The Gig is Up!
By: Link Superpedestrian
Tags: Employees, Transportation, Micromobility, Scooters, Urban Planning

It should come as no surprise that protecting thousands of free-floating e-scooters across a city is not easy. “Loss rate” — scooters that are irrevocably broken, stolen, or abandoned at the bottom of lakes and rivers — is a make-or-break KPI for shared e-scooter operators. Reducing loss rate is critical to achieving profitability, as well as ensuring the reliability and overall sustainability of a shared scooter service.

“You can train people about the scooter. It’s harder to find people who truly understand that the way we manage our fleet touches every single member of a community” — Jennifer Izzo, Director of Market Operations, North America

A year ago, monthly loss rates were reportedly as high as 10% among some operators. That’s tens of thousands of scooters permanently lost, damaged, or scrapped each and every month. Today, many operators consider a loss rate of 4 or 5% a cause for celebration.

After six months of operation, the loss rate of Superpedestrian’s LINK fleet is a remarkable 0.87% — by far the lowest in the industry.

I recently sat down via Zoom with three members of Superpedestrian’s Operations Team to figure out how they’ve managed to keep LINK’s loss rate so low.

Bill Knapp, Superpedestrian’s VP of Operations, is an industry veteran who has managed large fleets for Car2Go andJump. He attributes much of Superpedestrian’s success to the scooter’s tamper-deterring design, noting that consumer model fleets are easy targets for thieves who retrofit and resell the scooters on Facebook or Craigslist. “LINK is a scooter built for shared use, with hardware and software features that deter vandalism and theft, including unique component features that make hacking and retrofitting very difficult,” says Bill.

But improved scooter hardware and software are only a small part of the answer. The most important factor is the people behind the scenes. Superpedestrian’s approach is unique in the industry; rather than rely on gig workers, we only employ full-time and part-time W2 workers. Not only is this the right thing to do by our employees, but it also makes all the difference to our successful operations.

Bill lays it out. “Holding on to our scooters has as much or more to do with the people who manage our fleets. Behind all of these fleet performance indicators is a team’s ability to continuously learn, institutionalize, and apply new lessons. You just can’t successfully run a fleet of thousands of scooters across a big city with an itinerant work force. You can fake it for a few months, maybe even a year, but ultimately you find that cutting corners and failing to invest in permanent staff comes back to bite you.”

Jennifer Izzo, Superpedestrian’s Director of Market Operations for North America, echoes Bill’s point about the value of permanent, invested staff. “While some operating procedures apply across all cities, ultimately, market success is all about local knowledge,” says Jennifer. “And because that knowledge is something that accrues over time, it is very hard to gain and retain it when you are using gig labor.”

Andres Giraldo, a Regional Manager who, like Jennifer, has several years of experience operating shared bike and scooter fleets across the U.S., adds, “Independent contractors just don’t have the same investment. Our employees treat LINK scooters like the prized possessions they are, and they go the extra mile to make sure every missing scooter is recovered. ‘No Scooter Left Behind’ is what we say and what we do.”

Andres and Jennifer emphasized that the gig incentive structure doesn’t make sense for operating a sustainable and reliable shared e-scooter fleet. When people are paid per task, they have no incentive to take on the more time consuming pursuits, like tracking a lost scooter via a Craigslist ad, or picking up a scooter from an abandoned gravel mine an hour away. They add that when hiring they look for local knowledge first, micromobility experience second. “You can train people about the scooter. It’s harder to find people who truly understand that the way we manage our fleet touches every single member of a community,” adds Jennifer.

Superpedestrian’s deep operational know-how builds upon ten years of experience. Zagster, a micromobility company that Superpedestrian acquired in April, 2020, successfully operated more than 250 shared vehicle fleets in cities across the US. “Zagster was running successful and profitable bikeshare systems long before the Silicon Valley-funded micromobility boom, and figured out how to track, maintain, and rebalance thousands of vehicles,” says Bill. In addition to adopting Zagster’s commitment to investing in and sustaining a permanent workforce, Superpedestrian also inherited Wrangler — a proprietary piece of software that tracks vehicles and optimizes rebalancing, ultimately maximizing rides and minimizing operating costs.

Superpedestrian aims to set the new gold standard for the industry, and hopes other companies will follow-suit. Jennifer is hopeful: “Cities and competitors alike are starting to notice. When you treat workers as worthy of investment and time, that is how they treat the company, and the assets that they manage.”