IF YOU SAY you saw this coming, I don’t believe you. In 2018, electric scooter-share stole the mobility show. They arrived unannounced in cities. They provoked fierce council meetings and protests. They launched debates about who owns sidewalks, anyway, and what role regulators play in bossing around big business. They sucked up VC dollars, mountains of them, as upstarts crowed about the revenue generated per scoot. They got damaged and fixed, they launched their own new gig economy jobs.
Tag: Scooters
Why Silicon Valley Is So Good at Making People Hate Things They Should Love | Inc.com
To anyone who has spent time in a great metropolis, San Francisco can only be experienced as a collection of dysfunctions interrupted by the occasional nice view. The housing market is the stuff of nightmares. Traffic heading in and out of town sits gridlocked for hours a day. The overcrowded public transit system primarily serves a narrow corridor of neighborhoods. Whole tracts of the city are weirdly barren of restaurants or supermarkets.
And let’s not even start on the ways this increasingly wealthy city fails its large homeless population.
All this dysfunction creates a ready market for consumer-focused startups that can ease the suck a little. It’s no accident that Uber, Airbnb, and Instacart all started here. And so it was when app-enabled electric scooters started showing up on the streets of San Francisco in March, a lot of people wanted to ride them. Cheap, convenient, zero-emissions transportation that gets you exactly where you’re going–that’s something that would improve every city, not just one this broken.
Dispatches From The Front 