Bike-pooling and self-cleaning car floors
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how complex technology gets, there's always the question of what to do the garbage
Hello and welcome to Oversharing, a newsletter about the sharing economy. If you’re returning from last time, thanks! If you’re new, nice to have you!
I’ll be in SF for a few days in late September and thought it could be fun to have some sort of Oversharing meetup/drinks outing. If you’ll also be around SF then and would be interested in that, kindly fill out this Google form so I can get a sense of numbers. Also, send me your favorite bars/pubs/beer gardens/burrito spots! Contrary to what Brits will tell you, there are no good burritos in England and the main Mexican chain is spelled Wahaca, which should be some sort of crime.
Bike-pooling.
Here is a Bloomberg CityLab story about an upcoming UCLA project to get people in LA to ‘bike-pool.’ The basic idea is that cycling in car-worshipping Los Angeles can be very dangerous, with few protected bike lanes and 276 cyclists killed in traffic from 2011 to 2020, but that as they say there’s safety in numbers—so what if you got a bunch of people to cycle together? The pilot program, called the Civic Bicycle Commuting research project or CiBic, is due to start Oct. 1 with residents of Northeast LA. There’s a smartphone app and an Instagram and a pretty good-looking website where you can sign up to participate through November.
The app will match bike commuters together in groups of up to 12 according to routes and arrival times, similar to carpooling. Each group or ‘pod’ of cyclists in the pilot will be escorted by two paid ‘stewards’—experienced riders who prioritize safety over speed. The pod will try to travel with two cyclists side by side to take up the entire lane, creating what CiBic calls ‘human infrastructure’ in the absence of physical cycle lane infrastructure from the city. “We’re a car, basically—we take up the lane, we stop at every stop light, we respect every rule of the road,” Fabian Wagmister, an associate professor at UCLA and founder and principal investigator of CiBic, told CityLab.
CiBic is backed by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Civic Innovation Challenge. First-time riders will get a $50 cash incentive from the LA Country transport authority, and riders can earn additional bonuses for completing rides. The pilot is focused on lower-income communities of color, where nearly 75% of respondents to a CiBic survey said they drive to commute distances of less than 5 miles. In other words, this is a sweet spot for converting to cycling or some other mode of micromobility, which tends to focus on passenger trips of less than 5 miles (8 km). Soaring gas prices are also widely expected to push more commuters toward cheaper, more sustainable modes of transport and could hit lower-income commuters especially hard.
While it’s too early to say how CiBic will pan out, the project provides an interesting study of what a community-inspired cycling program looks like compared to when a for-profit company leads the charge. You’d think, for example, that it would be simple enough for an Uber or Lyft to offer a bike-pooling mode on their app—matching supply and demand and pairing people with similar routes and ETAs is these companies’ bread and butter, after all—but for whatever reason, a feature like this has never been prioritized. Privately run micromobility services have also tended to overlook or avoid underserved communities, focusing instead on affluent, largely white urban commuters who can afford their high rental prices. CiBic, by contrast, has a clear focus on sustainability, transport equity, and community-building. This is a program designed to create a lasting and affordable shift in transit modes, rather than to build consumer habits and reliance through venture-capital funded subsidies.
Elsewhere in corporate-led commuting initiatives, Google’s Waze is shutting down its carpool service after six years. Waze blamed changing commuting patterns from the pandemic, though with carpool making a comeback thanks to vaccines, lower case numbers, a covid-weary society, and high gas prices, and with the need to reduce car usage as great as ever, you have to wonder if there was a profit motive involved.
FOL.
Adam Neumann just can’t stop Adam Neumanning:
When staff at real estate startup Alfred arrived at work last Monday morning, they were surprised to discover that their largest investor, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann, appeared to have started a rival company — and raised $350 million to compete against them
Flow, Neumann’s splashy but mysterious new real estate venture, was aiming to build “the future of living,” influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in a blog post announcing the investment. Alfred’s motto — “welcome to the future of living” — sounded uncomfortably similar.
Neumann — who still owns about 10% of WeWork, the coworking company he cofounded in 2010 — helped New York-based Alfred with a $20 million capital injection at the start of the pandemic, and then invested again in 2022. Through his family office 166 2nd Financial Services, Neumann representatives held two board seats at Alfred from October 2020 until May 2022.
Alfred was founded in 2014, the peak of the Uber-for-X era, an on-demand concierge for wealthy millennials. In the beginning Alfred used an app to offer household services like laundry and grocery delivery, then later started partnering with landlords at fancy buildings to provide its services as an amenity. (An investor once described the gig/Uber-for-X companies to me as a collective effort by tech bros to replace their mom, and honestly I still think that’s a pretty apt description.) Forbes reports that Neumann originally invested in Alfred in a manner that gave him a path to taking control of the company, but was forced to give up those terms so that Alfred could complete a $125 million raise this past March. It was shortly after then that, according to Forbes, Neumann began to distance himself from Alfred and begin building out his future of living (FOL) competitor, Flow, which two weeks ago received a $350 million check from Andreessen Horowitz.
I’m may I say ~super pumped~ to have WSJ reporter and The Cult of We co-author Eliot Brown joining me this week to chat about all things We and Adam Neumann in a podcast for paid Oversharing subscribers. Look out for that interview this weekend, upgrade your subscription to listen, and by all means, buy Eliot’s book.
Money goes puff.
Instant delivery startup GoPuff is seeking a $300 million line of credit despite having already raised some $1.5 billion to deliver snacks, groceries, and alcohol to customers in 30 minutes or less. The Wall Street Journal reports that GoPuff burned through $400 million in the first quarter of 2022, leaving it with about $1.5 billion in cash, or enough to last slightly beyond the end of the year at that burn rate. Daniel Folkman, Gopuff’s senior vice president of business, told the Journal that the company has since reduced its cash burn by firing people and shuttering dozens of warehouses, which, while definitely one way to cut costs, is perhaps not the most promising move for a company that aspires to deliver in an instant by having a comprehensive network of dark stores and micro-fulfillment centers. GoPuff postponed a planned IPO earlier this year and laid off 1,500 workers as the tech market cratered. Co-founder Rafael Ilishayev told Yahoo Finance in June that the company was “very, very profitable” in its core markets and had “enough cash to wait for years,” which based on everything we know about GoPuff and the economics of instant delivery seems like an extremely optimistic interpretation of the company’s financial situation.
Magic clean.
A lot of the problems that come up when you talk about driverless cars are highly technical, but some of the biggest challenges are much more mundane. Like, for instance, how do you keep a robotaxi clean between trips when there isn’t a person driving it? According to a patent application filed by GM, one option is to give the autonomous vehicle a self-cleaning floor:
The GM patent would create a sort of conveyor belt in the passenger section of the vehicle that would rotate and dump waste in a collection tray when the car sensed that no passengers were inside. The patent drawing appears to show this with a banana peel [36] though it notes that waste items “may consist of but are not limited to food items, garbage and trash, liquids, ice, snow, mud or dirt, and the like.” It’s a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how complex technology gets there will always be the question of what to do with the garbage. It’s as true in New York as in self-driving cars as in that implausible Death Star trash compactor.
Other stuff.
Just Eat Takeaway sells stake in Brazil’s iFood for up to $1.8 billion. Restaurant outsourcing startup Bite Ninja raises $11.3 million. Tier Mobility lays off 180 people. YouTube removes videos of Tesla drivers using their own children to conduct vehicle safety tests. Instacart starts delivering bulky non-food items. Bird fleet manager in LA makes $4,500 a month. The ‘nuclear option’ in L.A.’s war to rein in the mighty car, make streets safe. FreshDirect exits Philly, Washington D.C. NYC Wants To Get Serious About Trash Containerization. Carveouts to NYC congestion pricing debated. Denver shifts funds away from road expansion and toward public transit, walking, and cycling. California to Ban the Sale of New Gasoline Cars. Oakland plans e-bike lending program. California seeks public input in crafting e-bike incentives. California lawmakers approve landmark fast food workers bill. Boulder could raise disposable bag fee. Boston seeks to ban fossil fuels in new buildings. Brussels breaks up with the car. Electric Scooter Revolution Faces a Reckoning in Stockholm. Uber Eats goes back to school. Manufacturers will be liable for autonomous vehicle accidents in the UK. U.S. Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965. Demand-responsive transit replacing buses in some U.S. cities. Can Technology Help Cities Manage Curbs Better?
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Building on the theme "Uber-for-X is just tech bros replacing their Moms... I've heard two others:
1. Uber-for-X or more broadly "appification" is a way to shift labor paid for in the past by FIRMS, to their CUSTOMERS, by cloaking the free labor in the language of agency or control or freedom. No need to pay a travel agent, you can do all the booking work yourself, without pay, on your airline app! Or hotel app, etc. I know car dealers are thrilled that they no longer have to pay salespeople to educate the customer, who on average has spent 10 or so hours of unremunerated work online researching cars. All this work is now done by customers, who haven't even noticed the burdrn shifted to them. This invisible shift of work to users without them noticing or being paid I think is massive.
2. Uber-for-X is a way to avoid engaging with people Tech nerds traditionally have been horrible introverts. (Old joke: How can you tell an extrovert coder from an introvert? The former looks at YOUR shoes while he talks to you.) So devise apps that allow reduced social interaction. You don't have to talk to the cab driver if you've already told the app where you're going, and thank God you don't have to face her when you tip (if you tip), later, after she's driven away. No chatting with the waiter, just order the food. No talking to the desk clerk, just punch the access code to your AirBnB.