Tag: Bird scooters

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Bird Says Riders Spent $1.1M Here This Year

Credit: Bird

Bird, the electric scooter company, said Memphis riders had a $1.1 million economic impact on the city this year. 

(Credit: Bird)

The company’s end-of-year report says Bird riders spent $100 million in cities that have the scooters. By riding instead of driving, Bird riders also saved 1.1 million gallons of gas this year, the company said.    

(Credit: Bird)

As for spending, the company said incremental spending, especially on food and beverage, was higher in cities that have Birds versus those who don’t. 

“All the data points to the same conclusion: e-scooters drive consumer spending and likely provide a significant financial boon to local economies,” said study co-author Daniel McCarthy, an assistant professor of marketing at Emory University. “Obviously cities have many factors to consider when choosing to partner with Bird or others in the micromobility industry, but the economic benefit to local businesses should not be understated.” 

Female ridership in Memphis was 41 percent this year. 

In another trend seen in 2021, Bird says more women are riding its scooters, especially in the Southeast. Female ridership in Memphis was 41 percent this year. 

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News News Blog

City Looks to Expand Scooter, Bike Fleet

CREDIT: Facebook

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Three little Birds

More shareable bikes and scooters could hit the streets here soon, as the city looks to increase shared-mobility options. 

As a part of its new permanent shared mobility program, the city said Monday that it plans to add to the current shared-mobility fleet here and is issuing a call for applications from shared mobility companies that want to operate here.

After conducting a shared mobility pilot phase over the past year with Bird, Lime, and Explore Bike Share (EBS), the city will form a permanent Shared Mobility Program here. The program will instate long term operating regulations that “reflect national best practices within this emerging and rapidly growing field,” the city said. This will replace the interim operating agreement each of the three operators have had since they launched here.

Together Bird, Lime, and EBS maintain around 1,750 scooters and bikes here. The city wants to bring that number up to 3,000 during the first year of the shared mobility program by allowing a total of three to five companies to operate in the city.

Companies will be chosen based on their “demonstrated experience, organizational and technological capacities, and alignment with the goals of the city’s shared mobility program.”

Operators have until the end of April to apply. The city hopes to add the new selected companies by June.


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News News Blog

City Removes Lime Scooters

CREDIT: Toby Sells

Toby Sells

A Lime scooter on Main Street.

City crews began removing Lime scooters from Memphis streets Monday morning, according to city officials, and as for the company’s future here, according to a spokesman for the mayor’s office, ”we’re really going to just have to see how the process goes.”

Lime, a tech and transportation company based in San Mateo, Calif., left its electric scooters on Memphis streets Friday morning. The move came with no warning to citizens and, apparently, no permission from city leaders.

In a statement issued from Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s office late Friday, the scooters were to be removed if the company didn’t come and get them. It didn’t, and the city began rounding up the scooters Monday morning, according to Dan Springer, Strickland’s deputy director for media affairs.

“The ordinance clearly spells out that in order to deploy shared mobility assets, a permit needs to be applied for and an operating agreement with the city entered into,” Springer said. “Lime ignored that statement.”
[pullquote-1] The threat to remove Lime’s scooters had some scratching their heads, wondering if the city was playing favorites with Bird, the company’s competitor. Commercial Appeal columnist Ryan Poe said in his column, The 901, on Monday that “blocking Lime while letting Bird continue to spread its wings isn’t just unfair — it sends a message to the world that Memphis is closed to competition.”

Springer said city officials have been talking with Lime for “a while now.” Though, they have been doing ”everything they need to do,” Lime does not have a permit and does not have a temporary operating agreement with the city like Bird does.

Bird started with 200 scooters here and now has north of 600. Under that company’s agreement, it cannot expand unless it provides proof that ridership demands it. Springer said, “They are not currently hitting that number. The market is not ready for growth yet.”
[pullquote-2] Springer said this kind of a shared mobility network — the scooters hanging around everywhere — is still in a test phase. Whether or not a company other than Bird can be part of that test is still unknown, Springer said, as is Lime’s future here.

“We’re really going to just have to see how the process goes,” Springer said. “They’ve not demonstrated that they are wiling to play by the rules thus far.”

Kemp Conrad, a Memphis City Council member instrumental in Bird’s arrival in Memphis, said it’s the administration’s job to decide how many scooter operators the city can have, not the council’s.
[pullquote-3] As for the administration, “We don’t have anything against Lime or anything like that,” Springer said.

“When the city is satisfied that safety and right-of-way issues have been adequately addressed by the pilot, the city will consider expanding the scooter fleet with other shared mobility providers,” he said.

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Opinion The Last Word

Buses, Bikes, & Birds: Fixing Memphis’ Transportation Issues

CREDIT: Facebook

It’s hard to miss the new shiny toys popping up around town. The shareable Birds and bikes are cool, and I’m sure they earn the city a few extra bucks, while making Memphis more attractive to tourists. But the real question we should be asking is: Are the new shared-mobility options equitable and accessible for Memphians that live beyond the city’s core?

The answer is — for a few reasons — probably not. Let’s start with the bikes, which, apart from a few stations located near Orange Mound and South Memphis, are concentrated in Midtown and Downtown, like most of the city’s amenities.

This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if the mission of Explore Bike Share (EBS) was not to “implement a bike-sharing program for the benefit of the general public with access to as many Memphians as possible.”

You simply can’t reach as many Memphians as possible if you’re only operating in certain neighborhoods. Next year, 300 more bikes are slated to join the fleet, and it would only make sense that these are dispersed at stations in low-access neighborhoods where residents actually need transportation, if in fact, EBS is committed to being easy, accessible, and affordable.

Even if the bikes do extend into lower-income neighborhoods, a smartphone and credit card is required to rent one. What about the population of Memphians who don’t own those? There has to be a real effort to make these amenities truly accessible to not only the people who want them, but also to the ones who need them.

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Three little Birds

Especially in a city like Memphis, with a huge wealth gap, there should be intentionality by the people in charge to level the playing field. If the city is going to endorse new programs like bike sharing, then isn’t it also the city’s responsibility to ensure that people on both ends of the income scale can access and use them?

Adequate and reliable transportation for everyone is a key piece of equality in any city. Vehicle ownership is expensive, and to get from place to place, people without cars here are forced to rely on their own two feet and the city’s transit system, which clearly has room to grow. It is no secret that Memphis’ public transportation system is lacking in many ways and needs improvement.

If you compare the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) to systems in other cities, well, there really is no comparison. Buses in Memphis don’t come frequently enough for most people to depend on them to get to school, work, and other necessary places. People have to wait up to an hour for a bus that ideally should be coming every 15 minutes.

I will give it to Gary Rosenfeld, MATA’s CEO, though. Since he took on the role about a year ago, he’s been pushing and advocating for a better transit system. One of the main obstacles standing in the way of MATA being a high-quality system is its lack of funding. For MATA to operate at the level it needs to, an additional $35 million would be needed each year.

If MATA can secure that funding, frequency on 70 percent of its routes would increase, reducing the wait time for passengers and bringing more — and useful — frequent service in close proximity to 70,000 additional people. With additional funding, MATA could also increase the number of people with access to service by 5 percent and bring transportation service to about 100,000 jobs in the city.

Rosenfeld recently said that maximizing the effectiveness of all social initiatives and programs implemented to address poverty or unemployment in the city relies on the effectiveness of the transit system.

He’s right. Creating new jobs and opportunities here is a solid step forward, but at the same time, people have to be able to access these opportunities on a consistent basis. Most often, the people who are in need of these programs and jobs are also the ones who lack transportation.

As Rosenfeld also said, good transportation provides mobility, equality, and increases the quality of life in a community. Whether it be buses, Birds, or bikes, access to transportation must improve in order for all Memphians to be able to live to their fullest potential. That’s for their benefit — and for the benefit of the entire community.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Welcome to It City

CREDIT: Lawcain | Dreamstime.com

A few short years ago, once you got south of Earnestine & Hazel’s on South Main, you entered a barren urbanscape of abandoned warehouses, dusty railyards, and weedy, empty lots. Now the streets are lined with row after row of apartment buildings. Hip restaurants like Loflin Yard and Carolina Watershed are repurposing old industrial spaces in creative ways. South of South Main is booming, inhabited by thousands of mostly young Memphians who live, work, and play Downtown.

Will it last? Can a neighborhood built on young folks wanting to live Downtown sustain itself? Well, it can, but only if there is a steady stream of fresh young folks wanting to live there in the coming years. Here’s hoping there is. Otherwise, well, that’s a lot of apartments to fill.

That’s because as those young Memphians grow older, they’ll form relationships and maybe — as tends to happen — decide to have children. At that point, they’ll usually want the customary accoutrements of family living: a house, a yard, a mutt.

The closest neighborhoods to Downtown are already feeling the pressure of the influx — from Downtown and from older suburbanites moving in. If you want to buy a home in Midtown, East Memphis, Cooper-Young, etc., you’d better be pre-approved for your loan and be ready to pounce when a house you like comes on the market. Memphis’ core is a hot housing market right now.

In recognition of that, developers are moving in, buying distressed properties, doing teardowns, and putting up two or more new houses on what were once single-family lots. These new homes are often what are called “tall skinnies,” because, well, that’s what they are. Another name for them is “infill homes,” and they are going up all over Cooper-Young and elsewhere in Midtown. (The Flyer‘s Toby Sells has done numerous stories on infill housing, with more to come soon.)

On the plus side, more housing is being created in core city neighborhoods, meaning a bunch of fresh residents, bringing more businesses, new restaurants and retail, and, hopefully, new students for neighborhood schools. On the down side, there is a danger our old neighborhoods will lose their historic charm as older homes get torn down, trees get removed, and residential parking gets more difficult. Try finding a parking spot around the new Nashville export, Hattie B’s, on Cooper.

In fact, if you want to see where all this could be going, drive up to East Nashville and behold the glut of tall skinnies on street after street. Behold the young hipsters with strollers. Behold the bicyclists and coffee shops. Behold the new urbania. It’s coming, for better and for worse.

In Memphis, all the attendant paraphernalia of an “It City” — the bike lanes, the bike-share program, the Bird scooters, the moving of musicians here from Austin and Nashville, the booming South Main, Overton Square, Crosstown, Broad Avenue, and Cooper-Young entertainment/restaurant districts, the Railgartens and Urban Outfitters and Hattie B’s — it’s all developing under our very noses. Something’s happening here, Mr. Jones, and we’d better pay attention.

Case in point: We’re increasingly seeing plans for new apartment buildings springing up in Midtown, with the city offering the usual PILOT plans to “encourage” developers by allowing them to avoid taxes for an agreed-upon period of time. Whether or not those deals make sense is an open question. What shouldn’t be in question is a requirement that in order to get a PILOT, developers should have to build structures that reflect the character of the surrounding neighborhood.

Traditional Midtown apartment buildings — the Gilmore, the Kimbrough, the Knickerbocker, the apartment buildings along Poplar near Overton Park — seamlessly integrate with the cityscape and their neighborhoods. In contrast, many of the new apartment designs being given PILOTs are stark, cheap-looking boxes, seemingly built only to take advantage of the housing boom with no consideration of the visual impact on the character of our historic streetscapes.

Again, go visit Nashville — specifically, the Gulch, just south of Downtown — if you want to see how quickly these cheap-looking boxes can redefine the character of a neighborhood. Memphis needs to put serious design restrictions and guidelines in place before giving out tax breaks to developers.

If we don’t do it, “It” is going to do us.

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Flyer How To: Let’s Ride the Bird

Flyer How To: Let’s Ride the Bird

You’ve probably seen folks riding those Bird scooters by now. I rode one over the weekend. They are a total blast. And they could be a good transportation option, depending on where you’re headed.

I took a scooter out for a spin today at lunch to show you how they work. I got some side eye from motorists and pedestrians alike. But I definitely pumped up the eye-rolliness of the thing by shooting a GoPro on a selfie stick.