How Santa Monica, the birthplace of dockless electric scooters, is shaping the multibillion-dollar industry A year ago, a warehouse filled with rows of electric scooters might have seemed a little dorky, maybe home to a company trying to show fanny pack-wearing tourists local landmarks. But today, in Santa Monica, California, an old industrial space filled with hundreds of electric scooters with purple and pink stripes represents one of the hottest innovations in urban transportation.
Lyft set up this operations center as part of its bet that the future of the company involves replacing lots of car trips with rides on electric scooters and electric bikes. Eventually, a Lyft spokesperson told me, the idea is to create a ?Netflix of transportation,? offering scooter, e-bike, and car rides with a single subscription, as well as guidance to link trips to public transit. A late entrant into the dockless scooter craze, Lyft is doing its best to catch up. This facility is the first of what the company, valued at $15 billion, expects will be a string of scooter depots, repair and recovery operations for the company?s foray into micromobility. As a participant in Santa Monica?s electric scooter pilot, the company is allowed to place 250 scooters on the street at any one time. Everything else happens under this roof. (The company provided an exclusive tour on the condition the warehouse location wasn?t revealed.)
Inside empty offices on the second floor, piles of scooters si...