Electric scooters and bikes are becoming more affordable. If there is any city in America that values itself on being green, you know that is Portland.
These are just cheaper rates to rent privately owned scooters though, right? Until banks start offering the same financing rates for e-rides as they do autos (currently, if you want to finance an e-bike, you’ll be paying personal loan rates), the biggest barrier to entry for most people is still the initial cost.
That’s cause there’s effectively no collateral. Cars retain at least some of there value after it’s used and your required to get insurance on it, so if it’s totalled you can get a new one for collateral. Scooters retain even less of there value when used and are way harder to sell, they also usually are uninsured so if you wreck it there’s nothing left for the bank to repo.
It’s be better if the government could do the financing since they are a public good and they can stand to loose a couple thousand if someone wrecks there scooter.
I don’t think there ever will be a market-driven supply of micromobility loans, and it would have to be government subsidized to exist. That is to say, here in the USA, we should absolutely do that since I don’t expect any private lenders to do it.
If something is economically prohibitive but has clear social benefit, that’s exactly when subsidization makes the most sense. Heaven knows we already subsidize other things which have unclear benefits, but loans for micromobility would be: 1) relatively cheap, 2) easy to ascribe to individuals (eg by SSN), 3) make concrete steps toward social and climate commitments.
That’s a lot cheaper than the laughable $1 + 45 cents per minute Lime is charging for their bikes where I live… $28 for the first hour. HA HA
That’s crazy, might as well buy your own scooter for that much.
$2.60 for half an hour of riding. While that might be cheaper than an Uber, why wouldn’t they try lending scooters to lower income individuals instead at cost over a larger period of time, leaving the charging to the end user? Seems that would cheaper for both the user and compared to whatever tax breaks they would be giving to attract the scooter rental companies.
electric annoy me because chicago has this system and its great for manual bikes where you can get buy with just the yearly fee which is like 2months of a transit pass (used to be closer to one month) but there are way fewer manual bikes now as the more expensive e-bikes take up the station parking.
