One afternoon in late May, a Bird scooter appeared in front of my house in San Francisco. This would be considered a normal sight in many American cities, where the shared electric vehicles have been available for by-the-minute rentals since 2018. But Bird isn’t part of San Francisco’s 12-month scooter pilot program—the company is only permitted to rent its fleet of black-and-white two-wheelers cross the bay in Oakland. In San Francisco, the small number of scooters that the program permits, from rivals Spin and Scoot, are not allowed in my neighborhood.
The scooter was unusual in a few other respects: It had a Bluetooth-enabled lock and a plug-in charger attached to it, in a Bird-branded baggy. And only my phone could unlock it.
This particular Bird was a rare breed indeed—part of the company’s new monthly rental program, which debuted in two cities, San Francisco and Barcelona, in May. It represents the latest subspecies in a veritable “Cambrian explosion” of rapidly evolving little vehicles. Instead of renting a scooter by the minute, I had a personal Bird for a month—an unlimited number of rides for $25. If most e-scooter trips are like one-way car rentals, this is more like a car lease, albeit at a micro scale.
The monthly rental program came about from community interest in having access to a Bird throughout the day, a Bird spokesperson told me in an email. Bird’s menu of consumer variations is all about meeting “the needs of different commuters,” and “replacing short car trips with a platform of micro-mobility ..
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