little bit more to say about keeping time with the satellites and the GPS network, as well as getting back into the electric scooter land. But before I get into any of that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In addition to keeping accurate time. The GPS network has to account for general and special relativity.

Yeah we're talking super important science here. So, according to general relativity, the clocks on the satellites would run faster than clocks on Earth because time runs slower if it's in an environment that has a stronger gravitational pull. And a clock on Earth would have a stronger gravitational pull on it than a clock on a satellite, so the clocks on Earth would run a little more slowly than a clock in space. However, then you have special relativity.

Special relativity says that the relative speed of a given object also determines how time will pass for that object. The faster the object is going relative to another object, the slower time will appear to pass for that uh fast moving object. So, since satellites are moving very quickly relative to a clock on Earth, the clocks on satellite will appear to run more slowly than o'clock on Earth. So they appear to run more quickly due to general relativity,

but more slowly due to special relativity. Special in general relativity don't quite cancel each other out, so the GPS network actually has to take into account both special and general relativity when trying to make sure all these clocks are synchronized properly, and it shows that Einstein was really onto something and who would have thought that I could fit in this quick discussion about relativity in an episode

that's all about electric scooters. So connected to this GPS receiver on these dockless bikes and scooters as a processor and a wireless communications device. It might be the equivalent of like a cell phone. There's some that use three gene networks to send information back to the general system,

but different ones may use different proprietary approaches. The nature of the communications device depends upon the company, but essentially it just comes out to being a type of wireless ray deo that sends out information about the bike or scooters location. The respective company or organization or whatever is handling this receives that signal and then registers the vehicle's location and frequently will incorporate the information into the app

that customers use. So if you're a customer, you can follow up an app and you can look at a map of your area and it should highlight the location of available vehicles because they are constantly paying the system with their location. This is also how the service is able to locate these individual vehicles at the end of the day so that they can redistribute them in the appropriate places and also recharge any that run on electricity.

The electronic lock prevents people from just grabbing a scooter or bike and taking it for a joy ride or stealing it for themselves, and the lock prevents one or both wheels from turning, So not much more to say about that. It's pretty basic piece of technology. The unique identify or for the bike, like I said, could be a QR code, it could be a string of characters, but it's unique to the bike or scooter so that the network can send a signal for the lock to

disengage and begin the rental period for that user. Also to alert users to the location of specific bikes, and to keep the location of bikes that are still being rented off of the map. Obviously, you wouldn't want to show the location of every single vehicle that was belonging to that system, because some of them might be in use and they would not be available to someone else who wants to just grab one right then and there.

So you have to have a way of identifying each of these and saying all right, well, this one over here is not in use, therefore I'm going to show it on the map, whereas this one over here is being used right now by somebody, so I'm not going to have that pop up on the map. Okay. Now, I mentioned earlier that these companies got started in China, or that this kind of service got started in China.

The two largest companies in China that do this kind of thing, especially with bicycles, are called o fo Ofo That one has more than two million bikes in forty three cities in China, and another one called Mobike, which has more than one million bikes of its own. Now, inspired by the success of those businesses in China, several people in America decided to give this same concept to go and early companies to get into dockleas bike sharing in the US where Zagster Blue Go Go, which was

a Chinese company, subsequently it went bankrupt. There was a spin which was recently acquired by Ford that Social Bicycles also known as Jump Bikes, which is now owned by Uber Motivated Company which is now owned by Lift and

Lime or as it was originally known, Lime Bike. Many of those companies would pop up around the same time around two thousand seventeen early two thousand eighteen, but in different cities, and would rapidly expand out to other locations as soon as the company's had secured enough funding to do that, and funding came along pretty darn quickly. There are a lot of different examples, but I'm gonna look at two specifically. I'm gonna start with a line Bike

as an example. It's admittedly a pretty dramatic example, but I think this is an interesting topic, not just from the text side, but also from the business side. So line Bike started as a startup in early and it was not the first dockless bike startup in the United States, but it did help define the model for success. You had co founders Brad Boo and Toby's son. They started the company in San Mateo, California, and they had the goal of creating a dockless bike rental company akin to

what was going on in China. The actual rollout of bikes would happen in April. Like many other bike sharing and renting companies, Linebike opted to use special tires for their bikes. They didn't use the inflated tires that you would typically find on a bicycle. Instead, they are foam core tires. This helps cut down on maintenance and repair costs, as those tires aren't in as much danger of ripping

apart or deflating, you know, getting a puncture. Other companies have used similar tires, some of them are even solid rubber tires. I imagine that these probably are a bit more stiff in the ride than your typical inflated tire bikes, but I've never actually been on once, I don't know.

The pricing model for a line Bike originally was a dollar every half hour, and investors obviously thought that this was a promising idea, so at launch, firms like Andrea sen Horowitz and I d G Ventures poured twelve million dollars into the company, and that was just the first round of funding, which happened in March. The following October they had a second round of funding where they raised

fifty million dollars in investment. Then in February, line Bike got another round of funding, this time at seventy million dollars, and in July two thousand eighteen, they got yet another round of funding for an amazing three hundred thirty five million dollars in investments, which meant that by July eighteen, Lime had reached a valuation of one point one billion dollars, and by then the company wasn't just offering up bikes

but also electric scooters. But that's not all. In October two thousand eighteen, Bloomberg reported that Lime was looking for even more financing, and this time at evaluation of more than three billion dollars. Rumor has it that the company has also been in talks with Uber about a possible acquisition. And Lime story is incredible, but it's not unique. There's another electric scooter duckless rental company called Bird that has also experienced a meteoric rise. Bird was founded by a

man named Travis vander Zanden. It was launched in two thousand seventeen in Santa Monica, California, and vanders Enden had previously worked as an executive at both Lift and Uber, so he had experience in this world, just in the car world. Uh leading into this, he secured fifteen million

dollars in funding in February two thousand eighteen. Just one month later, a second round of funding raised one hundred million dollars on in May, the company saw another one hundred fifty million dollars in investment, which catapulted Bird into the billion dollar valuation, making Bird the startup to reach the fabled unicorn status the fastest and start up speak, a unicorn is a company that reaches a billion dollars in valuation, and you hear a lot about unicorns in

tech business speak. But of course the story doesn't stop there. In June two thousand eighteen, Bird got another three hundred million dollars in financing that boosted the valuation up to two billion, and Bird, like Lime, is seeking additional financing and apparently is doing so at evaluation even more than lines three point three billion dollars. Incredible. The electric scooter trend started up around the end of and it really

began to get momentum, so to speak. In generally, the companies behind these business models followed a pretty brazen philosophy. They would move operations into a city, they would secure facilities to recharge scooters, and they would hire on staff to retrieve the vehicles at the end of the day and then place those scooters in strategic high traffic areas the next morning, all without first talking to city officials

about it. The general approach has been, don't ask for permission, just go out and do it, and then deal with any issues as they pop up. What just caused more than just a few problems along the way. I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. It's a pretty common

thread in technology that the law tends to lag behind innovation. Frequently, inventive people will create transformative technology that does not neatly fit into pre existing regulatory infrastructure, and then you get the awkward scramble as governments try to incorporate something new into a system that doesn't always deal with new stuff really well. We've seen this with autonomous cars, we're seeing it with artificial intelligence, and we're also seeing it with

these bike rental and scooter rental companies. Rather than risk being denied the chance to do business in a city, many of these companies bypass the tricky step of getting permission and they just go straight into getting to work.

But then you get a sudden flood of scooters in a city that may or may not have local laws dictating how such vehicles are supposed to operate, and cities scooters might be treated like bicycles, and there may be rules in place that say writers are supposed to wear helmets at all times, they're supposed to stick to roads and streets, they're supposed to stay off sidewalks. Other cities

might have the opposite. They might say that scooters are not street legal and people should never ride on streets or roads and only stick to maybe bike paths, sidewalks, that sort of thing. Some cities have no real regulations at all for them because there are still a relatively

new form of transportation. So if you live in a city that has one or more of these companies that are in operation in your area, you've likely either heard someone complaining about them, or maybe you've done some grousing yourself. I know I have, But in my case it tends to be directed not towards the companies necessarily, as I think their business model is a valid one, if not questionably applied. I think that asking for the permit approach is the more responsible way to do it, maybe not

the most profitable, but more responsible. But my ire is directed more toward irresponsible or disrespectful customers. You can't necessarily blame a company for the quality of its customers unless that company is actively cultivating a customer base of jerk

faces through its messaging, branding, and execution. But just a quick search online for duckless electric scooters or using actual company names like Lime or Bird or one of the numerous other companies out there is going to bring up tons of articles about how the scooters are causing headaches in cities around the world. So, for example, a piece on NPR's website that was published in August two thousand eighteen has the title Duckless scooters gain Popularity and scorn

across the US. The piece details how the scooters are getting an enthusiastic reaction from users and inspiring frustration or worse in others, and it points out that now there are entire social media accounts dedicated to some of the more egregious examples of bad user behavior, such as an Instagram account called scooters Behaving Badly. City governments are starting

to respond to this. In June two thousand eighteen, San Francisco's government ordered all electric scooter companies to cease and desist operations until those companies secured permits. The city announced that all electric scooters from those companies would have to be off San Francisco streets and sidewalks by June four, two thousand eighteen. Otherwise the companies would face a one dollars per day fine for every scooter of theirs that was left in a public right of way after June four.

In addition, San Francisco City government ruled that it would only issue permits for up to five companies MAX in a pilot program. Why did San Francisco react this way, It was largely in response to complaints from city residents. There were numerous incidents of scooters blocking sidewalks and ramps up to sidewalks, which made it harder for people to navigate when they were just walking on foot as a pedestrian.

The city was particularly concerned about the welfare of the elderly and those with mobility issues, because you know, you have a scooter left on a sidewalk ramp that might prevent someone in a wheelchair from being able to get off the street and onto the sidewalk. In addition, there were concerns that writers were not operating the scooters safely or even with common sense, in some cases, putting themselves

and others at risk. The permit program allows for a one year trial, and that trial has some other pretty big restrictions on it. Within the first six months of the trial, there could be no more than one thousand, two hundred fifty scooters on San Francisco's streets. After that half year period of things are looking okay like they're still working, then the city government can bump that up to two thousand, five hundred scooters for the entire city.

But to be considered for a permit, the companies have to provide proof that they will operate responsibly within the city, which includes having a plan in place to keep sidewalks clear of the scooters, which seems to me to be a pretty tall order because that relies on user behavior, and if users don't follow the rules, the companies are

the ones that suffer for it. That might not be entirely fair, but at the same time, I don't really know what the solution would be, as it's pretty hard to dictate to users what they must and must not do when they are unsupervised. In addition to keeping the sidewalks clear, the companies also have to provide insurance that to give trip data to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation agency, and they have to prove that the companies have privacy

and security measures in place to protect customers. In October two thousand eighteen, San Francisco began the scooter share permit and pilot program with just two companies. One of them is called Scoot and the other is called Skip. These two companies operate in relatively small regions in the city. I mean they have to. There are only one thousand, two d fifty scooters allowed in total between the two

of them, so it's impractical to offer wide coverage. You would rarely, if ever, run across a scooter, so they operate in pretty small areas within the city. So interestingly, the limited availability of scooters in certain neighborhoods in San Francisco has created a new disagreement, a new argument among

city officials. There are representatives from some of those neighborhoods who have complained that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authorities approach means that the districts they represent have few, if any scooters available, so the people who live in those districts can't take advantage of those services. So while the initial problem was that there were too many of these

darned scooters everywhere. Now the opposite is true. Now you've got people complaining that there aren't enough scooters out there, and that's probably in the back of the minds of many of the executives at these companies, because if they can launch their service quickly in cities without first getting permission from the city government, they can create a business that at least some people are going to find useful and fun, and some will even think of it as

a a necessary service once they start relying on it more frequently. And then as cities respond to complaints or they try to get a grip on what is going on to make sure everything is being operated in a safe and responsible manner, the cities are the ones that have to deal with the backlash from customers. If they are to remove those scooters, you're gonna have a bunch of angry citizens who say, you're taking away something that I use to get to and from work, for example.

So it's kind of like a parent taking away a favorite toy from their child and then having to deal with the imper tantrum, except in this case, I'm being unfair. I think temper tantrum is really being unfair. Because for some people, these these electric scooters really have been a way to become independent of cars. If they're just taking short trips between locations, then they can hop on one

of these things. They don't have to drive. They're not contributing to the traffic issues or the pollution, So there are legit arguments for using these services, even if those services came into cities without the first, you know, getting permission. While all this is going on, it is good to remember that Blue Go Go, that Chinese bike sharing company I mentioned earlier, did go out of business and went bankrupt.

So some analysts say that might indicate that this whole duckless sharing model, both for bicycles and for scooters, could be a bubble, and that there could be a bubble

burst in the future. There's also no shortage of competing companies out there, although only a few have really seen the monumental financial success at least from an investment standpoint of a company like Bird or Lime, and as right hailing companies like Uber and Lift get more involved, will probably see more integrated approaches rolling forward, so to speak. I didn't even cover issues of cities seeing a rise in things like people getting injured, broken bones, or even

fist fights that are broken out over scooters. Things like that. That's also happening. But you know that's again I can't necessarily fault the companies for this. That's again user behavior. So will the dockless electric scooter business models survive? I think so. I think it's likely to continue, and we're probably gonna see a real patchwork approach to it as different cities respond in different ways. Some will be more restrictive, some more permissive, and I doubt all the different companies

are going to stick around. I'm sure a few will follow in Blue Go Goes Away can eventually go out of suineness or get acquired by competitors. But at fifteen cents per minute for a lot of these electric scooter models, it's a pretty cheap way to get around, and when you're scooting about at fifteen miles an hour, it's got to be fun. Also, just full disclosure, I have never ever ridden on one of these electric scooters. I suspect I would fall off almost immediately because I'm old and

I don't have great balance. I would love to give one a try, but I've actually seen a guy take a really serious spill off of one of these in a major street in Atlanta called Highland, and he did a real tumble. And if that had happened to me, he bounced up pretty quickly and seemed more embarrassed than anything else. I would not have bounced up. I would

have crunched. I would have been embarrassed and injured. So I don't know that I'm ever going to get on one of these anytime soon, but they are interesting to me. I'm curious if you guys have them in your neighborhoods. Do you what what's your opinion? Do you think they're great? Do you think they are a blight on civilization? And if you have any other suggestions for episodes of tech Stuff, get in touch with me. You can write me. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com.

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