
New micromobility service – pogo stick sharing
A Swedish company, Cangoroo decided that our already-quite overcrowded cities needed a new mode of transportation – shared pogo sticks. If you had to watch out for e-scooters and bikes before, now you might have to check your surroundings for people choosing to jump to their destination. Cangoroo announced that it will be bringing between 100 and 200 pogo sticks to an unsurprising choice market, San Francisco. Before that the new mode of transportation will be deployed in Swedish cities of Malmo and Stockholm. The company markets pogo sticks as a fitness-focussed alternative to e-scooters, as the pogo sticks will be mechanical. The price is very accessible – $1 to start and $0.30 per minute after that.
Sudden influx of micromobility services like bike- and e-scooter-sharing has already caused some backlash in some markets like West coast US, as cities become overcrowded with bikes and scooters. The company’s founders hope that pogo sticks are the answer to overcrowded micromobility market, where it can be hard to distinguish between offers of various companies.
GM scales back Maven
GM’s car sharing service Maven will be exiting from eight American cities. That is almost half of the cities the service operates in now. The locations where the service will be terminated haven’t been named yet but the spokesperson from the company noted that GM conducted market-by-market analysis and decided to focus on cities with high demand and growth opportunities. Maven Gig, a service that rents vehicles to ride-sharing and delivery drivers like Uber and Lyft might remain operational in some of the cities.
Maven has had its ups and downs, as GM tries to find most cost-effective programs. In 2017 it also debuted Maven Reserve that lets users rent GM vehicles for a month at at time, and has also tested peer-to-peer sharing of GM cars.
US Post to use self-driving trucks
The United States Postal Service will start testing self-driving cars for mail delivery. A pilot program that started this week will encompass delivery of letters and packages between Phoenix and Dallas on a customized Peterbilt trucks operated by TuSimple, an autonomous driving startup based in San Diego. The pilot will run for about two weeks, after which the Postal Service will evaluate its success. A safety driver and an engineer will be present in the truck during the pilot program.
Inspector General of the USPS outlined a strategy for autonomous vehicle adoption two years ago. Self-driving mailing trucks aren’t anywhere close to adoption, however, long-haul trucking, and delivery of parcels between distribution centers is a very realistic goal. The US Post spends about $4 billion a year on highway trucking services. Those costs have been going up in the recent years as the country faces shortage of drivers.