[ryan_lane]

Bird was doomed from the very start, as they aimed to only be a scooter company.

Scooter operations shut down for nearly half the year in most markets due to the winter, and in those markets they either have to pay employees or lay them off (bird did the latter) once a year. They still have to store the scooters during that time, and they need to have scaled operations for their entire market.

Bike rentals tend to be shut down far shorter periods of time in the winter, and ridesharing doesn't shut down. This allows other companies providing bikes/scooters to move their operations around to other business units when they shut down their scooter unit.

As a whole the scooters make less sense than bikes. If we're going to subsidize something, it should be bike sharing (which _is_ somewhat government subsidized btw).