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(10-04-2018, 12:18 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: That's a great account...very detailed.
I was also quite surprised by how heavy they are...certainly no razor scooter.
It makes a certain kind of sad sense that Lime would oversupply their pit crews. It costs them nothing, and forces the "not employees" to compete for work, and ensures that most or all of their scooters get charged overnight. At what cost? I'm sure nobody is measuring that.
The "gig" economy at work.
I don’t think the problem is the availability of poor jobs. The problem is the poor availability of better alternatives. Given the widespread automation expected to be introduced in the upcoming years, I think this means a guaranteed annual income. As soon as people are able to survive without a job, all the really bad jobs will either disappear or treat their employees better.
Timing is pretty good, if we will just take the opportunity: there is a possible revenue source to fund part of the guaranteed annual income: carbon tax.
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(10-03-2018, 09:28 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: So I used the Lime scooters today, so I wrote up my thoughts on the experience, the pilot, and scooters in general.
https://kissingbridgetrail.blogspot.com/...oters.html
Nice writeup, thanks!
I'm still confused about the cost of the scooter. When I open the app and click on a scooter it says "$1 unlock + 30c/1 mi". I assumed that "mi" in this case means "miles" because the scooters are listed as having "XX mi range" and range is usually a measure of distance. Fully charged scooters have a range of "23 mi"; if that's minutes that seems awfully short. But the screen shots in the review show distances in KM, so now I'm wondering if "mi" stands for minutes after all... in which case why wouldn't they just use "min" as the abbreviation?
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(10-04-2018, 09:12 AM)goggolor Wrote: (10-03-2018, 09:28 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: So I used the Lime scooters today, so I wrote up my thoughts on the experience, the pilot, and scooters in general.
https://kissingbridgetrail.blogspot.com/...oters.html
Nice writeup, thanks!
I'm still confused about the cost of the scooter. When I open the app and click on a scooter it says "$1 unlock + 30c/1 mi". I assumed that "mi" in this case means "miles" because the scooters are listed as having "XX mi range" and range is usually a measure of distance. Fully charged scooters have a range of "23 mi"; if that's minutes that seems awfully short. But the screen shots in the review show distances in KM, so now I'm wondering if "mi" stands for minutes after all... in which case why wouldn't they just use "min" as the abbreviation?
Thanks  .
Yes, it is a minute. Why they don't use "min"...not sure, it is another problem with the UX in the app IMO.
And yeah, it is a lot more expensive than I thought.
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(10-04-2018, 09:28 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: Yes, it is a minute. Why they don't use "min"...not sure, it is another problem with the UX in the app IMO.
And yeah, it is a lot more expensive than I thought.
That's really misleading. "mi" is always an abbreviation for "miles", not "minutes".
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Misleading to the point of probably being illegal.
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I was curious if they could get away with arguing that $1 per mile is $1 per minute - as we'll soon see I have pretty weak unit conversion skills so genuinely had no idea - then did the math and discovered that would be about 96.5kph. So, probably not.
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Startups like this don't care about pesky things like 'laws'. They've all taken lessons from Uber on how to grow fast.
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"Move fast and break things." In this case, the "things" to "break" are laws and agreements you made a day ago.
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What is “gig” and why is it bad? I have never heard of this.
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(10-06-2018, 08:02 AM)Canard Wrote: What is “gig” and why is it bad? I have never heard of this.
It's not intrinsically bad. It basically refers to freelance work. There has been a rise in what are known as freelance marketplaces with the internet. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Uber, Lyft etc. These can be useful services, but what they are also doing is creating employment with none of the protections typically offered to workers.
Lime Scooter using a marketplace to get people to change batteries is a perfect example of this temporary freelance work replacing what would normally be a more secure full- or part-time job in the past.
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When I look on the app, it looks like there's a huge red area around a central "not red" area (the pilot area?). But then outside of the red area it's normal again. Tapping on the red area says it's just a no parking zone... but can you ride there? Like basically you can just ride wherever, but you're supposed to park them back inside the not-red area (but not outside the red area)?
At what point does it ask for your credit card info? Just feel like that's something I'd rather punch in now than awkwardly doing while standing there trying to turn it on to go for a ride.
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(10-06-2018, 10:42 AM)Canard Wrote: When I look on the app, it looks like there's a huge red area around a central "not red" area (the pilot area?). But then outside of the red area it's normal again. Tapping on the red area says it's just a no parking zone... but can you ride there? Like basically you can just ride wherever, but you're supposed to park them back inside the not-red area (but not outside the red area)?
At what point does it ask for your credit card info? Just feel like that's something I'd rather punch in now than awkwardly doing while standing there trying to turn it on to go for a ride.
They still appear to be playing with the data. The red area used to be grey. You aren't supposed to ride outside the pilot either.
As for credit info it is indeed confusing. You need to add money to your "wallet" to use them. Kinda weird to use stored value here I thought .
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Ah, it was actually super easy! It use some ApplePay so all I had to do was press my thumb on them fingerprint scanner.
Wish there was a way to rent more than one though, like SoBi - my husband has a BlackBerry Classic, so he couldn’t try one (not that he wanted to).
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https://www.waterloo.ca/en/living/electr...-pilot.asp
https://www.waterloo.ca/en/contentresour...l_AODA.pdf
- Sounds like Lime will be responsible for the charging, and will pick up the scooters every day at 9pm, and return them for use by 7am the next morning.
- The pilot runs through November, then starts up again next spring and runs through 2019.
- The City of Waterloo only shared the cost of the signage installed (<$10k), and the rest of the costs are all borne by Lime.
- All the data earned from the pilot goes to the City
- 100 scooters this fall, and a max. of 150 next year.
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If I understand correctly, the scooters are to be used only on the one specific route, not other areas? How will LIME enforce this?
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