[joosters]

These companies have existed for how long?

It was you who chose it as a measure of success for the company! It'd be difficult to find any examples even if the scope was widened to include bike hire schemes, which have been around for almost a decade.

I agree that it'd be great if we could switch from using cars, however I'm not sure that scooter hire companies are the way to do this. Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters? The answer isn't clear, but I'm worried because of the excessive waste generated by the cycle hire companies like Mobike and Ofo. I expect we'll see the same problems with the scooter hire companies too.

[weber111]

> Wouldn't it be better and less wasteful if people owned scooters?

Isn't the, well, _whole point_ of the sharing economy to reduce waste by not having everyone own things they only use some of the time?

[joosters]

Yes, but the costs might prove to be too high. For example, if people owned their own, they wouldn't need people driving around town collecting scooters to recharge, and then driving them back to a drop-off point. Likewise, rented scooters probably have a far shorter lifetime due to theft, harsh treatment, abandonment and so on.

[icebraining]

Yet electric scooters existed before these services started, and there was no major uptake of their ownership comparable to their current rented use, as far as I know. Which implies that alternative is not real.