Riding Bird’s electric scooters just got more expensive in some cities

Bird is experimenting with price changes as it seeks to tighten up the margins of its money-losing business. Since it first launched, the micromobility company has charged $1 to unlock an electric scooter, plus 15 cents per minute of riding. Now, Bird is effectively doubling that per-minute fee in some cities, while lowering it in others.

“Similar to ride-hailing, big macs, and cups of coffee, our pricing now varies by city”

Bird wouldn’t provide a full list of which markets would experience price fluctuations, but local media outlets and scooter watchers on Twitter have some of the details. Per-minute fees increased to 25 cents in cities like Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, to 29 cents in Baltimore, and to 33 cents in Detroit and Charlotte, NC. Some cities are getting price decreases to 10 cents / minute, like Bloomington, IN, Charlottesville, VA, and Columbia, MO.

“Similar to ride-hailing, big macs, and cups of coffee, our pricing now varies by city,” the spokesperson said in an email. “The price for our environmentally friendly scooters has been updated to range from 10 cents to 33 cents per minute.”

Some cities are requiring the scooter companies to pay large upfront fees to account for the costs of enforcement. Baltimore charged Bird and Lime each a $15,000 fee up front and a $1 per scooter fee per day. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Bird added a $2 transportation fee on top of its $1 unlock fee after the City Council implemented a $300 per scooter fee.

Bird says it is making the price changes transparent to riders prior to them initiating a ride. When riders open the app, they’ll see a message about updated pricing information and will be asked to acknowledge the change to unlock a scooter.

The price updates come as scooters begin to return to some cities in force after disappearing for the winter. And the scooter sharing companies are beginning to roll out more durable, longer-lasting versions of their scooters that are supposed to improve their ability to stay in service longer. Those scooters are more expensive to manufacture and operate, though, which necessitates some price adjustment for consumers.

The unit economics of the scooter-sharing business is overall pretty terrible. Quartz crunched the numbers from Louisville, Kentucky, and found the average lifespan of a scooter was only 28.8 days, doing an average of three and a half rides per day. At these rates, Bird only recoups $67 on the cost of the average scooter — in other words, it loses a whopping $293 per scooter. And that’s not even factoring a host of other costs, like taxes and fees. Bird disputes these numbers.

Other scooter companies are likely to raise their prices in response to Bird, though the major ride-hailing companies that also operate scooters, like Uber and Lyft, can probably afford to delay those changes in order to poach riders from Bird and Lime.