I was in Berlin a couple of weeks ago and there appear to be at least half a dozen bicycle and scooter networks in the city. This makes for a terrible experience because you have to sort of guess which network you might want to use and if that one doesn’t have equipment nearby try another one. It also means that usage of equipment on any one network is far below what it could be resulting in lots of bikes and scooters sitting around on sidewalks.
What should be done instead? Cities should get together and publish an interoperability standard that every bike and scooter sharing company needs to adhere to. Then as an enduser, I could pull up a single app (either by one of the networks or by a third party provider) and see + book all available equipment.
This would mean that equipment providers would have to compete on the quality of their equipment (e.g. comfort, safety) instead of who has raised the most money to build the densest network themselves. It would also allow cities to have an easy birds-eye view of total capacity, utilization, etc. – which is the type of information needed for intelligent planning and regulation (eg where should the city create more bike and scooter lanes).
I believe a similar approach would work well for ridesharing networks, such as Uber, Lyft, myTaxi and others.
