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Scoot: The Zipcar for Scooters

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I am actually surprised this idea took this long to come to fruition, but someone has finally built a “Zipcar for scooters” business. For those not familiar with the idea, Scoot promises to offer urban commuters convenient access to its network of electric scooters that it has parked around in major metropolitan areas. From what we can gather, the idea is that members of the Scoot community pay a monthly fee to have access to these scooters (in addition to the hourly-usage rate), and can use the Scoot scooters around to run errands in cities like San Francisco.

Scoot hopes to augment the way urban-dwellers approach transportation on two wheels, much in the same vein as companies like Zipcar have done for four-wheeled commuters. While Zipcar has been relatively successful in dense-packed cities (the real killer-app here has been Zipcar’s dedicated parking spots, and ability to give car-less residents an easy option to escape the city on the weekend), it will be interesting to see if the model completely transfers over to the scooter/motorcycle world.

Obvious barriers exist like getting urbanites to adopt the moped-like scooters over other methods of transportation, especially with the perceived dangers that comes with riding a scooter/motorcycle in a city environment (yet they’ll ride their fixies through the Finance District, no problem).

Recently securing $550,000 in funding, Scoot hopes to take its private beta here in San Francisco onto a larger public scale, as well as include other metropolitan areas. Could this be your new form of transportation for when you need to pick up a gallon of milk at the grocery store? Only time will tell.

Source: TechCrunch

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