From Stratechery, June 11:
As I understand it, the proper way to open an article about electric
scooters is to first state one’s priors, explain the circumstances of
how one came to try scooters, and then deliver a verdict. Unfortunately,
that means mine is a bit boring: while most employing this format wanted to hate them,
I was pretty sure scooters would be awesome — and they were!
For me the circumstances were a trip to San Francisco; I purposely
stayed at a hotel relatively far from where most of my meetings were,
giving me no choice but to rely on some combination of scooters,
e-bikes, and ride-sharing services. The scooters were a clear winner:
fast, fun, and convenient — as long as you could find one near you. The
city needs five times as many.
So, naturally, San Francisco banned them,
at least temporarily: companies will be able to apply for their share
of a pool of a mere 1,250 permits; that number may double in six months,
but for now the scooter-riding experience will probably be more of a
novelty, not something you can rely on. In fact, by the end of my trip,
if I were actually in a rush, I knew to use a ride-sharing service.
It’s no surprise that ride-sharing services have higher liquidity:
San Francisco is a car-friendly town. The city has a population of
884,363 humans and 496,843 vehicles, mostly in the city’s 275,000 on-street parking spaces. Granted, most of the Uber and Lyft drivers come from outside the city, but there is no congestion tax to deter them.
The result is an urban area stuck on a bizarre local maxima: most
households have cars, but rarely use them, particularly in the city,
because traffic is bad and parking is — relative to the number of cars —
sparse; the alternative is ride-sharing, which incurs the same traffic
costs but at least doesn’t require parking. And yet, San Francisco, for
now anyways, will only allow about 60 parking spaces-worth of scooters
onto the streets.
Everything as a Service
This is hardly the forum to discuss the oft-head-scratching politics
of tech’s de facto capital city, and I can certainly see the downside of
scooters, particularly the haphazard way with which they are being
deployed; in an environment built for cars scooters get in the way.
It’s worth considering, though, just how much sense dockless scooters
make: the concept is one of the purest manifestations of what I
referred to in 2016 as Everything as a Service:
What happens, though, if we apply the services business model to
hardware? Consider an airplane: I fly thousands of miles a year, but
while Stratechery is doing well, I certainly don’t own my own plane!
Rather, I fly on an airplane that is owned by an airline that is paid
for in part through some percentage of my ticket cost. I am,
effectively, “renting” a seat on that airplane, and once that flight is
gone I own nothing other than new GPS coordinates on my phone.
Now the process of buying an airplane ticket, identifying who I am,
etc. is far more cumbersome than simply hopping in my car — there are
significant transaction costs — but given that I can’t afford an
airplane it’s worth putting up with when I have to travel long
distances. What happens, though, when those transaction costs are
removed? Well, then you get Uber or its competitors: simply touch a
button and a car that would have otherwise been unused will pick you up
and take you where you want to go, for a price that is a tiny fraction
of what the car cost to buy in the first place. The same model applies
to hotels — instead of buying a house in every city you visit, simply
rent a room — and Airbnb has taken the concept to a new level by
leveraging unused space.
The enabling factor for both Uber and Airbnb applying a services
business model to physical goods is your smartphone and the Internet: it
enables distribution and transactions costs to be zero, making it
infinitely more convenient to simply rent the physical goods you need
instead of acquiring them outright.
What is striking about dockless scooters — at least when one is
parked outside your door! — is that they make ride-sharing services feel
like half-measures: why even wait five minutes, when you can just
scan-and-go? Steve Jobs described computers as bicycles of the mind; now that computers are smartphones and connected to the Internet they can conjure up the physical equivalent as well!...
...
MUCH MORE