Bird, the E-Scooter Sharing Service, Accessed by App, to Double its Fleet in NYC

 By Yehudit Garmaise

Bird, the e-scooter sharing service, is planning to double the size of fleet in New York City, as the weather warms up, according to businesswire.com.

The Bird e-scooters, which customers rent by using a smartphone app, are picked up and dropped off at safe sites on the streets.

While scooter-sharing services are common on the West Coast, they are catching on in New York City, where average ridership of e-scooters increased by nearly 70% in March compared to February.

Bird’s announcement coincides with the plan of the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT) plan to further expand its e-scooter pilot, to “reduce our dependency on automobiles,” said Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez.

After first working as an executive at Lyft in 2013, and then Uber from 2014 to 2016, Travis VanderZanden, Bird’s CEO, launched the first e-scooter company in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2017.

By 2019, people in 120 cities worldwide were renting e-scooters from Bird, which is valued at $2 billion.

Photo Credit: Flickr