CityLab Daily: Scooters Get a Place to Park

What’s up, dock? At this year’s South by Southwest festival, the city of Austin, Texas, saw a surge of more than 9,000 rentable dockless scooters roll in. It was an intense variation of the disruption that cities have experienced over the last two years as docked bikeshare gave way to dockless bikeshare, which then gave way to scooters. Now, if the conference circuit is any indication, we’ve come full circle—with docks for scooters.

At last week’s National Shared Mobility Summit, a startup called Swiftmile pitched itself at as a sort of gas station for micromobility, using solar power to charge scooters while they’re tethered to docks. Lyft, at SXSW, demoed its own low-fi parking racks, which are intended to bring some order to the scooty chaos. Going back to docks could make shared scooters more predictable and lessen the need for human labor to get recharged, but it could also add costs to the already dodgy road to profitability for these scooter startups. CityLab’s Laura Bliss has the rundown: The Hot New Thing in Dockless Electric Scooters: Docks.