On our recent trip to San Diego, I witnessed a very new phenomenon that wasn't even a thing just one year earlier. Dockless electric scooters for rent.
There are currently two competing companies offering electric scooters, Lime and Bird. First, you get the app for the appropriate scooter company, connect it to your credit card, then you just need to find a scooter. Based on what I saw, that won't be much of an issue, especially in commercial and tourist areas. Where we stayed in Pacific Beach, scooters by both brands were parked in front of restaurants, stores, bars, hotels and other random places along heavily trafficked pathways and sidewalks.
In the case of Lime, It's $1 to unlock the scooter with the app, then $0.15 per minute of riding. So if you grabbed one and took it for a 30 minutes cruise around, you'd get billed $5.50. The charge would be the same on a Bird scooter.
These scooters go almost 15 mph (almost 24 km/h) and have a range of anywhere between 20 and 37 miles (32 - 59 km). You're supposed to wear a helmet while riding, but I never saw that, likely because the majority of folks using them were tourists. Who carries a helmet with them? Watching people go zipping by on the beach pathway, I noticed that adding these scooters to the equation can make things tricky, considering that there are spots where walkers, joggers, runners, skateboarders, bikes and now electric scooters are trying to share the path. I saw folks who didn't quite know how to ride them safely and saw a few examples of people riding two per scooter, which doesn't look very safe.
There has understandably been some backlash about these scooters in some places. But there are more places embracing them than banning or vandalizing them. In the case of Lime, they're ubiquitous in many California and Massachusetts cities, as well as the expected Seattle, New York, Chicago, Denver, etc. They have also partnered with a lot of universities in the US to increase mobility for students around campus. Bird aren't in quite as many cities, but they're growing and have also partnered with several universities.
You can earn money charging scooters too. Since they're left where they are once they run out of juice, someone has to get them and recharge them. You can sign up to be a charger and they'll sell you a charger unit. Then, you use the app to find out where the dead ones are and bring them to your home (using your own vehicle). Then you charge them and then take the charged scooters to wherever they feel they're needed and drop them off. Based on what I've seen, you get roughly $8 for every scooter you charge. It takes roughly 4 hours to charge a scooter. One guy bought 8 chargers for $40 and was making a few hundred bucks on the side. The trick is, you won't see a lot of dead scooters before 9:00 pm and you have to have them back on the street (where they tell you) by 7:00 am if you want to get paid. Bird pays $5 per scooter.
