Wheels Labs, which first brought its e-bikes to Austin in November last year, is re-launching here, as well as in Dallas, San Diego and its hometown of Los Angeles.
The company pulled its e-bikes from the market amid the pandemic a few months ago, as Austin and other cities enacted stay-at-home orders and fear of spreading the coronavirus on surfaces led to questions for scooter and bike rental companies.
While the pandemic remains, with Texas hitting its highest number of Covid-19 hospitalizations ever this week, the company is back with a batch of new safety measures. It has new self-sanitizing handlebars and brake levers, which come from a partnership with NanoSeptic. And it's adding baskets to its bikes to make them easier to use for shopping and other errands.
The company has also pledged to donate all proceeds from the 8 minutes and 46 seconds of all riders' first rides through June 17 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and other nonprofits and groups advocating for change following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. (The 8 minute, 46 second timeframe references how long a police officer had his knee to the neck of Floyd.)
Wheels' re-launch in Austin comes amid a lot of ups and downs for the scooter and e-bike industries.
During March 2019, which is when SXSW took place, dockless bike rental companies reported 51,205 rides during the month -- with an average trip of 1.6 miles. In March this year, as the pandemic became headline news and SXSW was canceled, bicycle trips plummeted to 7,079, with an average ride of 1.7 miles, according to city data.
In April, when stay-at-home orders were in place, there were 0 trips logged on bikes. The same was true for May, city data shows. And so far, there's no data for June.
But scooters are a little different story.
Austin's public data show that during March last year, with SXSW raging and no coronavirus to spoil the fun, there were 689,271 dockless e-scooter trips, with an average trip of about one mile -- or 13 minutes. At the time, the city had 19,442 scooters known to be on its streets.
Flash forward to February this year, the last month before the pandemic became a part of our daily lives, 243,023 scooter trips were logged, with an average ride of about a mile -- or 11.5 minutes.
At the time, there were 10,018 scooters on the streets, so you can already see how many scooters vanished as compared to during SXSW a year prior. That's a 48% decrease in available scooters even before stay-at-home orders.
Then, in March this year, as news of the pandemic set in, total trips plummeted to 152,016, though the average trip went up to 1.2 miles or roughly 12 minutes. That's a 78% year-over-year decrease, with the absence of SXSW perhaps being the biggest factor.
As stay-at-home orders became the norm in April, things got really rough for scooter companies -- 10,551 trips, with an average of 2 miles and 16.4 minutes. And there were only 1,406 scooters on the streets.
But things are turning around, just a bit.
In May, the city tallied nearly 20,000 trips, with. 2.3 mile average -- or 18.5 minutes. The city showed 1,931 scooters on the streets that month. And June appears to be on pace to exceed that -- we have nearly 8,000 trips as of Wednesday and a total of 2,042 scooters out there in the wild.
For some companies, the pandemic has caused outright shutdowns. For others, it's been a time to reduce fleets and offer free, short trip usage for health care workers.
In late April, Lime relaunched its scooters with discounts for health care workers. Bird had a similar program, called Local Heroes, that allowed folks to nominate people helping fight the virus and its impacts for the hero award and a free scooter. Lyft in April also launched its LyftUp program to give health care workers free rides.
At the end of April, Lyft laid off nearly 1,000 of its employees and furloughed 288 more as it dealt with a massive drop in users during the pandemic. It wasn't clear how many Austin employees were impacted, but the company shut down its scooter operations here, as well as San Jose and Oakland. Their remaining markets, at that time, were Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Monica and Washington, D.C.
In the last week of May, Spin, an e-scooter company owned by Ford, said it put about 240 of its scooters back out on city streets in downtown, East Side, East Riverside and South Austin. It re-launched offering free rides for health care workers.
While scooters are reemerging. There's still a lot of room for growth.
As of May 19, the city showed there were 9,000 permits available for scooters and other shared micromobility providers.
