All day, the coverage of ICE’s murder of Alex Pretti was interspersed—incredibly, awfully, comically, tragically—with updates on the blizzard blanketing the eastern US. Images clouded, with tear gas, or snow. Two ice storms, both deadly, both smothering America. Less than three weeks ago, they killed Renée Good.

By now you will have read the news, seen the videos, chosen for yourself whether to accept the evidence of your eyes and ears. These are intolerable things. The cruelty is the point, and you are right to grieve and rage. But also, these are times for hope, and resilience, and resistance. The refusal of Minneapolis to comply with a thuggish federal invasion is at once heart-rending and awe-inspiring. The ICE Out general strike that drew tens of thousands in subzero temperatures; the mutual aid networks delivering food and supplies; the community patrols, armed with whistles and phones; the businesses that closed their doors; the women with walkers; the drummers; the journalists; the salt-buyers; the ones arrested as they prayed.

There is something for everyone to do. Yes, everyone. Yes, you. Yes, now.

I am paraphrasing a post from activist and organizer Brittany Packnett Cunningham, who shared ways to get involved, whether you are in Minnesota or halfway around the world in London. Here are ones I found most helpful:

1. Follow local voices. These are the journalists, activists, and others on the frontlines, with the most reliable viewpoints and information. Here is a list of local news outlets and independent media. Amplify those viewpoints, with preference to the most marginalised voices. If you can, subscribe or donate to support their work.

2. Correct propaganda. Call a lie a lie. Don’t repeat unsubstantiated government claims. Help people develop media literacy and understand why truth matters.

3. Build community networks now. Minneapolis is the blueprint for how to resist. Get to know your neighbors, establish mutual aid groups, set up Signal chats, think about those who will need help most when ICE inevitably comes to town.

4. Donate. Stand with Minnesota has a comprehensive directory of mutual aid funds, legal support orgs, emergency service providers, and other groups doing rapid response on the ground. There are so many groups doing the good work—take some time to browse through. So far I’ve donated to:

   • Minnesota Freedom Fund

   • Unidos MN Education Fund

   • Resources for frontline organizers

5. For the Americans: call your representatives. Tell your elected leaders not a penny more for ICE brutality. Chuck Schumer has already indicated Democrats are ready to shut the government down Friday over DHS funding. Now is the time to keep the pressure on. Look up your US senators’ names. Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. If no one answers, leave a voicemail, or look up the in-state number on the senator’s website. As for what to say: here’s one script. Here’s another. Here’s Kerry Washington doing it. Call twice a day, once for each senator. Your calls work. Your calls are working.

There is something for everyone to do. Grieve and rage, but also hope and resist. If not now, when? Do it today. Do it now.

Hello and welcome back to Oversharing! I’ve been busy lately doing the rounds at transportation tech conferences: Micromobility Europe two weeks ago in Amsterdam, and MOVE this week in London.

Yesterday I gave a keynote at MOVE, “De-congestion pricing: Why New York failed where London succeeded.” Like any subway rider past or present, I was stunned and outraged when New York governor Kathy Hochul “indefinitely paused” congestion pricing on June 5, less than 48 before the end of the state legislative session. Congestion pricing was decades in the making and would have been a signature climate and urbanism initiative in a country known for neither. So much time, so many dollars have been wasted. New York lawmakers were blindsided, then sent home for the summer with a gaping $15 billion hole in the budget and no viable plan for filling it.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve thought a lot about the contrast between New York, a city I lived in for six years, and London, the city I live in now. New York failed to get congestion pricing over the finish line, allegedly fearing political blowback from suburban voters in the upcoming elections. London, by contrast, last year expanded its clean-air Ultra Low Emission Zone to all London boroughs over opposition from some suburban constituents and a fervent Conservative push to make the policy an election-defining issue. Ahead of the London mayoral election this spring, the prevailing political wisdom was that the Ulez expansion might doom Sadiq Khan and hand the mayoralty to his Conservative opponent. Instead, Khan, the Ulez’s staunchest defender, won a historic third term by bigger margins than before.

There are many reasons why Democrats may not win the House in November: Immigration, the economy, the war on Gaza, general disillusionment with Biden and an ageing and seemingly inept party. Congestion pricing is not one of them. I’m not a political analyst, but I find it hard to imagine that amid war, economic uncertainty, continued pandemic recovery, curtailed abortion rights, and effective minority rule by a hard right Supreme Court, the thing that will make or break voters at the ballot box is a charge on driving into the central-most part of Manhattan. New York needed a leader like Sadiq Khan, brave enough to usher in a transformative public policy despite the risk of political backlash. Instead it got Kathy Hochul, a profile in cowardice. The city will be dealing with the fallout for years to come.

With that, here’s my talk at MOVE. If you prefer to hear me read it, you can listen to the audio voiceover of this post.

Working on ambitious, transformative policies like congestion pricing is my jam. If you’re interested in having me speak at your company or event; need help with a policy position paper or research project; or generally are looking for high-quality writing, editing, and consulting on transport, tech, and sustainable urbanism, get in touch via my website or by replying to this newsletter.

-Ali

Hi, I’m Ali Griswold. I’m a journalist and urban policy expert. I’ve lived in London since 2019 and before that was in New York City for six years. When people ask me what the biggest difference between the two is, I always tell them: it’s the public transport.

London and New York both have world class transport systems, but within world class there is a world of difference. In London, I rarely wait more than 5 minutes for a train. When I lived in Brooklyn, my subway line routinely ran at 14-minute intervals during peak commuting hours—shoutout to the R train—or would sit in a tunnel for ages. I remember being on the Tube shortly after moving to London and hearing a British man tell his friend in horror how he been stuck underground for a whole 15 minutes. In New York, we call that a Wednesday. 

Upgrading the subway is a multibillion, multi-decade project so overwhelming and politically fraught that for a long time it was just ignored. But in 2019 the political powers decided something had to be done and passed, for the first time in US history, a congestion pricing plan.

If you’re here, you probably know what congestion pricing is, but for the uninitiated: It’s a policy of charging road users more to enter the busiest parts of a city, usually during peak hours, in order to reduce traffic and improve air quality. You might notice I’ve titled this talk “de-congestion pricing.” That’s because a big challenge of these policies is communicating to the public how it will help them. The price is on congestion, yes, but the goal is de-congestion.

London has several forms of road pricing. There is the congestion charge, a £15 daily fee to enter the city center during peak hours that dates to 2003; and the Ultra Low Emission Zone or Ulez, a zone now covering all London boroughs that charges £12.50 to drivers whose vehicles don’t meet emissions standards. In its first year, the congestion charge reduced traffic by 30%. Since launching in 2019, the Ulez has cut harmful nitrogen oxide emissions by 46% in central London and 21% in inner London. The city now expects to reach legal pollution limits by 2025 that were previously projected to take 200 years.

Cities that have congestion pricing know the process follows an arc: at first, people are upset. It’s a universal truth that people don’t like being asked to pay for something they once got for free—one reason why charging the real price of on-street parking is so difficult. Then the policy takes effect and residents start to see the benefits—cleaner air, safer, quieter streets—and also to realize that, for the most part, the fees don’t affect them.

The tough part is before, when people haven’t yet seen the benefits, and are afraid of change. You have to grit your teeth and stay the course through that initial resistance, knowing that in time the policy will bear itself out.

New York has been working since 2019 to design congestion pricing under state law, and trying to get a policy in place much longer. More than 700,000 vehicles enter central Manhattan every day, and congestion costs the city an estimated $20 billion a year in lost time and productivity. The plan was to charge drivers $15 a day to enter the Central Business District, raising $1 billion a year in desperately needed funding for the MTA, the city’s transport authority, and backstopping up to $15 billion in bonds for capital projects like accessibility improvements at stations and modernizing train signals. 

Everything was ready. $500 million of fancy enforcement cameras were in place. And then on June 5—two weeks ago today—the governor announced congestion pricing would be “indefinitely paused.”

This was a stunning failure. If congestion pricing is a marathon, New York ran 26 miles, then dropped out in the final stretch and blew a $15 billion hole in the city’s budget. Governor Kathy Hochul was roundly pilloried in the press for her decision, and her claims that congestion pricing would hurt New York’s economic recovery, including by the city’s business community. She claimed to have axed the policy after speaking with owners of her favorite midtown diners about their New Jersey customers, and said at a news conference that congestion pricing would cause the cost of a slice of pizza to rise, to which I can only say: even Pizza Rat takes the subway.

Autopsies are still being done, but the consensus at this point is that congestion pricing was a victim of politics. Hochul and perhaps her colleagues in the US House were anxious about losing suburban voters who disliked the policy and would be most affected by it.

This brings me to the first thing that went wrong in New York: the structure of the transport system. Many people don’t realize that the MTA is controlled not by the city but the state. In other words, the people in charge of the city’s transit system are neither its primary users nor accountable to its voters. Hochul and most state legislators are drivers. A 2017 public information request by the New York Daily News found that most MTA officials barely used the subway. The MTA is also jointly funded by the city and state, and the state often has other priorities. In 2016, former governor Andrew Cuomo used $4.9 million of MTA funds to—this is all true—bail out upstate ski resorts that were suffering from the effects of global warming.

The second thing that went wrong in New York was that the plan had no champion. Even before Hochul flipped, the support was at best tepid from the same people who are now outraged over the policy’s suspension. Congestion pricing needed a Robert Moses or a Jane Jacobs—let’s be honest, Moses would hate it—and instead it got only bureaucracy.

The final way New York failed was in its communication with the public. Perhaps because it lacked a champion, the public instead heard about the plan mostly from critics or in tedious public hearings that routinely ran for hours and got bogged down in dry and confusing details about state highway codes. If people were scared or anxious about the policy, the MTA was at least partly to blame.

Public communication, by contrast, is exactly where London has excelled. Transport for London, led by the mayor, has run a remarkably consistent public messaging campaign around both the congestion charge and the Ulez, taking every opportunity to remind people that these policies result in cleaner air, safer streets, and better public transport. These are great, compelling messages to an urban public, but the MTA never seems to have understood that. In London, on the other hand, the Ulez enjoys broad public support.

The second advantage London has on New York is in the structure of its transit system. Unlike the MTA, which is torn between city and state, TfL is controlled by the mayor. That means London transport strategy is set by someone who is directly accountable to the voters who use that system. The mayor sets fares on public transport and is also in charge of road policies like the Ulez. The political system ensures that it is in the best interest of the mayor to act in the best interest of public transport, because voters are taking notice. It’s no coincidence that Sadiq Khan has been the biggest champion of the Ulez throughout his mayoralty.

Finally, when it comes to the politics of road pricing, London did it better. This might be surprising coming from the nation that produced The Thick of It, but New York politics is also a shambles. What most people seem to agree on is that New York scuppered congestion pricing after the start date ran up too close against several impending elections. That was never supposed to happen, but red tape and delays ensured that the policy took years to get to the finish line from its initial passage in 2019. London did the opposite. Last year, the mayor extended the boundaries of the Ulez to include all boroughs, a decision that was understandably unpopular in the outermost parts of the city where public transit is less comprehensive and residents are more reliant on cars. The city took various measures to mitigate these effects, like a scrappage scheme for people willing to give up their polluting vehicles. We can argue over whether those measures went far enough, but another thing they did was to have the Ulez expansion happen as far out from the mayoral election as possible.

In July 2023, conservatives narrowly won a by-election in Uxbridge, a suburban west London town whose seat was previously held by Boris Johnson. Conservative Steve Tuckwell ran a single issue campaign opposing Sadiq Khan and Ulez expansion. Tories subsequently seized on automotive rights as a rallying cry, with Rishi Sunak saying he was “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists.” In the lead up to the London mayoral election in May, political analysts and the media suggested that Khan might lose, in no small part because of backlash against his clean cities campaign. That didn’t happen. Khan won a third term as mayor, by bigger margins than before. At the end of the day, it turned out that anti-Ulez sentiment was either less broad or less potent than the conservatives had hoped.

New York should learn from London, but instead they’ve preempted themselves: Turning away from an ambitious, generational policy for fear of what might happen in an upcoming election. They failed to convey the benefits of congestion pricing and in doing so failed themselves. They never found a champion for the policy, and still haven’t. Congestion pricing needs a people’s president, who understands the needs of the average New Yorker. If I could suggest a candidate: I think Pizza Rat is up to the job.

I told one of those stories at an event hosted by The Moth in London last year. If you aren’t familiar with The Moth, it’s a fantastic nonprofit storytelling organization. You can find out more at themoth.org and subscribe to hear weekly stories from their radio hour and archive wherever you get your podcasts. This story was told and recorded at The Moth storyslam in London in October 2023. The theme for the night was “adulting.”

As they say on the podcast, “All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers.” I promise you, all of this actually happened.

-Ali

Last year I said that, after a decade in journalism, I was switching my focus to policy work on the same issues that form the core of this newsletter: safer streets, smarter cities, more just labor and technology practices. I want to solve problems rather than write about them.

Over the past few months I’ve been taking steps to make that happen. I made a website (finally redeeming one of those podcast Squarespace promo codes—thanks Criminal). Please check it out here. The photo is by my talented and brilliant friend Emilie, who, in addition to receiving honorable mention in this year’s hyper-competitive Oscars’ pool, nailed the brief of “a photo of me on my bike looking chic and urban-designy.”

Let’s work together

I’m now available to consult on a project basis for research, reports, speaking, and policy solutions. If you need something researched, written, investigated, or approached from a fresh perspective in the worlds of digital technology, sustainable urbanism, transportation, and of course the gig economy, please reach out through this newsletter or the contact form on my website.

I’ve also thought more about what to do with Oversharing, and decided the best way forward is to remove the paywall from all posts, past and future, while keeping a paid option available for people who want to support my work.

I’m a paying subscriber, what does this mean for me?

If you’d like a pro-rated refund, please get in touch. If you choose to continue your subscription for now, thank you so much for your support, it means the world to me.

I’m a free reader, what is changing?

All posts going forward will be free to everyone. I am also in the process of removing the paywall from the archives, but this will take time as it requires manually updating each post published behind the paywall.

If everything is free, why would I pay?

It’s become clear to me over the past year that Oversharing is not aligned with a paywall. This space is better when it starts with the organic joy of having something to say rather than the mandate to create content for a paying audience. My goal in taking down the paywall is to reclaim that joy, and I would invite you to view a subscription as the same. Instead of paying for access, you’re contributing to the joy of getting Oversharing in your inbox and the joy I put into writing it.

What does it cost?

I’ve set the prices for paid subscriptions at the minimum Substack allows: $5 a month or $30 a year. Think of it as buying me a coffee once a month, or a decent-ish bottle of wine once a year. Or think of it as a small way of saying, Ali, I really love Oversharing, I hope you keep writing it, and I want to be part of making that happen.

Can I support Oversharing without subscribing?

Absolutely! While a subscription is the highest form of praise, you can also support the newsletter by sharing it with a friend, leaving a comment, sending in thoughts and tips, and hitting the heart-shaped ‘like’ button on posts.

More soon,

Ali

Hi, it’s Ali. For those of you who don’t know me, I created and write this newsletter, Oversharing. Thanks so much for being here.

It’s been 18 months since I relaunched Oversharing as a subscriber-supported newsletter. I did this after years of writing it for free in my spare time: late nights and bleary-eyed mornings where I compiled Oversharing from the scraps of my day job as a journalist covering the gig economy. When Substack offered me a “Pro” deal in early 2022, I had just completed a master’s degree in sustainable cities at King’s College London and was looking for the next thing. Pro let me experiment with writing Oversharing full time without taking on the typical financial risk of a leap to freelance. It was a fantastic opportunity and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Writing Oversharing is one of the joys of my career. It’s so cool and affirming to have your work find a following—to have people love not only what you say, but how you say it. I’m incredibly grateful for this community, which time and again has proved thoughtful, engaging, incisive, and kind. I’m hoping to lean on your generosity again as I take another leap now.

After 10 years in journalism, I’m ready for a new challenge. I’m looking to transition from journalism to policy or strategy work in any of the core Oversharing areas: transportation, sustainable urbanism, digital markets, tech policy and regulation. Why? I’ve spent more than a decade reporting on some of the most influential companies of our era and their tremendous sociotechnical impact, from reshaping how we move people and things, to accelerating our green transition, to exposing the holes in our labor and antitrust laws. I’ve seen how companies work at every level, from investors and executives to regular workers, and their potential for good and for harm. I’ve met policymakers and regulators and understand the careful choreography of rules that create space for innovation while safeguarding the public. I’ve had more delightfully nerdy conversations with academics, economists, technologists, urbanists, and other smart, curious people than I could possibly count.

I’m looking for opportunities to put these skills and expertise to practical use: to solve problems instead of writing about them; to have a more direct hand in advancing causes like green transport, healthy cities, fair labor practices, and savvy digital regulation. This is where I’m asking you, the Oversharing community, for help. If you’re interested in working together or know of a company or organization that could benefit from my experience and insight, please reach out. Message me on LinkedIn, DM on X née Twitter, or reply directly to this email. I’m looking for work based in London, UK, with a hybrid or in-person culture. Yep, that’s right. After several years of independent remote work, I couldn’t be more ready to go back to the office.

I thought a lot before writing this email. Journalists are trained to keep a wall between themselves and their audience, and even now, years out of a traditional newsroom, breaching that feels uncomfortable. I also don’t like asking for help. It goes against those classic values of hard work, independence, and self-reliance that I was raised on. But if I’ve learned anything in the past decade—from working in journalism, to moving to the UK, to surviving a global pandemic and building a new life abroad—it’s that self-reliance is overrated. It’s good to trust your community and to ask for help when you need it. It might make you uncomfortable at first, but learning to tolerate discomfort rather than push it away frees you to do big, daring, exuberant things.

What does this mean for Oversharing? For now, nothing. I’m still writing it. I hope you’ll keep reading. I may revert to the original formatting—an essay and blurbs once a week or so—rather than more frequent single-subject dispatches. The past 18 months have been a great experiment, but I’m ultimately not sure Oversharing is meant for a full-time publishing schedule. This space is better when it starts with the joy of having something to say. That joy is harder to come by when coupled with the demands of rote content creation.

Finding and reclaiming joy is a lifelong journey, but you can do it one bit at a time. Today that bit is Oversharing. I hope this newsletter brings you joy and that you’ll stay on the journey with me, wherever it goes next.

–Ali

In 2018, as most micromobility companies flocked to e-scooters, Revel went for mopeds. From a warehouse in Red Hook and a small office in Gowanus, Brooklyn, Revel began operating a fleet of 68 bright blue mopeds. It gradually expanded to DC, Austin, Miami, and San Francisco, growing that fleet to around 6,000 vehicles.

“To me, it just always made more sense,” Revel co-founder and CEO Frank Reig told me in 2019, when we met up for an interview at the Web Summit technology conference in Libson. “When you’re dealing with stuff in the public right of way, when you’re dealing with cities, when you’re dealing with regulators, it’s better to not be a disruptor. A moped isn’t a disruptor. They’ve been around a hundred years, there’s nothing new. They stay the hell off sidewalks. They ride and park in the street. They need to have a license plate. There’s a regulatory scheme around them already.”

Five years later, Revel is pulling the plug. The company announced last week that it would end moped service in San Francisco and New York City, its two active markets, on November 18. It will focus instead on other EV offerings—a small EV ride-hail service in New York, and building charging hubs in New York and the Bay Area. Decommissioned mopeds will go to local recycling facilities, and Revel is laying off 60-odd employees. Per TechCrunch, Reig blamed the mopeds shutdown on weak demand, telling staff in a memo, “the service has been strained and ridership isn’t what it used to be.” A company spokesperson told TechCrunch ridership slid 30% this summer from the previous year in both New York and SF.

Revel’s moped exit is the latest entry in a turbulent year for micromobility. Companies that made their names on rapid expansion and profligate spending are under pressure to show they can operate sustainably as capital has become harder to come by in a high-interest rate environment. According to VC database PitchBook, micromobility startups have raised just $772 million across 70 deals so far this year, compared to $2.1 billion over 144 deals in 2022, and a whopping $7.2 billion over 130 deals at their peak in 2018.

The most prominent example of this mode shift is Bird, which went from the fastest startup to a $1 billion valuation (2018), to an ill-fated SPAC (2021), to harassing customers for unpaid pennies (2022), to a takeover and delisting from the New York Stock Exchange (2023). Since it was acquired by its Canadian counterpart in January, Bird has overhauled everything from leadership to on-the-ground ops. (For more on that, see my recent interview 🔒 with Bird CEO Michael Washinushi.) Meanwhile, European scooter operator Tier Mobility has reportedly been up for sale since the spring and sold off U.S. subsidiary Spin to Bird in September. Ride-hail firm Lyft set alarms ringing over the summer when the Wall Street Journal reported it might sell its bike-share division, which includes many of the largest U.S. systems.

Unlike many of its e-scooter rivals, Revel didn’t rocket to unicorn status. Since launching in 2018, the company has raised $220 million in financing, most recently $50 million in debt from BlackRock in November 2022 to build EV charging hubs. It was last valued at $326 million after a Series B funding round in February 2022.

Despite efforts to create a safe riding environment, Revel struggled with safety concerns. It temporarily suspended service in New York City in July 2020 after two traffic fatalities. Revel relaunched that August with stricter rules, including immediate suspension for driving the wrong way on a one-way street and real-time photographic evidence of wearing a helmet. Revel already capped speeds at 30mph (48kmh), the maximum vehicle speed before a driver is required to have a motorcycle license in New York State. It also offered free driving lessons from trained instructors, many of which Reig taught himself in the early days. A June 2020 report the company commissioned suggested Revel do even more to prepare riders, as 17% of incidents occurred with first-timers, and 30% with customers who had taken five or fewer rides.

By 2021, Revel was dabbling in other things. It experimented with leasing e-bikes and opened an EV charging hub in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, there were signs the moped business was flagging. Revel left Austin, Texas, in late 2020, blaming covid and the city’s entrenched car culture. In 2022, it paused service in the Bronx over theft concerns, then exited D.C. and Miami. That same year, Lime wound down an electric moped service it had trialed in New York for a year. Revel’s vehicles were also getting old. In a May 2022 interview, Reig told TechCrunch the company was “starting to think about the next moped technology we want to use—how do we want to think about reinvesting in our markets, in our fleets?” Quite possibly the cost of refurbishing that fleet, combined with weak ridership, prompted the decision to shutter the service now.

While it’s easy to roll your eyes at a micromobility service ditching its moped business for more cars, and while I’m usually first to the eyerolling, this seems like it might be a smart move. First, Reig has been focused for a while on the bigger picture of electrifying urban infrastructure. “There’s no infrastructure because there’s no EVs, and there’s no EVs because there’s no infrastructure,” he said in a 2022 interview. His preference to “not be a disruptor” when dealing with cities is also paying dividends. Last year, Revel won a $7 million grant from New York State to lead development of a site in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for EV charging and community training in clean-tech jobs. Revel is also busy building other EV “superhubs” throughout New York City, and even garnered praise for from deputy mayor for operations Meera Joshi. (For those not familiar with NYC politics, Joshi ran the Taxi and Limousine Commission during the Uber heyday and knows a thing or two about dealing with startups.)

Second, as I often say in Oversharing, micromobility is a tough business. The ops are hard, the logistics are hard, and the economics are really hard, especially without VC subsidies to prop them up. It’s not a coincidence that all modes of micromobility, but in particular e-bikes and e-scooters, have gotten significantly more expensive as their operators have been forced to make the numbers add up. A recent report from Nacto, an association of U.S. city transportation officials, calculated the typical cost of a 30-minute e-scooter ride these days at $11.70, far more than a comparable ride on public transit. The prices private companies need to charge to make a profit on these services may ultimately not be compatible with the rates that make e-bikes and e-scooters a practical urban transport alternative.

Third and finally, mopeds, moreso than bikes and e-scooters, aren’t for everyone. That’s something Reig has always known, and even viewed as an advantage for attracting the right type of rider. “With a vehicle like a moped, there’s a certain barrier to entry just because of the vehicle type that it is,” he told me in 2019. “We’re just ok with that. If people look at our vehicles and people say ‘I would never use that,’ that’s ok. It’s almost a good thing.” Almost, until there aren’t enough riders to keep it going.

Last December, in one of the strangest transactions to happen in micromobility, Bird Global was bought out by Bird Canada. Bird Global, the original e-scooter operator founded in 2017 in Santa Monica, California, by Travis VanderZanden, was in rough shape after a year of layoffs, management shakeups, market exits, and stunning operational errors like systematically overstating revenues and chasing down customers for unpaid sums in the pennies. Bird Canada, a separate operator that brought e-scooters to Canada by licensing Bird’s name and technology and claimed to have cracked the code on running an e-scooter service, took control of its struggling namesake in a $64 million deal.

Over the past 10 months, the Bird Canada team has led a near-total overhaul of Bird: new leadership, new markets, new operating strategy. This summer saw the final departure of VanderZanden, who stepped down as board chairman after previously being stripped of his roles as president and CEO. In August, Michael Washinushi was appointed interim CEO, taking over from longtime Bird exec Shane Torchiana. Washinushi is now tasked with leading a company that has yet to turn a profit and was recently delisted from the NYSE over its anaemic market cap.

Washinushi is an unusual choice in an industry where most CEOs come from backgrounds in the gig economy or micromobility. Wayne Ting, the CEO of Bird’s chief domestic rival, Lime, spent 4.5 years at Uber, including a stint as chief of staff to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. VanderZanden founded Bird after working in executive roles at both Lyft and Uber. You can think of micromobility as the second wave of the gig economy (along with stuff like instant delivery), and its top roles are overwhelmingly populated by people who came from the first wave (ride-hailing, home-sharing, food and grocery delivery).

After several tough years at Bird and across micromobility more broadly, an outsider might be just what Bird needs. In its latest quarter, ended June 30, Bird booked a net loss of $9.3 million on $48.3 million in revenue. That wasn’t great, but it was a huge improvement from a year ago, when Bird lost $320 million on $66.8 million in revenue. (Growth will always be king in tech stocks and critics focused on the 28% slide in revenue, but I’d take the 97% reduction in net loss any day.) In September, Bird acquired US competitor Spin from European scooter operator Tier Mobility (also having problems and reportedly up for sale since the spring) for $19 million. Bird has said it intends to appeal the NYSE delisting, as it “does not believe the current market cap is reflective of the intrinsic value of the business.”

Earlier this month, Washinushi and I sat down on Zoom in one of his first interviews as Bird CEO to chat about his unlikely path to the e-scooter industry, Bird’s recent acquisition of Spin and NYSE delisting, and whether in retrospect any company should have used a SPAC to go public. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Oversharing: You were CFO of SiriusXM Canada for nearly 11 years, and then CFO of FreshBooks, an accounting software company. Jumping to a struggling e-scooter startup seems like a surprising move. How did you end up there?

Washinushi: It might sound surprising, but I think for me it's about understanding the category as well as the business model and the management team. And so I understood the category, the business model, and then the management team, predominantly—John Bitove, Stewart Lyons, JJ Bitove—the first two I've worked with for almost 20 years. Working with John and Stuart [at SiriusXM] I think was a very successful management combination. SiriusXM at one point was a struggling business or struggling category. And we worked through this to make it very successful over the course of that 11 years. So, it may seem like a big jump, but having worked with John and Stuart, and understanding the category that they worked in, it didn't feel like a big jump for me. And then combined with seven years of experience with what I'll call a SAAS [software-as-a-service] technology firm, which I think really helped me understand technology as a space in terms of working through new and emerging technologies, I think is very helpful in terms of what I can bring to Bird.

What is Bird’s category, as you understand it?

It's a mode of transportation for the last one or two miles, specifically for urban centres. Riders can either walk or take public transportation or Uber. Micromobility provides that sort of cost-efficient way of getting from Point A to Point B within one or two miles. That's one of the primary uses. Secondary use in this category are people who are visiting the cities and would prefer to view the city on a vehicle versus walking. I see this category growing because as we experience within urban centres the reduced parking, the higher congestion, the emergence of more pedestrian and bike lanes—these are all tailwinds towards promoting this particular category. I.e., it's faster to use our product. It's more convenient to use our product. And it's safer, given what the city infrastructure is.

If you had to choose a top-level category, would you say it's transportation or technology?

Transportation.

Coming in as first CFO and now CEO, what do you see as the most urgent problems for Bird to tackle? I know in the earnings there's been a lot of talk about regulatory relationships and more efficient deployment.

The priority is having the right level of operating expenses to support this category so that this business can be not only profitable on a self-sustaining basis from an ebitda point of view, but also profitable from a free-cash-flow point of view. Because this business is operational in nature. That's why I go transportation. There is a lot of effort on us to make sure that the vehicles are in the best condition, make sure the vehicles are placed in the right place to optimise the ride. There is definitely an element of the right price. Where technology becomes involved is making sure it's the right experience from the app to activate the vehicle. And so there's a lot of costs and making sure that we're investing at the right levels to optimise the rides and obviously still make a profit. I think that's the challenge. Giving the consumer the right experience, generating gross profit, having the right operating expenses to generate edbita and cash flow so that we can invest in scooters and vehicles for the future.

What from your perspective makes Bird different from the many other scooter operators out there?

I think what differentiates Bird first is brand. So there's a lot of brand recognition on Bird, and part of that is because Bird was the one that first launched to create this category in 2017. So that's a differentiator. There's a high level of brand recognition. Second differentiator, I believe, I might be biased, is the vehicle we have. It's a more comfortable vehicle for longer rides. It's got a longer base. It's smoother, it's air-filled tires. It's a more comfortable ride. Third is our technology and our app. We've got a good app for individuals who are riders to find and activate a vehicle for a ride.

Do you think, for instance, Lime wouldn't say the same thing about their own service?

Yes, I think Lime would say the same thing.

So then what is the proof in that case? If every operator thinks they have the most recognition, the most comfortable ride, and the best tech?

I think Lime can say that they have the high brand recognition. I'm not so sure outside of Lime any other provider can say, especially in North America, that they have the high brand recognition. It's hard. For us, when I look at our market share now, and specifically North America, with the combination of Spin, we probably have the highest share.

So on the Spin deal. The price on that was $19 million, a fraction of the $100 million Ford paid for it in 2018. What do you think made Spin so cheap? And then how much of that deal was about buying permits to operate in markets that Bird has lost, including, for instance, Baltimore, which was a loss under new management as recently as August, not under the prior management team?

[Laughs] So, great question. I think obviously market dynamics have changed. The value of vehicles or scooter businesses are very different in 2018. I can't compare the two. But I think for us, in terms of the reasons why we bought Spin, I'll call it three reasons. First was the markets that we've lost and the markets that we don't have exposure to. Some of which are university campuses. Spin has a high exposure to the university campus, which is very helpful. Second reason doing the acquisition is the new vehicles that Spin has. Tier had recently not only acquired Spin, but they made a significant investment in the new Ninebot C1s and had just deployed those vehicles into the marketplace. So relatively very, very new vehicles as part of this purchase price was actually another key reason. And then I think the third reason why we bought this was Spin is in-house operations, and I think we see there is opportunity to expand in-house operations of the North American platform. We'll be very selective and only apply it to where it makes sense, but Spin gives us that step up.

Is Bird in-house in any of its markets at the moment?

Bird Canada was predominantly in-house. There were a few markets in Bird North America that were in-house, as well as in the European operations we have a few markets.

And did you see signs that the in-house markets performed better, not just in Canada but in the US and Europe?

I think I saw a sign that we have better control on all aspects of the rider experience and rider revenue. That gives us the ability to influence that. Whereas with an FM [fleet manager] model, there is less control. Higher, potentially, gross margins, but less control.

Could you give an example of how the two different models would then trickle down to the rider experience?

In an in-house model, we have greater control in terms of where vehicles get deployed. We will obviously leverage data to determine what optimises a ride or the ability for a vehicle to get a ride, and we can direct, because they're our employees, where to place the vehicles at what period of time. In an FM model, we can recommend and try to influence the FM fleet managers to deploy the vehicles at that particular place or time, but we don't necessarily have that control. So that rider experience of having that right vehicle at the right place at the right time has far more control in an in-house fleet than an FM.

Right, there's limits on how much control you can exercise because of employment law.

I would almost say that the conversation is carrot and stick, depending on what you want to use. If you've tried to use incentives for them to deploy it, you may use a stick approach to ensure that the vehicles are safe and being taken care of.

As you've already mentioned, Bird was acquired last year by Bird Canada, and that's part of how you got here. You said when we were first talking that Bird Canada has done quite well. Could you elaborate on that? Because I think for many people, cold snowy Canadian cities don't sound like a natural fit for e-scooter success.

You're correct. Bird Canada was a seasonally operated business through the summer and late spring, early fall. So potentially open eight to nine months out of the year. I can't go into specific details since Bird Canada was a private company, but Bird Canada launched in 2019 with very limited capital. And Bird Canada was very judicious about the capital that was used to grow into the markets. So Bird Canada launched in markets like Calgary with a capital constraint of number of vehicles that they could purchase, and worked with the city to create a regulatory environment where it capped the amount of vehicles that was suited to how much capital they had to invest in that particular market.

So by that you mean, for instance, Bird went to Calgary and said 'we have the funding to launch a scooter service with 500 vehicles. We would like you to set a rule that any scooter operators in Calgary can only have up to 500 vehicles'?

Probably not as forthright as that. I think we probably didn't disclose how much capital we had, but just said 'I think the ideal size of a vehicle count in Calgary is probably 2000.'

But the sentiment was you proactively proposed rules that fit what you thought you could invest in the market, with the idea that then other competitors couldn't just come in and have, say, 3x the number of devices?

With the intention of the city should only have x amount of [devices] in the marketplace.

Okay. Sure.

One of the things I'd say is a big differentiator in terms of the future right now versus before is being mindful about how many vehicles a city should support. I think there is a viewpoint more is better. When capital is plentiful, I can see that viewpoint. When capital is scarce and vehicles are expensive and you have a repair cycle, finding that optimal level of vehicles and obviously unit economics in a given market to make sure that not only are you profitable on a unit economic from an adjusted ebitda point of view, making sure that you're profitable in terms of you can afford to purchase more vehicles in the lifecycle.

One thing I often come back to when writing about Bird and the e-scooter market generally is how the original M.O. of Bird was this Uber-style, launch first, ask permission later. It's how they started in Santa Monica, with that infamous LinkedIn message to the mayor, and I believe part of why we had the referendum over here in Europe where scooters got kicked out of Paris. Because Paris was sort of patient zero for European cities getting littered with scooters with zero consideration for what the right size of the fleet was. So I do wonder, when you're talking about Bird and its brand recognition, how much of a challenge you see changing that reputation specifically with the cities and the regulators, less so the consumers.

You're right. We have strong rider brand recognition. With respect to the cities, there are cities where Bird has bad taste within the city, because of that mentality of launch first, answer questions later. I think the way we're dealing with that is new management. Using Bird Canada as an example of what great regulatory relationships can lead to, and then ultimately proving it. Actions speak louder than words, you know. We have to have a few more quarters or years of runway to prove to the cities that it is a very different management team. It's not a launch and ask questions or answer questions later.

I'll go back to Bird Canada. Building that relationship with the city, being mindful about the framework in terms of how many vehicles we can have and how much a city can properly support. Being responsive to the city's requirements and being responsive to 311 within the city creates a great relationship within Canada, to the point where there's a great reputation in Canada of Bird Canada. I'll use the example of Hamilton [Ontario] where Bird Canada was awarded exclusivity to the City of Hamilton. Which is not a big city. It's a city of half a million. So Bird Canada has a great relationship with many of the cities within Canada because of just being responsive to the cities. And actually also creating that framework where you don't want a city littered with too many vehicles and it just looks visually awful. So we're very mindful of that. I think that's a big differentiator in terms of how Bird Global had operated in the past.

When you're looking at a city or you're looking at a market, how do you assess the right balance between sufficient density of the service, such that it's convenient and available and accessible for people to use, but not too dense so that it's offputting? What is that magic number?

You could use the guideline of number of vehicles per capita as a starting point, but I think it has to flex down or up depending on the specific cities. I think it's better to start low, on a per capita basis, and then as the city evolves ask for permission to expand, instead of starting high or having a large number of competitors within a marketplace and having the city have to scale back.

You look at Paris. Paris is a patient zero where there were too many competitors, too many vehicles. And, it's been a while since I've been to Paris, but Paris is a very congested city. So there's not exactly a lot of available public space for vehicles to properly reside in. So that is a clear combination of too many vehicles in a congested city creating not the greatest experience for riders. Whereas if you go to a city like Washington DC, it's a very strong vehicle marketplace. It's such an expansive city—wide sidewalks, wide spaces. It doesn't have the feel that there's too many scooters or vehicles in that space. Yet it's probably one of the top markets in the world for e-scooters.

Bird was recently delisted from the NYSE and is now trading over-the-counter (OTC). What is the vision for what happens with Bird's status as a company?

We're still a public company. Our listing has been suspended off of the NYSE. We will be appealing the decision with the NYSE. But for us as an operating company, we're still going to be reporting publicly our results. Our shares do trade on the OTC so there is liquidity with respect to our shares. And so for us, it's business as usual. Just the difference is we're currently suspended on the NYSE.

Would you consider taking it private or do you see benefits to staying a publicly traded company?

Given where the market cap is right now, or the value of the company, especially in relation to the revenue, I think looking at that potential option of private is something we would have to look at. The challenge is just the availability of capital to be able to invest into a company to take private.

But surely, the OTC trading isn't providing all that much capital, is it?

It's not providing any new capital for us. It just provides liquidity for existing shareholders. To take private you would have to find someone who's willing to fund the capital to buy out existing public shareholders.

In retrospect, as a longtime CFO, do you think anyone should have gone public via SPAC?

No. I mean, this is a great conversation. It's a viewpoint of just a handful of SPACs that I've seen. It's an immediate way for private companies to go public. But if the private company is not ready to go public, then it's a really—it's a really bad idea. And I think too many companies that were private were not ready to go public.

And again, just from from an outside perspective, why would a company that's not ready to go public make that jump via SPAC?

Easy access to quick capital. I mean, the companies I've worked for in the past, and companies that are parallel in the past in terms of technology companies—the preparation for going public is a six- to 18 month-journey. You have to take that journey to be ready to go public. I see the de-SPAC as 'we have an opportunity to go public in the next few months. This is additional capital on the balance sheet. Let's take advantage of it.'

Is there anything I haven't asked you about Bird or Bird Canada you want to add?

You made a comment with respect to Baltimore. In terms of under existing management. I would provide a viewpoint that some of the challenges with some cities exist well—months or quarters—in advance of actually losing the license.

Let me ask you this, what do you think of the space?

I think I'm a bit jaded. I love the transition away from cars and all of that, but I don't understand why people would take shared scooters at the price you need to charge to make the business work instead of buying their own bike or scooter. Especially if they're a person who lives in the city—not a tourist case, like you were talking about—but that primary case of they've replaced it for their commute, they're using it multiple times a week. It seems like at the sticker price of a decent retail option, after a few months, it would be cheaper to have a personal device.

You know what, I would agree. It's not just Bird, I think it's all of our competitors. We have been focused on gross margin and contribution per rider, and if you're focused on that, that leads to price increases, and I think there's been a lot of price increases in this particular category. That is reaching that tipping point of, to your point, why wouldn't one buy their own scooter? Europe's a little different. In most markets I see, the rate per minute is about 30 cents. In North America, it can go as high as 40 cents to 50 cents per minute. And as a 5-10 minute ride, that adds up.

It's certainly more than hopping on the bus or your local metro system.

Yeah. And my concern is, there's a fixed dollar amount people are willing to pay for a vehicle. Riders will decide with their feet if they want to use our vehicles or not, and how long they want to ride for. So the challenge is—and every city is different, like every city has a different dynamic in terms of the number of vehicles, every city has a different dynamic in what the right pricing is for that city as well. Finding that right price dynamic is really where I want to spend time: to understand for every city what's the right price point where we maximize the amount of riders, but also having them ride longer on the vehicle. At the same time, knowing that dynamic, we have to make sure that the operating expenses are tuned to make a profit. That's the approach I would like to take, because ultimately it's the riders who are going to decide how often they want to use and how long they want to use our product. Honestly, I want to maximize that.

After a sluggish year in the polls, Tory British prime minister Rishi Sunak is championing a new cause: the automobile. Sunak says he is “slamming the brakes on the war on motorists” and “hare-brained” schemes that don’t “reflect the values of Britain.” The schemes at issue include a 20mph speed limit in Welsh villages and town centers; residential streets with reduced traffic flow, known in the UK as “low traffic neighborhoods” or LTNs; and the general urban design concept of 15-minute cities, in which neighborhoods are drawn up so that people live within an easy 15-minute walk or bike ride of most essential needs, like groceries and healthcare.

Sunak’s motor enthusiasm emerged this summer after the Tories hung onto a parliamentary seat they were widely expected to lose in outer London. Conservative Steve Tuckwell narrowly won in Uxbridge by running a single-issue campaign against the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone, or Ulez, which charges drivers £12.50 a day if their cars don’t meet emissions standards. The zone expanded on August 29 to all London boroughs, an additional 5 million people. The Ulez is a clear environmental success—credited with slashing nitrogen oxide emissions and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in London—but is unpopular with vehicle owners forced to pay the daily charge or purchase a new, emissions-compliant car.

Sunak isn’t the only one to swerve this way lately. The war on war on cars is an increasingly popular conservative platform. Politico reports Europe is facing a cycling backlash, with conservative politicians across the continent encouraging an automotive culture clash that they believe puts them on the side of working-class drivers. In Berlin, the newly elected conservative local government has paused all bike infrastructure projects that “endanger” existing car lanes and parking, as well as reversed plans to pedestrianize a major boulevard. (Stockholm, on the other hand, plans to ban petrol and diesel cars from 20 blocks of the city center from 2025.)

Meanwhile in the U.S., the United Auto Workers strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers has inflamed tensions around electric vehicles. Workers are seeking to secure their wages and working conditions in the new electric industry. President Biden, whose administration has bet big on EVs, made an unprecedented appearance on the picket line, while Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have derided the electric transition. At least seven GOP-controlled states have raised fees on EVs in a move critics say is designed to stunt sales. House Republicans over the summer pushed to limit the Pentagon’s use of electric vehicles and block Biden’s proposed emissions standards. Back in January, a group of Republicans in Wyoming even introduced a bill aiming to phase out the sale of EVs entirely.

People get emotional about their cars, making them potent culture war fodder. Car ownership in the U.S. is deeply embedded in the mythology of the American dream. Cars are the heroes of classic American films, a coming of age rite for teens, and an enduring symbol of freedom, independence, and social mobility. Even without the emotional ties, decades of urban and suburban sprawl development, combined with sustained underinvestment in public transport and rail infrastructure, mean life without a car for a huge number of people simply isn’t an option. There are a lot of places where if you want to get somewhere, you have to drive. Reducing automotive reliance might be a goal in some of these places, but it’s also clear that cars aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

The war on war on cars, like most culture wars, aims to flatten these complexities into a single and maximally inflammatory position. Those crazy liberal environmental fanatics! They are coming for your cars, every last one! They would rather you go nowhere than anywhere at all! They hate freedom! They hate choice! They will unleash armies of cyclists on the streets to ram you off the road! They will build ramparts of groceries and local shops and force you to walk there instead of driving 10 minutes to Costco!

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Different places require different policies and strategies. The Ulez makes sense in central London because of the city’s density, congestion, and robust public transport network. It would make much less sense in a rural or spawled area with limited to no public transportation and high reliance on private vehicles. Policies like congestion pricing, the Ulez, low-traffic neighborhoods, and cycling infrastructure aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions, they’re tools in a vast and growing kit for tackling emissions, congestion, and the other negative effects of an over-reliance on cars. These policies are hugely important to our future—to creating greener, resilient, and more liveable cities. They also aren’t a panacea. If we’re removing cars from certain places, we have to make sure the people who live and move around there have other options for getting where they need to go. We should take measures to ease what is bound to be a difficult transition, especially for the most vulnerable. We should understand that change is hard and takes time to adjust to, and approach it with patience and empathy. The war on war on cars doesn’t want to have these conversations, though. It just wants to get mad about it.

A quick update on some new financial news out of micromobility firm Lime, which today announced it was profitable in the first half of the year.

Here are the topline figures from Lime’s H1 release:

• >$250 million in gross bookings (+45% y/y)

• $27 million in adjusted ebitda

• positive GAAP ebitda (no figure disclosed)

This is the second time that Lime has released limited financial data. In February, Lime claimed it was the “first micromobility company to post a full profitable year,” citing 2022 adjusted ebitda of $15 million and $4 million in unadjusted ebitda. That means the company’s adjusted ebitda for the first half of 2023 alone is already up 80% on the entire 2022 year. That certainly seems promising, though it’s hard to analyse without knowing exactly what Lime includes in its adjusted math or how revenue and expenses break down across the different quarters, as micromobility is a highly seasonal business.

Easier to parse are the ridership and gross bookings numbers, which show unambiguous growth. In 2022, Lime said it completed “nearly 120 million trips” and did $466 million in gross bookings. In the first half of this year, by comparison, Lime says it’s racked up more than $250 million in gross bookings. It didn’t give a ridership total for the first half, but said the second quarter was its best ever with more than 40 million trips taken.

“Our year-over-year revenue growth and ability to operate profitably are strong signals for the long-term viability of Lime's business,” Lime CEO Wayne Ting said in a prepared statement. “This record first half is a strong endorsement of our investments in in-house hardware design, operational excellence and cultivating strong relationships with cities.”

Micromobility operators have lately been on a mission to prove they can run a profitable business. US competitor Bird in June reported huge improvement in its net loss, which shrank to $9.3 million in the second quarter from $320 million a year ago. Bird sold late last year to Bird Canada, a separate operator that licensed the Bird name in Canada. The new ownership has since overhauled Bird’s management, including parting ways with founder Travis VanderZanden and CEO Shane Torchiana. The new team has focused on winning and renewing permits with cities, something Bird struggled to do under VanderZanden, as well as deploying its scooters more efficiently and in locations where they’ll get the most use.

Lime has been laser-focused on achieving profitability under Ting, who was elevated to CEO in May 2020 and before Lime served as chief of staff at Uber under Dara Khosrowshahi. Uber has of course been on its own multiyear journey toward profitability, which it finally achieved in the second quarter with its first-ever operating profit of $326 million (everyone is some kind of profitable!). Uber reached that milestone in part by trimming its business interests to a few core items, like rides and food delivery. One of the things Uber unloaded was Jump Bikes, an e-bikes startup it purchased in 2018. In 2020, Uber led a $170 million investment in Lime and also handed off Jump as part of the deal. The signature red Jump bikes were rebranded and absorbed into the Lime platform.

Lime was founded in 2017, the same year as Bird. Both companies raised lots of money out of the gate from venture capitalists who saw the success of Uber and were eager to win the next big transportation race. Lime’s last big raise was $523 million in November 2021, bringing its total financing to $1.5 billion. Its last known valuation of $510 million came during that 2020 round led by Uber, which was a major markdown from the $2.4 billion valuation it commanded a year earlier. These are obviously old numbers so I wouldn’t put much stock in them other than to say that startup valuations are inherently volatile, especially when correlated with VC enthusiasm.

The company is presumably valued better these days. Lime’s relatively strong past 18 months are a testament to the tight ship Ting runs, especially as capital has become harder to come by, forcing many startups and tech firms to cut costs or make exit plans. As I’ve said many times, a decade of free-flowing investor subsidies helped a lot of startups survive for years without a viable business. These companies could afford to lose money on their operations because, at the end of the day, someone else was footing the bill. High inflation and the end of cheap capital was a make-or-break point, distinguishing those who could cut it from those who couldn’t. European scooter giant Tier Mobility, for instance, has reportedly been on the market since at least the spring amid mounting financial losses.

For Lime, as for Uber, those tough market conditions have been an advantage. “2022 was a hard year for many people, but it’s actually good for the strong players,” Ting told TechCrunch in February. “This is a year where if you can’t make your business work, you’ve got to start shrinking because there’s not free money on the other side.”

If you’ve been in London this summer, you’ve surely heard it: a loud, pervasive clacking as a Lime bike goes by.

That sound, also called the “click clack of anti-capitalism,” is the unofficial soundtrack of the London summer, where “borrowing” an electric Lime bike has become a popular teen activity. How exactly you do it is easily found on social media sites like TikTok. It involves breaking part of the locking mechanism by taking a running start with the rear wheel off the ground. The clicking that ensues is the sound of the lock trying and failing to engage as the rider pedals the ‘borrowed’ bike without electric power or an actual rental.

@c9crxsh#fyp #foryou #foryoupage #viral #blowthisup #uk #method #limebike #limebikemethod #hack #lifehack #lime #ridelime #bike #uber #fypシ

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Riding a Lime bike like this violates the company’s user agreement, which warn users not to “tamper with, vandalize or try to gain unauthorized access to our Services.” Unfortunately for Lime, that warning has done little to deter London’s free riders. I’ve personally never attempted it, but I’ve seen it done enough both in real life and online that I feel like I definitely could. In other words, this is simple stuff, not something you need coding skills or an engineering degree for. As a commenter put it on Reddit a few months ago: “My 11-yo daughter explained to me how it’s done.”

An equally important point is that kids and most teens aren’t actually allowed to use Lime. In both the US and UK, Lime’s user agreements require riders to be 18 or older. The UK terms state that adults can rent “non-electric bikes only” (emphasis Lime’s) to minors over 16, which would be great if there were any non-electric bikes on the platform. I confirmed with Lime that there are not. “Oh wow good find,” a spokesman texted me. “Will have to flag for our team.” In short, if you’re under 18, you have no officially permitted way to ride a Lime bike.

Lime is more than aware of the borrowing, but prefers not to talk about it. Unlike a software bug, this vulnerability is in the hardware and it can’t be patched overnight. Ellie Bird, a Lime spokeswoman, said by email recently that the company is in the process of modifying the bikes and expects to have updated its whole London fleet by the end of October. It’s unclear whether the changes are being applied to e-bikes in other markets. To date the bike-borrowing has been “pretty isolated” and not “a major problem outside of London,” Bird said.

@f.capo1Lime bike meth on lock💪🏾

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The bike-borrowers have set in motion not just unrented Lime bikes but also a fierce urbanism debate. On one side are those, like Lime, who’ve been quick to criminalize the behavior. “We are aware of a limited issue relating to the criminal damage and vandalism of our e-bikes,” a Lime spokesperson told TimeOut in July. “We are working with the police and local schools to identify, limit and warn against it. We are also in contact with social media platforms, which bear the responsibility of removing criminal content like this if shared by its users.”1 In a written report for local government earlier this summer, Lime said it had “contacted more than 20 local London schools to remind pupils that vandalism of Lime vehicles is a criminal offence.”

This is problematic language for many reasons, like that many of the borrowers are teens of color in underprivileged areas. It’s very true that bike crime is a major problem in London, but there is a world of difference between stealing someone’s bike or deliberately vandalizing a service and exploiting a hardware flaw for a free ride. The bike borrowers might not be the most responsible users—you often see them dump bikes in the middle of a sidewalk, for example—but at the end of the day the only thing they are ‘stealing’ is a window of time in which that bike might have been rented by a paying user (which, reminder, anyone under 18 can’t be anyway!). Lime says it doesn’t have data on the bike borrowers, but it’s obviously aware many of them are kids, based on its targeted outreach to London schools. By choosing words like “criminal” and “vandalism” to describe the behavior predominantly of kids and teens, many of whom are minorities and live in underprivileged areas, Lime is actively perpetuating harmful and racist stereotypes.

On the other side of the debate are those who see the borrowing as kids being kids, as well as an encouraging sign that London’s youth would happily cycle more if they had easy and affordable access to bikes. Yes, Lime has a unique vulnerability in its locking mechanism, but its bikes are also now extremely prevalent and popular in London. That makes them an attractive option for anyone looking to hop on and cycle somewhere. And the bike borrowers must really have places to go because let’s be honest—using a Lime bike without the electric boost is the opposite of a joy ride. These things are HEAVY. “Lime should get some sort of NHS grant for their contribution to teenage activity levels,” Guardian editor Peter Walker tweeted in July. “Manually pedalling a bike that heavy definitely falls into ‘strenuous’ exertion.” You have to imagine the thrill of riding a borrowed Lime bike on a hot summer day would quickly be outweighed by the sheer effort of pedalling it.

The bike-borrowing has been a minor blemish on an otherwise very good period for Lime. In July, Lime released a report it commissioned from urban consultancy Steer Group on its London performance from January 2019 to March 2023. The report, which combined service data from Lime with a survey of 964 London e-bike rider respondents between May 23 and June 6 of this year, found that Lime is thriving in London. It reported Lime bikes were used by 1.25 million riders in the city during the 2019-2023 period, with trip volumes increasing on average 10% each month. Over 250,000 of those riders said they hadn’t cycled before using a Lime bike (presumably in London, not ever). The most commonly reported reason for taking a Lime bike was commuting (38-37%, male-female), followed by social outing (24-25% m-f). Asked for details on the company’s performance since June, a Lime spokesperson would say only that it’s been a “great summer in London.”

You could argue that Lime’s bike-borrowing problem is a symptom of its own success. They are widely available and well-used. That makes them an easy target for opportunists, even if there weren’t a flaw in their security. What’s more, the bike-borrowers are actually using the system the way it’s designed, albeit it not in the official way. Bike-share advocates love to talk about how the big advantage of the system is that you can just hop on and hop off, without having to worry about stuff like maintenance and parking. That’s literally what we’re seeing in London—bike-share used the way it was intended, except by people who’ve figured out how to do so without paying for it.

The underlying question is of course what to do next. Lime, as we’ve already discussed, is in the process of rolling out a hardware fix that should soon make this particular trick a thing of the past. But what about the young people who are obviously interested in having access to a system they currently aren’t permitted to use? One option would be for Lime to lower the ridership age to something like 15 or 16, in consultation with local officials. Another would be for government to provide subsidies that young people could use on bike-rentals. The sticker price of a Lime isn’t cheap. In my area it’s £1 to start the ride, plus £0.27 per minute. A ride into central London would cost me around £9 or £10, according to a Citymapper estimate, which is more than double the equivalent Tube fare. Even if teens were allowed to rent Lime bikes, the cost is a very real barrier.

There’s plenty of precedent for subsidizing youth travel. Transport for London, which operates the Tube and buses, offers a variety of free and discounted travel cards for children and under 18s. Sixteen to 25-year-olds can get a third off most rail fares with a UK railcard. Students 18 and over get 25% off a Santander Cycles (Boris bikes) membership. There are plenty of ways these existing schemes could be expanded to include the newer bike-share services.

Once again, we return to the philosophical question of what kind of service Lime wants to be: is it a private company selling a private service that limits its rider pool in order to minimize risk and maximize profit, or one that works proactively with transport authorities in pursuit of a service that is an inclusive and comprehensive addition to public transport? If the latter, expanding access to include the teens who would obviously like to use Lime bikes would be a great place to start. Right after dropping “criminal” from the vocabulary.

The click-clack of anti-capitalism comes for all of us, but in the meantime if you’d like to engage in some good old capitalism, please consider becoming a paid Oversharing subscriber today.

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You may have heard Lyft wants to kill surge pricing.

“Prime Time, also called surge pricing by Uber, is where you basically don’t have enough driver supply, so you have to price it high so it can send more drivers out there and also sort of suppress demand,” Lyft CEO David Risher said recently, on the company’s quarterly earnings call. “That’s a bad form of price raising. It’s a particularly bad form because riders hate it with a fiery passion. And so we’re trying to really get rid of it.”

Uber didn’t create dynamic pricing, the term for changing prices with demand—airlines had been doing it for years—but it popularized it by making it so visible. In the early days, Uber made surge a signature feature of its digital taxi platform. It highlighted surge with bold price multipliers you had to agree to before booking and publicly defended the model. Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick spent lots of time on Twitter and in the press explaining to the haters why surge was good for them as well as for Uber. Here he is in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ: What do you say to customers who are unhappy about surge pricing?

Mr. Kalanick: We make sure people see it and understand it before they accept. If they accepted it and then they’re upset that they accepted it, I think that’s just people getting used to dynamic pricing in transportation.

If you’re going and buying a hotel room, you know that prices can change. You know that if you don’t buy it now, the price could go down or it could go up. You know that if you buy a flight on the day before Christmas, it’s probably 10 times more expensive than two weeks after Christmas. You’re OK with that and you understand it. But in ground transportation, there’s been fixed pricing for 100 years. Because of that, there’s an education process.

Uber’s surge pricing turned out to be an excellent litmus test of your worldview. Some saw it as econ 101: demand rises and so do prices. Others viewed it as everything wrong with capitalism, proof that companies would use any means to extract the highest possible price. In the beginning, surge was generally unpopular and raised a lot of eyebrows. Customers routinely shared horror stories of hundred-dollar fares after concerts or on New Year’s Eve. Regulators took note after several big surges occurred during extreme weather, leading Uber to agree to cap surge during declared emergencies so as not to be accused of price-gouging.

But just as people got used to calling a cab from their phone, they also adjusted to surge pricing as the new normal. The horror stories quieted down. Uber’s explanation that surge helped to bring supply in line with demand became generally accepted wisdom. Even Lyft, which kept fares flat for the first few years, launched its own version of surge called Prime Time in late 2013. Always the nice guy to Uber’s bad guy, Lyft emphasized that it capped Prime Time at 3x (200%)—capitalism gone mild, not wild—but in 2016 it quietly eliminated that policy.

The most significant change to surge wasn’t any of this, though. It was the shift, led by Uber and followed by Lyft, from visible to invisible surge, or what Uber rebranded as “upfront pricing.” Upfront fares or pricing is the term ride-hail companies use to mean showing you the total price of your ride before you book. This is different from the original surge era, when surge appeared as a multiplier but the final sum was only revealed at the end of the trip. Uber frames upfront fares as simpler for riders: the price you see is the price you get. But in many ways upfront fares are anything but. The prices are still dynamic, but without any context. Instead of being told that demand is high and your fare will be too, you now have no sense of what a “normal” versus high fare even is. You simply get a price from the algorithm and have to decide if it’s one you’re willing to pay.

Willingness to pay is the operative phrase, because that’s what upfront pricing is designed for. In 2017, Bloomberg reported Uber was employing machine learning to calculate fares not only based on time and distance but also using what it knew or assumed about the rider. As then product head Daniel Graf explained to Bloomberg, a rider traveling from one wealthy neighborhood to another might be shown a higher price than someone heading to a poorer part of town, even if all other factors were the same.

In econ terms, this is known as price discrimination—selling the same product at different prices to different buyers in order to maximize sales or profits. Both Uber and Lyft do it. In the past year, both companies have also rolled out price-discriminated upfront pay to drivers. University of California Law professor Veena Dubal has an excellent paper on algorithmic wage discrimination where she argues that such pay practices allow firms “to personalize and differentiate wages for workers in ways unknown to them, paying them to behave in ways that the firm desires” and that “this personalized wage is determined through an obscure, complex system that makes it nearly impossible for workers to predict or understand their constantly changing, and frequently declining, compensation.”

The dominant ride-hail pricing model now is this: companies like Uber and Lyft charge one price to the rider, based on what they think that rider might pay, and offer another rate to the driver, based on what they think that driver might accept. Then they pocket the difference. The benefits to the platform are obvious. In the old world of pricing, Uber and Lyft promised drivers a fixed cut of the fare. Changing that rate would invariably spur protests and outrage, no matter how much Uber assured drivers that cutting fares would help them earn more. Upfront pricing decoupled what the rider pays from what the driver earns. The companies no longer have to pay a certain share or explain themselves when that share changes. The wider the gap between the upfront fare and upfront pay, the more the company earns.

I’m telling you all this to make the point that when Lyft’s CEO says the company wants to get rid of surge pricing, it doesn’t mean anything, because surge as we know it has lost all meaning. In the most recent quarter, Risher said the share of Lyft rides affected by Prime Time decreased 35% from the previous quarter. “It’s good for our riders, and it’s good for our overall market,” he said. That’s a great soundbite, but it doesn’t mean much when price discrimination is the starting point. Uber has also highlighted easing levels of surge pricing, which, again, sounds nice until you consider the backdrop of upfront pricing and a 40-plus-percent increase in average fares over three years.

Upfront pricing is one of the few things that makes me nostalgic for the Travis Kalanick era. It was refreshing for a company to be unabashedly honest about what it was doing the way Kalanick was about surge pricing. Customers might have hated those big blue multipliers, but they gave you the information you needed about what was actually going on. Upfront pricing might seem more palatable but in reality it’s a black box with a charming coat of paint. Of course Risher wants to phase out Prime Time: customers never liked it, and Uber and Lyft moved on a long time ago.

Over at Lyft, the numbers were also solid. Revenue rose modestly, boosted by strong rides growth. Net loss ($114 million) narrowed from the same period last year ($377 million) and prior quarter ($188 million), proof that new CEO David Risher’s cost-cutting regime is paying off. Lyft forecast $1.13-1.15 billion in revenue for the next quarter, better than expected. “Our customer obsession and focus on strong execution is really paying off,” said Risher, showing his stripes as a former Amazon exec.

The problem for Lyft is that good results aren’t enough. Uber and Lyft are no longer playing in the same league, and it’s increasingly unclear whether Lyft can ever catch up.

Lyft today looks more or less the same as it did 10 years ago. It’s still primarily a U.S. ride-hail service. It’s still number two to Uber. Other lines of business failed to take off. It wound down car-rentals. Bikes and scooters, while popular, never generated meaningful revenue but did increase costs; the system may now be up for sale. Lyft’s best asset is the feel-good brand it cultivated against the bad-boy persona of Uber’s Travis Kalanick, something Risher is well aware of. “Drivers’ preference for Lyft in part is based on how we treat them, but it’s also based in part on our values and how we’re perceived in the marketplace, and that’s true with riders as well,” he told analysts last week. “I don’t find a lot of people in love with our competitor,” Risher added. “But I do find people in love with us.”

This sort of brand affinity shouldn’t be discounted. I have friends who still prefer Lyft to Uber because they think it treats drivers better, an opinion that formed years ago and stuck. But brand affinity alone isn’t much to compete on, especially against Uber. I’m also not sure there is such a thing as an ethical ride-hail company: Sometimes Lyft treats drivers better, sometimes Uber, depending on various factors like funding availability and regulatory climate, but they are all part of the same gig work system. If you want to feel good about your transit choices, ride a bike or take the subway.

While Lyft kept things close to home in every sense, Uber did the opposite. It expanded around globally and into other services. Some failed, like Uber’s attempt to break into China, or the defunct UberRush courier service. Others were deemed distractions and sold off, such as Jump Bikes and the self-driving car unit. But a couple have stuck and became pillars of the broader Uber business. Uber Eats, the restaurant delivery service that carried Uber through the pandemic, accounted for nearly half its bookings ($15.6 billion) in the most recent quarter. Uber Freight, while smaller, keeps chugging along, with $1.3 billion in bookings in the same period.

Having more markets and more lines of business has given Uber more options. Eats allowed Uber to build a presence in markets that were still sorting out rules around ride-hailing, a sort of advance guard of delivery couriers. It kept drivers working through pandemic periods when they didn’t want people in their cars but were ok with your takeaway order. The Eats infrastructure is helping Uber expand into things like grocery, a segment the tech industry has long considered promising because of its bigger basket sizes and predictable order frequency. Uber is also working on a concept it calls “add-ons,” in which it offers you the option to add extra items from nearby stores (e.g., beer from a 7-Eleven) to your existing order. All of these things are ways of getting new users into the Uber system, and existing users into it more often.

The benefits of this diversification became obvious during covid. While lockdowns grounded Lyft’s rides, Uber was able to pivot to food and grocery delivery. Both companies faced a worker shortage coming out of the pandemic, but Uber rallied faster thanks both to more aggressive incentives and the flexibility that having both deliveries and rides gave its ‘earners.’ Getting its labor pool back faster gave Uber all sorts of other advantages: a more liquid labor supply means faster ETAs, more reliable service, and more competitive pricing. It creates the advantages that make it hard for other companies with fewer workers, longer ETAs, and higher prices to catch up.

Having more services also means more ports of entry to the Uber system on both sides of the platform. Workers can come in via rides or delivery. Customers can come in for food, groceries, rides, e-bikes (via Lime), as well as new modes Uber is adding, like taxis (lol) and train and bus tickets. The vision is for Uber to be something of a travel super-app, anchored by the core rides business but with enough options to suit all of your transportation needs. The longer Uber can keep you in the system and on its platform, the better.

Lyft, under Risher, is taking a back-to-basics approach. It’s cutting costs and pursuing a “pure play on ride share.” In other words, this is the opposite of what Uber has done, and it will be interesting to see if it works. A sign of the times is that Uber is bringing back shared rides (now “UberX Share”) after a prolonged pandemic pause, while Lyft, the company arguably most affiliated with the “share” in ride-sharing, has abandoned shared trips in favor of an option to wait longer for a cheaper fare.

On the one hand, there are benefits to making sure your core business is stable and running smoothly before you branch out into anything else. On the other, if your main competitor has a bunch of ways of getting people into its system, it’s probably good if you have that too. Anecdotally, for instance, I’ve heard from friends and readers who were disappointed that Lyft might sell bike-share, as they subscribed to the company’s Lyft Pink membership program primarily for its bike-share benefits. If Lyft jettisons bikes, it will likely lose those paying members as well.

Ride-hail is a commodity business. The cars are the same; the drivers are the same. There’s no cost to downloading multiple apps, so most people have a couple and are in the habit of checking both before booking a trip. One way out of commoditization is to offer a service that is clearly superior; another way is to provide a bucket of services that make it easier to stay with a single platform than to toggle between several. It’s hard to see Lyft pulling off the former, and it is actively turning away from the latter. Uber simply has so much more going for it—who knows if Lyft will ever catch up.

Elsewhere:

• Uber and Lyft are threatening to leave Minneapolis if the city votes Thursday to pass an ordinance on setting minimum driver pay at $1.40 a mile plus $0.51 a minute.

• Several Cruise driverless cars stalled and another got stuck in wet concrete in San Francisco, wreaking havoc and causing backups just days after the state Public Utilities Commission voted to let driverless ride-hail services expand across the city. San Francisco officials may sue the state over the decision.

• In the meantime, people are having sex in the robotaxis, a problem the companies have yet to solve for.

• Thanks so much for being a paid subscriber to Oversharing! If this newsletter was forwarded to you by a friend, colleague, or frenemy, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Five years ago, Lyft bought itself some bikes.

The deal came a few months after Uber acquired Jump Bikes, a startup maker of fire-engine-red e-bikes, as part of its shift toward being a multimodal transport platform. Lyft was forever trailing Uber—in rides, in sales, in cities, in market share—but not this time. If Uber was buying a dockless e-bikes startup with operations in two cities, then Lyft could buy the biggest bike-share operator in the U.S.

The acquisition target, Motivate, wasn’t a household name, but many of its urban bike-rental services were. Motivate was the operator behind Citi Bike (New York), Divvy (Chicago), Capital Bikeshare (Washington DC), and Ford GoBike (the Bay Area, now Bay Wheels), as well as programs in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon. In 2017, nearly three-quarters of the more than 35 million U.S. bike-share trips were made on Motivate systems. Lyft paid $251 million, cash. The sale closed in November 2018.

In many ways, bikes seemed like a natural fit. Lyft cultivated its reputation as the friendly, nice-guy ride-hail platform that cared about things like green transport and sustainability. While Uber expanded aggressively into other countries and other lines of business (food delivery, driverless cars, flying cars), Lyft’s only expedition was a launch in Toronto. Taking over the leading U.S. urban bike rental platform strengthened Lyft’s feel-good, green credentials, entrenched its position in the U.S. cities that formed the core of its business and, finally, gave it something to distinguish itself from Uber.

Five years later, Lyft wants out. Bike-share is a tough business, as any micromobility company could tell you, and new Lyft CEO David Risher has deemed it a distraction. The Wall Street Journal reported late last month that Lyft is seeking buyers for its bike-share division, something the company awkwardly failed to deny in a subsequent statement citing “strong inbound interest” in its bikes and scooters business.

Risher, a veteran of Microsoft and Amazon, took over from co-founder Logan Green earlier this year and is tasked with turning the flailing business around. One of his first moves as CEO was to lay off some 1,100 people, almost 30% of staff, and plow the savings into making Lyft more price competitive with Uber. Risher has a lot of money riding on the outcome. In addition to a $3.25 million signing bonus and $725,000 annual salary, Risher is eligible for a performance-based annual bonus equal to 100% of his base salary and 12.25 million restricted stock units, worth an estimated $980 million, that vest if Lyft achieves certain stock price targets, starting with $15 a share.

In May, on his first earnings call as CEO, Risher laid out his business thesis. “We’re effectively a pure play on rideshare,” he said. “So, that’s important for us to execute on as well.” A pure play on ride-hail means no room for distractions. Lyft the previous year had wound down a short-lived consumer car-rentals business. Bikes and scooters, Risher indicated, could be next on the chopping block:

E-bikes are a big deal. When people ride e-bikes they like them a lot. But for us, I think we haven’t done the job we need to do to make sure that every time a person rides the bike, they get welcomed into the Lyft ecosystem, and frankly, welcome into the rideshare side of things.

It can be nice when someone says the quiet part out loud. The quiet part in this case is that Lyft under Risher no longer views bikes and scooters as a clean, green complement to its main service, but as another entry point into the pure-play business of ride-hail. Owning Citi Bike and those other beloved bike-share systems isn’t about enriching urban transport or closing the last-mile gap with more sustainable modes; it’s an elaborate marketing campaign to install the Lyft app onto more phones and get more passengers into its cars, and per Risher’s assessment, it’s not paying off.

There has always been reason to doubt Lyft’s stewardship of urban bike-share. Cycle-hire programs like Citi Bike are, at their best, an extension of existing public transit systems. Public transport takes many forms but at its most basic level is a government-led effort to provide affordable, reliable, and accessible transportation to large numbers of people. Doing this is not typically profitable, as evidenced by the fact that most public transit systems in major global cities lose money by design. Passenger fares tend to cover only a fraction of operating costs, with the rest coming from taxes and government subsidies.

Lyft is a public company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. It’s supposed to make money by design, not lose it. And so any bike-share system run by Lyft isn’t really able to operate at a loss like other public transport, unless government steps in to help pick up the tab. That has a whole range of downstream implications for the service. How much rides cost. Where bikes and stations go. The level of investment and maintenance Lyft puts in. Some of these things are governed by local agreements—in New York, for instance, Lyft pledged to invest $100 million in Citi Bike over five years as part of the Motivate acquisition—but in any public-private partnership there is always an element of mutual interest and good faith. Lyft’s contractual obligations to its bike-share contracts aren’t in question, but the company’s commitment to carrying them out to the best of its abilities under Risher certainly could be.

Warning lights were flashing even before the sale sign went up. In March, Lyft shut down Minneapolis’s Nice Ride after failing to find a new sponsor for the program. (For now, e-bikes and scooters from Lime, Spin, and Veo have taken its place.) In other cities, Lyft has hiked prices to cover operating costs, leaving many riders disgruntled or priced out. Anecdotally, Citi Bike users complain the e-bikes are often dead or broken, while others say the Citi Bike app itself has become harder to use, in what they suspect is an effort to push more people onto the main Lyft system. On the operating sheet, bikes and scooters remain a fraction of Lyft’s revenue. In the quarter ended March 31, Lyft attributed $47.9 million of a total $1 billion in revenue, or about 5%, from bikes, scooters, and its Flexdrive car-rental program for drivers. Meanwhile, cost of revenue grew $109 million or 25% from the same period in 2022, in part due to a $20 million increase in bikes- and scooters-related costs.

The question now is if not Lyft, who? Who will buy Citi Bike and its bike-share siblings? Over the past weeks I’ve posed this question to many people with knowledge of the space, and none have had a good answer. Probably not Uber, which got out of bikes in 2020 by offloading Jump to Lime. Probably not Lime, which in addition to its Uber ties has shown little interest in offering the sort of white-label service behind an urban bike-share rather than fronting its own brand and devices. Certainly not Bird, which is busy attempting to salvage its business after being taken over last year by Bird Canada. Other micromobility firms that might once have been interested are in various states of distress now that capital is no longer cheap and freely flowing. Tier, which absorbed a few competitors in the past, has been exploring a merger—first with Bolt and more recently Voi—while Dutch e-bike maker and industry darling VanMoof declared bankruptcy in July.

Put another way: what sort of company would want to be in this very difficult business? You can understand why Risher wants out. The margins are thin, the operations demanding, the regulations and fees imposed by cities ever greater and more complex. In my ideal world, these systems would be absorbed by their local transport agencies and seamlessly integrated into the public system—the possibilities! free transfers from the bus to bike-share! all your transit options in one place!—but we live in the real world and it would absolutely not go so smoothly. Even if local governments had the money and political will to take on bike-share, they would still need the staff to operate and maintain the fleets as well as to update and manage the technology. A more likely outcome is that any city looking to take over its bike-rental program would simply find a new operator to contract with.

American bike-share schemes are on the brink. They are a public good operated by a private-sector company that, under investor pressure, has rapidly lost interest in unprofitable, public-minded lines of business. This problem is bigger than Lyft; it goes to the very core of the bike-share model. For urban bike-rentals to ever truly be an affordable, accessible, reliable layer of public transportation, they require sustained public investment. Until then, they seem destined to stay a transit hot potato, passed in bursts from one private owner to another.

P.S., have you seen Barbie? Do yourself a favor, and go see Barbie.

Micromobility

A new program from Boston mayor Michelle Wu offers free bike-riding lessons to children ages 4-13.

HumanForest launched parcel delivery in London.

U.S. bike-share systems are on pace for another record year, led by booming ridership in New York City.

The Boston metro area is expanding its BlueBikes cycle-hire with new stations, more ridership, and a dream of e-bikes.

Scotland is investing £1 million in shared cycling programs.

+E-bike rebates keep on rolling:

• DC: $750-$1,500 back for income-qualified residents, plus smaller incentives for replacements batteries and bike locks

• Vermont: $150,000 in funding for the year, available to income-qualified Vermonters on a first-come, first-serve basis

• Colorado from 2024 will make e-bike rebates available to as many people as are interested, a dramatic expansion to the wildly popular and often oversubscribed programs. It’ll be funded with surplus state tax revenue and combinable with any other local incentive programs.

• Columbus, Ohio: Rebates of $500-$1,200, backed by $250,000 in funding

• Connecticut: Demand for the new rebate program ($500-$1,500) has been “overwhelming,” the state reported, despite the small number of bike shops authorized to accept the vouchers

Policy and regulation

Weekday train journeys of more than 30 km (19 miles) jumped by 27% in June from April, following the introduction of Germany’s €49 ($55) a month urban transport pass. There were about 100,000 fewer daily car journeys in June, on average, than in the same month in 2019. Give people car alternatives and they will take them.

New York governor Kathy Hochul is forging ahead with congestion pricing despite a new lawsuit attempting to block the policy—an “act of vehicular NIMBYism,” as Paul Krugman put it—from neighboring New Jersey.

Congestion pricing is set to be a windfall for the New York subway system, and could fund much-needed upgrades to signals, elevators, fare gates, and platform barriers.

Denver’s regional transport agency RTD is cutting fares for the first time in decades, and piloting a program to make it free for riders under age 19.

California won five federal grants, worth about $2.5 million total, to address “areas of persistent poverty.” Grant projects include building out local public transport and improving safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

Minnesota’s new transportation bill is brimming with sustainable transit initiatives, including a new sales tax in the Twin Cities specifically to fund transit operations, statewide e-bike rebates, an 18-month free transit pilot for seniors and disabled residents, and lots of dedicated funding for buses, rail, and cycle and pedestrian networks.

Belgian and French train operators are weighing a regular, affordable train route from Brussels to Paris.

Urban adventures

Community gardens in the Bronx are gaining recognition as a powerful and vital urban tool in combatting climate change.

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are a surprising new backer of people-friendly streets as they look to revitalize downtowns.

Paris will charge higher parking fees to SUV owners from January 2024.

After a historic €1.4 billion ($1.54 billion) clean-up effort, Paris is set to bring back swimming in the Seine.

Paris city council crowdsourced a map that helps people find cafes serving €1 espresso.

Brighton is trialing recycling collection by e-cargo bikes in the city center to lower carbon emissions.

London is moving ahead with its planned expansion of the ULEZ after the UK high court dismissed a legal challenge from five local boroughs.

New, more energy-efficient Piccadilly line trains, due to replace a fleet dating to 1975, are being track-tested in Germany.

Downtown Brooklyn will get a $40 million makeover with wider sidewalks, more trees, dedicated bus lanes, and protected bike lanes.

Delivery orders in New York won’t automatically come with forks anymore.

Other stuff

Swifties on their way to Eras tour concerts across the U.S. are riding shotgun with their hair undone in the front seat of… public transport, in what’s being dubbed the “Taylor Swift transit effect.”

London’s urban foxes aren’t just a Fleabag metaphor. See for yourself.

Boris Johnson’s swimming pool plans threatened by newts.

Adam Neumann still can’t sell his Gramercy triplex.

What’s in the subway water that drips on your head?

A defense of the ugliest building in Paris.

Ryan Gosling’s top Ken-sentials to help you find your Kenergy.

In February 2003, then London mayor Ken Livingstone introduced a new charge of £5 per day on motorists entering central London. Two decades on, the congestion charge is an unqualified success. City transit regulator Transport for London (TfL) credits it with boosting public transport and other modes of sustainable travel, funding buses and people-friendly infrastructure like protected cycle lanes, and of course improving traffic congestion in the capital. That’s not to say central London isn’t congested, but much less so than if the policy weren’t in place.

Congestion pricing is not only accepted in London, it’s popular. Per a June poll from Redfield & Wilton Strategies, a majority of Londoners support or strongly support the £15 daily fee on motorists entering the busiest part of the city during peak hours.1 Compare that to New York, which has spent the better part of this century trying to get congestion pricing in motion. Blame lack of political will, blame dull and incompetent public messaging, blame New Jersey, that armpit of America, which has sued the federal government in its latest effort to block the plan.

But we are not here today to talk about New York congestion pricing or even to complain about New Jersey. We are here because despite the broad popularity of congestion pricing, a second policy designed to curb auto emissions in the capital is being widely vilified after the Labour party lost an election last week in outer London.

The policy in question is the Ultra Low Emission Zone, or Ulez. The first thing you need to know about the Ulez is that it’s a lot bigger than the congestion charge zone. That big green blob in the map below? That’s the Ulez. The second thing is that it’s about to get even bigger.

While London has come a long way since the Great Smog, its air quality until recently still ranked poorly among European cities. The main pollutants of concern in the UK are fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), primarily from vehicular emissions and commercial heating systems. PM2.5 is a major health concern as the microscopic particles can travel into the lungs, cross into the bloodstream, and harm the brain and other organs. The European Environment Agency considers air pollution the “single largest environmental health risk in Europe and a major cause of premature death and disease,” led by high concentrations of PM2.5 in urban areas.

In the UK, air pollution is linked with nearly 40,000 annual deaths, nearly a quarter of them in London. The effects are especially severe in children, but are increasingly thought to be tied to dementia in older people as well. Toxic air disproportionately harms poor communities and people of color, who tend to live in closer proximity to areas of high roadside pollution. Beyond the human costs are the financial ones. By one estimate, the “social cost”2 of pollution from road transport in London was £10.3 billion a year ($13.2 billion) in 2020, well ahead of any other European city.

Despite its current association with London mayor and Labour party member Sadiq Khan, the Ulez was dreamed up by none other than former London mayor Boris Johnson. In 2015, the Johnson mayoralty announced the “world’s first” Ultra Low Emission Zone would take effect in London from September 2020. Vehicles traveling in the existing congestion charge zone would have to meet tighter emissions standards or pay a daily charge. Johnson made the announcement, which included £65 million in government funding to help cabbies transition, at a Coventry factory slated to produce cleaner taxis. “The world’s first Ultra Low Emission Zone is an essential measure to help improve air quality in our city, protect the health of Londoners, and lengthen our lead as the greatest city on earth,” Johnson said, four years before he would be elected Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader, five before he would “get Brexit done,” and eight before he would declare the Ulez “sheer bone-headed cruelty” in a column for the Daily Mail.

The Ulez came into force under Sadiq Khan a year earlier than Johnson proposed, in April 2019. The daily £12.50 charge applied to drivers in the congestion zone whose diesel engines didn’t meet the “Euro 6” emissions standard, as well as most petrol cars over 14 years old. In its first two years, the Ulez cut nitrogen dioxide pollution in central London by nearly half. The share of compliant vehicles soared from 39% before the policy took effect to more than 80% after. In October 2021, the Ulez expanded 18-fold, to an area bounded by the North and South Circular roads and covering 4 million people, 44% of the London population. In November 2022, Khan announced a further expansion of the Ulez to all London boroughs and an additional 5 million people from August 29, 2023.

It’s this now-imminent Ulez expansion that became a flashpoint in last week’s parliamentary by-elections. (A by-election occurs when a member of parliament vacates their seat between general elections.) Conservative Steve Tuckwell narrowly won in Uxbridge, a suburban town in the West London borough of Hillingdon and seat previously held by Boris Johnson, despite the Tories losing two safe seats elsewhere in the UK. Tuckwell ran a single issue campaign, less for the Conservative party than against Sadiq Khan and the Ulez expansion.

Since the defeat, Labour leader Keir Starmer has wasted no time in blaming the Uxbridge loss on Khan and the Ulez, which is certainly easier and more convenient than doing any amount of party soul-searching. Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, a London mother whose daughter died at age 9 in 2013 in part from air pollution, accused politicians of turning the Ulez into a “political football.” Khan, for his part, has said he’ll look at additional ways of mitigating the impact on Londoners, like making subsidies to get a compliant car available to more people, but isn’t budging on timing. The cameras are being installed. The mayor of congested Milan is cheering him on. Everyone is awaiting a high court ruling, expected as soon as this week, on a challenge by the outer London boroughs to the Ulez expansion.

Since 2019, the Ulez is credited with reducing nitrogen oxide emissions in London by 23%, and PM2.5 emissions by 7% across the city and 19% in the Ulez itself. The air quality improvements are “above what was predicted for the scheme,” the mayor’s office said in a report this February, and have persisted even with the return of traffic coming out of the pandemic. Revenue generated from Ulez charges—£226 million in the 2021-22 fiscal year with a net income of £111 million—is reinvested back into London’s transport network, but this is not designed to be a permanent funding stream. The mayor’s office projects that net revenue will stop by 2027 as most people switch from polluting to emissions-compliant vehicles.

Cleaner air, healthier people, better public transport—these are undeniably all good things. The problem is that they are hard to measure and see tangible impacts of, especially for someone staring down the barrel at new fees of £12.50 a day, up to £4,550 a year (even the Ulez takes Christmas off), to drive their car. Khan has done his best to soften the blow. There are exemption phases for disabled drivers, wheelchair accessible vehicles, and community transport buses run by nonprofits. There is a £110 million “scrappage scheme” that gives grants of up to £2,000 in cash or £3,000 in combined cash and transit benefits to eligible car owners looking to scrap or retrofit their vehicle. Similar grants are available for motorcycles and wheelchair accessible vehicles.

The Redfield & Wilton survey that found a majority of Londoners support the congestion charge also found a majority support the Ulez and think it has improved air quality in the city. A plurality (47%) of all Londoners were in favor of expanding the Ulez, but opinion in the outer boroughs was evenly split, with 39% for and 39% against. This makes sense. These are the people for whom things are about to change. Who may need to pay more in what is already a severe cost of living crisis. Who may need to change commuting patterns they would be far more comfortable keeping the same. Of course some of them don’t like it.

These concerns are important, but they are not sufficient. The climate crisis is here. Forests are burning. Islands are burning. The oceans are too warm. Cities and towns are far too warm. Extreme heat is literally killing people. The coming decades will require lots of changes and uncomfortable decisions. Many lives have been disrupted already and many more will be. Now is the time to be using every available tool to combat air pollution and emissions, not to back away from it. Congestion pricing and the Ulez are the best kind of tools because we already know they work. These policies accelerate the shift to cleaner vehicles and more sustainable transport modes, reduce harmful emissions, and keep communities safer and healthier. They are a change and as with all changes they require getting used to, but the evidence also suggests that once people adjust they get on board. In both London and Trondheim, Norway, public opinion shifted in favor of congestion pricing and opposition dropped once people had a chance to actually experience the policies. These are the leaders we need: not those who shy away like Starmer, but ones like Khan who persevere in the quest for cleaner air, healthier people, and better public transport, knowing that just because something is unpopular today doesn’t mean it will be that way forever.

Today I want to go deeper on the theory of tactical urbanism, also known as “pop-up,” “DIY,” and “guerilla.” Whichever the name, the concept broadly describes interventions in the urban landscape by local residents, typically in response to perceived inaction or neglect by authorities and almost always without official permission. This form of urban activism has been described variously as spontaneous, playful, innovative, sophisticated, opportunistic, and straight-up cool. It has been used in active protest, like the anonymous activists “coning” AVs in San Francisco, or in quiet frustration after people got tired of waiting for their local government to fix a simple and eminently fixable problem.

The phrase “tactical urbanism” is typically attributed to Mike Lydon, an urban planner in New York who wrote the book on it in 2015. Lydon considers TU to be an umbrella for a wide array of small-scale actions designed to improve the local urban environment, which he terms “tactics.” These include pop-up shops and cafes; guerrilla gardening; play streets closed to cars; and “park(ing) days” on which car park spaces are briefly reclaimed for people-friendly uses, like setting up picnic chairs or a ping-pong table.

There is long, rich tradition of tactical or DIY urbanism in the U.S. There is also sometimes a sense that this form of urbanism is a uniquely American phenomenon. It fits neatly with the national mythology of Horatio Alger, the preference for small government, and the popular adage that if you want something done right, do it yourself. In reality the only thing uniquely American about tactical urbanism is our inclination to view it as yet another instance of American exceptionalism.

One of my favorite histories of tactical urbanism comes from Emily Talen, professor of social sciences and director of the Urbanism Lab at the University of Chicago. Talen begins her 2014 article, “Do-It-Yourself Urbanism: A History,” by observing that the sort of small-scale, informal interventions considered “novel” and “revolutionary” in wealthy nations like the U.S. are often “standard protocol” in other parts of the world:

For the most part, the approach is distinguished by being in direct opposition to top-down, capital-intensive, and bureaucratically sanctioned urban change of the kind most often associated with urban planning. In the US case, this signals a disinterest—or perhaps disillusionment—with changes promised through more conventional routes like tax increment financing districts, design guidelines, or comprehensive planning. It has been described as an attempt to ‘‘skirt authority’’ that signals a restive public not content to wait for planners and architects to accomplish better living environments.

In the U.S., Talen traces DIY urbanism to late-1800s efforts to plant trees and beautify public spaces led by “hundreds of mostly women-led village improvement societies.” The groups later organized into the American League for Civic Improvement, but in their early, less formal days, were concerned with anything from digging sewers to planting flower beds. These small, hyper-local actions were an especially notable contrast to the modernist urban utopias that were popular at the time, like Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. Here is Talen again:

These efforts, whether motivated by beauty, redemption, conservation, or complexity, can be viewed together as interrelated attempts to improve cities in small-scale ways, from the bottom-up, and without the direct involvement of government. The overall trajectory was in two broad phases. The first phase focused on small-scale urban beautification and civic improvement, motivated in part by a desire for social change through physical neighborhood improvement. A second phase involved recognition of the need to foster urban complexity and diversity explicitly, via small-scale interventions that contrasted with top-down, large-scale, orthogonal planning. In either phase, from beautification to Everyday Urbanism, urban improvement existed outside the purview of government-sanctioned planning agendas.

The instances of tactical urbanism we tend to hear about these days usually involve somewhat renegade efforts to fix long-ignored issues. One that periodically pops up in the news is Crosswalk Collective LA, a group of anonymous activists who paint zebra crossings at unmarked intersections they perceive as dangerous, often to the delight of the neighborhood and chagrin of city officials. This is the tension at the heart of tactical urbanism: what some see as necessary interventions, brought on by persistent government inaction, could also be described as reckless or even lawless. Crosswalk Collective LA last year organized a Gofundme after several of its members were forced to stop painting three crossings near a local school by Los Angeles police and issued citations of $250 each.

The tactics of tactical urbanists are not unlike those of many startups that operate in the public realm. Both tend to subscribe to the philosophy of “ask forgiveness rather than permission” and believe that any pushback they might encounter from local authorities is the price of teaching the city to love what they are offering. This, after all, is how Uber introduced us to ride-hailing and Bird and Lime acquainted us with rental electric scooters. These days those systems are governed by rules and contracts and RFPs, but in the beginning the Ubers and Birds appeared in our lives because some tech bros and venture capitalists with the money and resources to do so decided they should.

Money, resources, and power may very well be the dividing line between interventions that remain in the realm of tactical urbanism and those that go on to become formal services. It turns out that having millions or billions of dollars and powerful connections, like, say, a former Obama aide leading your policy team, goes a long way toward being granted that forgiveness you asked for and having rules and laws changed to suit your service. It also helps in making your service or product so widely available that cities have no choice but to engage in a dialogue about how to make it work on a formal level.

This is a necessary threshold for lasting changes to the urban ecosystem, and it is much harder to reach when you are a small group of activists stealthily painting crosswalks one by one, or coning AVs by night, than a technology firm with the backing of Silicon Valley. What if instead of Crosswalk Collective LA, the group painting crosswalks was a nascent but well-funded tech startup pursuing contracts with municipal governments to analyze and improve dangerous urban intersections? It might not work, but also it might quickly be promoted from the category of rogue citizen to promising urban tech solution.

Money and power is hard to ignore when considering the conflict between Safe Street Rebel in SF and the driverless car firms. After investing more than $100 billion in developing autonomous technologies, the self-driving car companies seem to feel entitled to the city as urban laboratory, regardless of what the people who live in those cities think about it. Shortly after the CPUC delayed its vote on the next phase of the program, GM-owned Cruise took out a full-page ad in the New York Times designed to shame the public into getting on board with Cruise’s vehicles. Safe Street Rebel also recently alleged on Twitter that Cruise vehicles are now being tailed by private security in SUVs.

In other words, tactical urbanism is always a story of David vs. Goliath. Because the actions are by definition informal and small scale; because they come from concerned locals rather than a formalized group; because they are rarely if ever funded to any significant degree. That can make it hard for the actions of tactical urbanists to stick, but it also makes the movement hard to snuff out.

Self-driving cars have met their match in the form of the humble traffic cone.

If you’re on TikTok, you may already know what I’m talking about. If not, please take a moment to enjoy this viral video of San Francisco activists disabling autonomous Cruise and Waymo vehicles by placing bright orange traffic cones on their hoods.

@sfstandardAnti-autonomous vehicle activists have recently started the “Week of Cone” by immobilizing Cruise and Waymo driverless vehicles by placing traffic cones on their hoods, all to protest the potential unlimited expansion of Cruise and Waymo robotaxi services in the city. Have you had any robotaxi unicorn sightings recently?🦄 #SFStandard #SanFrancisco #SF #DriverlessCar #Robotaxi #SFTech #BayAreaTech #SFTok #SFNews

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The cones immobilize the AVs (that is shorthand for “autonomous vehicles”) by forcing them into “shutdown mode” with their hazard lights on, “until the cone is removed or a company technician comes to reset the car's system,” the San Francisco Standard reported. Safe Street Rebel, the group behind the stunt, unleashed the cones last week ahead of a scheduled July 13 vote by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that could allow Cruise and Waymo unimpeded access to public streets as the next phase in their robotaxi development. “We want to either have [autonomous vehicles] not on the city streets at all or very limited,” one Rebel told the Standard. “It's like the state has decided that these things are going to be deployed in San Francisco without the consent of the city or the people in it.”

An unnamed Waymo spokesperson called the coning “vandalism” that “encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways.” Hannah Lindow, a Cruise spokesperson who was at least brave enough to attach her name to her statement, told the Standard that “intentionally obstructing vehicles gets in the way of those efforts and risks creating traffic congestion for local residents.” The SFMTA, San Francisco’s municipal transport agency, said on Twitter Friday that it “does not endorse ANY actions that may increase the number of disabled AVs on San Francisco streets,” and encouraged people to attend this week’s CPUC meeting.

Autonomous vehicles are one of our era’s defining moonshots. Silicon Valley and the auto industry—companies from Google to GM, Ford to Zoox—have collectively sunk more than $100 billion into developing vehicles that can navigate everything from endless highways to complex urban grids in all sorts of weather conditions, with the ultimate aim of getting human drivers off the road. Driverless disciples believe the technology will eliminate road fatalities, decrease congestion, and spell the end of those sprawling, oppressive parking lots. They also plan for it to make a lot of money—which, more than $100 billion in, they definitely need it to.

The AV industry as your average consumer relates to it has been developing along a two-pronged track. First is the incorporation of “driver assist” technologies in consumer-grade vehicles. These range from fairly mundane features like cruise control and blind-spot detection, to the controversial Tesla “autopilot” system. The second pathway to driverlessness is through robotaxis. Companies like Waymo and Cruise are designing fleets of AVs that will be able to provide an Uber-like service without a human behind the steering wheel. The vision once again is unfettered profits. The economics of ride-hail are tricky, but eliminating human labor from the equation could make them much more attractive. As Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick told the world at a conference nearly 10 years ago in his signature unapologetic style, “The reason Uber could be expensive is you’re paying for the other dude in the car.”

The other thing about driverless cars is that they are always five years away. It turns out this stuff is really complicated, and even $100 billion and the most powerful egos in Silicon Valley haven’t been able to get it done as fast as they hoped. There are practical problems, there are regulatory problems, there are ethical problems. There are people, the biggest problem of all. People, they are so unpredictable! Some are bad drivers. Some are possibly deranged. Some are central-casting villains whose ill-conceived heists waste so much time and money and credibility. Some refuse to drink the Silicon Valley kool-aid altogether, are opposed to our driverless future, and are willing to make that point with a strategically placed traffic cone.

There is a long tradition in urbanism of residents taking matters into their own hands when they feel abandoned by local authorities. It is known variously in the academic literature as tactical, do-it-yourself (DIY), pop-up, and even guerilla urbanism. Examples of tactical urbanism include turning dumpsters into swimming pools, reclaiming parking spots as tiny parks, and painting crosswalks on neglected intersections. These interventions have been described as playful, innovative, and spontaneous. They are typically low budget and executed by volunteers or activists. All are by definition unsanctioned.

Using traffic cones to disarm a driverless car is textbook tactical urbanism: an intervention by concerned local activists in response to perceived neglect and inaction by local authorities. It’s also brilliant. I challenge you to find a more powerful image of people protesting technology in the recent past than that of the humble orange traffic cone perched atop an inert driverless car. There is the obvious metaphor (a Silicon Valley unicorn, rendered literal and impotent), the terrific color and contrast, the clear juxtaposition of power and wealth with human ingenuity. The financials, should you pause to consider them, are mind-blowing. You can buy a dozen heavy-duty traffic cones on Amazon for about $250, or about $21 per cone. You can use that $21 object to incapacitate a machine that has so far cost many billions of dollars to develop, and will surely consume many billions more.

It is hard to imagine a more effective public awareness campaign for the forthcoming CPUC meeting than the “Week of Cone,” as Safe Street Rebel dubbed it. A vote that had threatened to slip by quietly is suddenly the subject of both traditional press and viral social media chatter. It’s possible nothing changes; it’s also possible that people turn out in force on Thursday to have their say on the future of AVs in San Francisco. This, more than flashy stunts, is the essence of tactical urbanism: using creative, unofficial, rebellious tactics to inspire people to engage as stakeholders in their communities and urban landscapes; reminding us to exercise our participatory power even as corporations threaten to buy it up and take it away.

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They say no news is good news, but sometimes good news is news. Hearing about good things can even help ease the pain of all the bad things happening in the world.

The 2022 good news omnibus edition of Oversharing was an instant reader favorite. Instead of leaving the next one until 2024, I thought it would be fun to finish each month with a good news roundup, starting with June. Let me know what you think, and happy Fourth of July weekend 🇺🇸 to all the American readers.

Micromobility

Both dockless and docked bike-share usage grew in Europe in the first quarter.

Segway received a third-party verification that meets international standards for its life cycle assessment of several e-scooter models, an industry first.

More U.S. cities are rolling back bans on rental bikes and e-scooters.

Montreal introduced a new 24/7 hotline for reporting vehicles blocking bike lanes.

New York City got a $25 million emergency federal grant to fund e-bike charging stations citywide, after a spate of fires related to people charging batteries at home.

Sales of e-bikes in the U.S. nearly doubled in one year.

Four-wheeled e-cargo bike-vans are replacing traditional delivery vans in cities.

How cool is this solar-powered e-scooter?

If everyone cycled like the Dutch, it would offset a carbon footprint the size of the UK.

+So many e-bike rebates:

• British Columbia: Introduced income-based rebates of CAD 350-1,400

• Connecticut: Opened applications its voucher program on June 28. Standard vouchers are $500, and up to $1,500 for qualifying residents

• Massachusetts: Weighing rebates of up to $750 for qualified buyers

• Minnesota: 75% of the cost, up to $1,500; smaller incentives for high-income families; from 2024 with $2 million annual budget

• Portland, Oregon: Prioritizing rebates for low-income households for use at local bike shops

• Salt Lake County, Utah: Released 1,000 vouchers worth $600-$1,400 (by income and for a regular e-bike vs. e-cargo bike) on a first-come, first-serve basis

Policy and regulation

U.S. cities are starting to ban “right on red,” a notoriously dangerous traffic rule.

Famously congested Los Angeles is getting closer to a congestion pricing scheme.

U.S. Department of Transportation awards $1.7 billion in grants for zero- and low-emission buses across 46 states and territories.

New York state could hike registration fees for heavier passenger vehicles.

After a long and painful slog, New York is full speed ahead on congestion pricing. Kathy Hochul tells angry drivers to take the subway. Say it with me: cleaner air, faster travel times, better public transport.

California threw public transit agencies a lifeline with $5.1 billion earmarked for transport over next three years in new state budget.

Bologna, Italy, will set a flat 30 km/hour speed limit for nearly all streets.

Lyon, France, plans to introduce parking fees based on vehicle weight from 2024.

Paris, following Lyon, adopted a proposal on “progressive” parking fees that would charge more to larger vehicles like SUVs from 2024.

Transport for London’s new Cycling Action Plan aims to double share of Londoners living near a cycle route to 40% by 2030.

Urban adventures

“Bike buses” are gaining popularity as transport advocates and community organizers help kids cycle to school. Some say they have “kidical” mass.

Sinking San Francisco skyscraper has stopped sinking.

Bus riders can access free digital ‘pop-up’ libraries in Boston, no card required.

LA completes new bus and protected bike lanes as part of “road diet.”

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s new “Street Code” puts pedestrians first, cars last.

Paris firefighters are responding faster than ever, thanks to a vast grid of cycle lanes that help emergency services cut through gridlock.

Paris unveils plan to remake a crowded boulevard with rain gardens, cycle highways, and pedestrian promenades.

Vilnius, Lithuania, set up a water mist system in a public square to help people stay cool in the summer heat.

A new digital tool in Turku, Finland, lets users find a route with the most greenery or the cleanest air, among other parameters.

Other stuff

My friend Walt Hickey’s book, You Are What You Watch, is available for preorder! Walt is a Pulitzer Prize-winner who writes the always excellent Numlock News.

‘Lobster Lady’ turns 103, has been hauling traps for 95 years.

Living near green space could add 2.5 years to your life, study finds.

He wanted to pet dogs for his 100th birthday. Hundreds lined up.

The latest McKinsey Mobility Consumer Pulse Survey includes nearly 31,000 online responses collected in December 2022 from “current mobility users” across 15 countries.1 The bad news is that nearly half of respondents (49%) said they use a private car most often to get around (more than three times per week). The good news is that more respondents plan to decrease their use of private vehicles (30%) than increase it (20%), with a quarter of respondents in urban areas thinking about ditching their cars entirely. And the modes most people plan to use more in the future are 1) public transit and 2) micromobility.

Planning isn’t the same as doing, but the McKinsey survey paints a picture of an urban demographic ready to move past cars—if given sufficient alternatives. Per McKinsey, consumers are increasingly making mobility choices based on sustainability considerations, travel efficiency, and improvements to the urban landscape, rather than pure cost. When asked what changes they’d like to see to their local mobility system, the 11,462 respondents in urban areas picked:

1. Better public transport (52%!)

2. Better micromobility infrastructure (37%)

3. More electric vehicles (35%)

You’ll note that micromobility infrastructure is significantly more popular than additional shared mobility services. This is an interesting data point, suggesting there is broader support and enthusiasm for expanding things like protected cycle lanes than bringing in more shared devices to cities. That makes sense if you consider that 1) people who don’t use shared mobility might still own a personal bike or scooter and want more micromobility infrastructure and 2) after several years of rapid expansion by rental bike and scooter companies, urban infrastructure development is slower moving and probably a bigger barrier at this point to uptake.

The last point I want to pull out from the McKinsey survey is that even urbanites still want to be able to access a car sometimes. This goes back to the point about sufficient alternatives. It’s not that city dwellers are in love with their personal cars, it’s that there are some activities for which having a car is undeniably easier and more convenient.

McKinsey surveyed people about their interest in using “microcars”—tiny cars with three or four wheels and small engines, sometimes also called “bubble cars.” Of respondents who expressed interest, the most (48%) said they would consider using a microcar for grocery shopping, followed by leisure activities (37%) and commuting to work (35%). And yeah, that makes sense! Having a car is a big asset for grocery shopping, because, speaking from personal experience, there is a real limit on how many groceries you can carry back from the store yourself. Leisure activities aren’t always on the public transit map or in cycling distance. The goal shouldn’t be to get rid of all cars always, but to give people the options they need to replace as many trips as possible with other modes, and to get a car when they really need it.

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Recently I found myself in the odd position of having to get to the airport by car twice. The first time was because of a rail strike. You may have heard it’s a summer of strikes in the UK. Rail workers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, teachers, university workers, and even some civil servants are walking out over pay amid runaway inflation. The rail schedule was clear when I booked my flight, but by the time my trip rolled around, National Rail had planned industrial action shutting down all train service to London Gatwick Airport.

This was bad news for me, since Gatwick is extremely easy to access by rail and extremely difficult to reach without it. There is a limited coach service that runs to the airport from a central London train station, but it was already sold out. The only remaining way to get there was by car.

The day before my flight I checked Uber. It quoted around £90 to get to Gatwick. Competing apps, like Bolt and FreeNow, gave similar estimates. I went back to Uber to try the trip in Reserve, Uber’s scheduled rides feature. This produced an even higher fare. None of this was surprising. With the upcoming rail strike, you had to assume demand for ride-hail services was high, pushing up prices. Uber has also been open in describing Reserve as a premium product. In February, discussing results from the fourth quarter of 2022, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi cited Reserve as a “huge shift” in the company’s rides product and said 50% of those trips “are upsell, so to speak. They are more profitable than on-demand trips.” The chances of getting a good Uber rate to the airport were low.

A decade-plus of ride-hailing has trained us to turn to apps when we need a ride. Some users search for the best rate by toggling between apps, or applying a discount or referral code. Others might know a few additional tricks, like tweaking their pickup point or having a friend request the ride, all of which can affect the fare thanks to the advanced price discrimination used by ride-hail algorithms. But I’m here to remind you that there’s another way. It may seem archaic, but I promise you it still works, sometimes even better than ride-hailing. You can call a cab.

This is what I did the night before my Gatwick flight late last month. I’m using “cab” here to mean any sort of professional for-hire car service, from taxis to livery services, or what in London are known as “minicabs.” I did a quick Google and called up two local cab companies to ask about a car to Gatwick for the next morning. The first one quoted £79. The second said £65. I booked it immediately.

Here’s the thing about booking a cab these days: it’s a lot more streamlined than it used to be. Many cab and livery companies have an app you can use to book online, or will follow up a phone booking with a text confirming your trip. The technology isn’t as slick as that of the major ride-hail firms, but it does the job. And here’s the secret the ride-hail firms don’t want you to know: cabs can be a lot cheaper than Uber.

It took me about 15 minutes to find, call, and book a ride with a for-hire car company. The £65 I paid (plus tip) was expensive, but 28% cheaper than Uber’s real-time fare quote and even further from its Reserve price. (To reiterate about those Reserve prices: while writing this I put in a trip to Gatwick for now, and again as a scheduled ride for tomorrow morning. The first trip showed a fare of £80, the second £115, a 44% premium.) And my ride was great. I would rather have been on a train, but the driver showed up on time and got me to the airport on schedule. I would happily book with that company again, especially for such a reasonable rate. Five stars all around.

I’m telling you all of this because it’s emblematic of Uber’s evolution from hyper-subsidized startup to mature, publicly traded ride-hail company. The heyday of VC subsidies is over. Capital, once cheap, is now very expensive. Investors want returns, they are tired of losses forever! Profitability is a real word! You can’t just make up the terms anymore! Money doesn’t grow on trees, unless you are Adam Neumann!

Uber became a global multibillion-dollar phenomenon for two reasons:

1. It offered a superior product to traditional taxi companies

2. It sold that product at an impossibly cheap price

The story is of course more complicated than that, but if you had to boil it down to the absolute basics, it would be those. Uber had a great idea (a ride, at the touch of a button) and it made that service available to the masses at an impossibly low price. I say “impossibly” because the fares Uber charged for most of its first 10 years in business were only made possible by venture capital subsidies and immense corporate losses. The cheap Uber rides that many grew to know and love in the 2010s didn’t actually reflect the real costs of operating Uber’s business, but the company’s kept fares low anyway to make Uber popular and entrench its global ride-hailing position.

We have now entered a new era. The post-pandemic era. The Dara Khosrowshahi era. The inflation era. The guys-we-gotta-stop-losing-so-much-money era. Uber needs to be profitable and you can only wring so much cost-savings out of efficiency. The rest has to come from raising prices, which the company has been doing for the last few years. The result is that Uber rides are no longer uber-cheap, nor are they always cheaper than that asshole named taxi. Uber admitted as much when it began partnering with taxi firms last year, telling customers they should expect to pay roughly the same for a taxi ride booked through the platform as an UberX.

I would guess this is especially true on rides to and from the airport, which cab companies tend to offer at flat rates, and ride-hail firms often price extortionately. And maybe that makes sense. People who travel to the airport probably have more disposable income, since they are traveling somewhere. People who travel to the airport by Uber are usually choosing to pay more for the convenience of that mode. Airport trips include a lot of business customers who are less price sensitive. You can charge a good premium for all of that.

The other data point I’ll add here is that while Uber brought back shared rides last June, in cities including New York, and recently announced it would be “doubling down” on UberX Share, shared rides have as far as I can tell still not reappeared in their most obvious use-case: to and from the airport. This brings me to the second time I called a cab, on the other end of my trip. I was flying back to London from JFK and planning to get there by public transport, until I looked at the train schedule and realized my flight was too early to take LIRR, the local commuter train. Instead of slogging for two hours on the subway, I decided to pay a premium to take a car to the airport. Once again, I checked Uber, which again offered me an uber-high fare quote and no shared ride option. Once again, I did a quick survey of livery firms and within 15 minutes had made a booking—online, this time—with Carmel Limo.

I don’t remember what Uber and Lyft quoted me, but I’m sure that the $67.50 plus tip I paid Carmel was significantly cheaper. My driver showed up 15 minutes early, at which point I was still asleep, but was nice about waiting until our arranged time. We made excellent time to JFK, which turned out to be a blessing because that airport is such a goddamn nightmare. My first choice transport mode will always be public transport, but if I need a ride to the airport in New York again I wouldn’t hesitate to book with Carmel. (Also, they have a referral code program too! The VC influence is pervasive! Use mine: 1789930.)

And hey, if you’re an Uber person, that’s fine, do what makes you happy. If you’d rather stick with one app than shop around or pick up the phone to call some car services, maybe because you just don’t need one more thing to do, maybe because the idea of making a phone call drives fear into your heart like an arrow (if the latter, you are definitely British), then that’s also ok. I just want you to know that while the ride-hail apps would prefer you forget another way exists, there is another way. It is slower and more old-fashioned and while not actually very old can feel positively antiquated in a world of on-demand services. But it’s real. It works. It might even be better. I want you to know that you, too, can call a cab.