On Los Altos Avenue
Interesting to see the occasional Lime ebike in Los Altos – the nearest Lime bike location is posted as in Mountain View. No sighting yet of their Segway scooters.
For several years we tracked the increasing frequency of Teslas, and then an increasing variety of electric cars, on the streets in Los Altos. It seems like it’s almost time to do the same exercise, but for electrically assisted single person transport. Not all of them have two wheels, nor do they all have pedals. Segway sell a single wheel Ninebot. Lopfit walking bikes from Denmark have made it to Palo Alto.
These tie back into the Transportation as a System question – which company is best placed to gain scale by putting together solutions to the transportation requirements of people and things ? These personal scaled devices are part of the solution, and the travel pattern data they create have value, as indicated by the recent funding rounds. GV (was Google Ventures) led a $250m round for Lime in early June. Sequoia Capital led a $300m round for Bird (scooters) later the same month.
Updating, July 9th – the latest GV round also involves Uber, and has gone up to $335m.
Collecting background references
https://stratechery.com/2018/the-scooter-economy/ consumer surplus funded by VCs
Italian modular cars for China for services https://technode.com/2018/06/27/modular-kingdom/
Lime bikes – https://www.limebike.com/locations
Street flow rates/capacity for cars v bikes/scooters https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/dictionary/capacity
Bird scooters funding explanation https://bothsidesofthetable.com/all-the-questions-you-wanted-answered-about-bird-scooters-and-their-recent-300-million-funding-62a8d557904d
Electric walking bike https://www.lopifit.nl/
Cunning Systems 