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Image courtesy of Wheels
Can WeHo-Based Wheels Get More Underserved Angelenos to Ride E-Bikes?
Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
When Los Angeles launched its micromobility pilot in 2019, it had big dreams for improving transportation equity for all Angelenos.
Three years later, less than 3,000 people make use of micromobility programs aimed at helping poorer sections of the city, despite stringent requirements on companies to provide these options and programs to help raise awareness. At issue, experts said, is a patchwork of rules and regulations between municipalities that can be a logistical headache for riders, infrastructure that doesn’t offer much protection for scooter and bike riders in these areas and a public outreach campaign that has failed to gain traction.
“It's a big challenge because when you drive your car, for example, people don't pay attention to municipal boundaries. They just want to get from point A to point B in the most seamless way possible,” said Will Sowers, director of public affairs at Wheels.
Wheels Director of Public Affairs Will Sowers.
Image courtesy of Wheels
While each city has its own equity requirements, the city of L.A. established its current program in 2021. Any operator deploying vehicles in special operation zones (including Venice, Hollywood and Downtown) is required to deploy 20% of its fleet in equity zones. There is no trip fee for rides that begin or end in these zones. The city also requires operators to offer a low-income option for riders, attend meetings with neighborhood councils and other local stakeholders, provide a non-credit-card and non-smartphone option for payment and partner with a community-based organization.
But those efforts haven't made as much an impact as the city might have hoped.
As of October 2021 there were 2,915 active users enrolled in low-income programs across all operators, according to information provided by L.A.’s Department of Transportation. That’s just 17 more riders than the city reported a year and a half earlier–in a report which also noted that 85% of users did not know that equity programs were available.
Riders in L.A.’s underserved neighborhoods use micromobility differently than those in more affluent areas, according to Sowers. While a rider in Venice might ride to the beach or to a restaurant, riders in underserved areas often use e-scooters as a way to get from a transit stop to work and vice versa.
“We've even seen examples of people using our device as a courier,” he added, “where they may — with one of many delivery apps — grab a short shift.”
Wheels Plan to Go Further
Wheels is trying something different. The company has made an effort to design its scooter for the way that lower-income riders use them, and is one of the few scooter companies able to thread the requirements of multiple municipalities in L.A.
It currently boasts it has the most interconnected micromobilty network in the L.A. metro region, with permits to operate in the city of L.A., Santa Monica, Culver City and West Hollywood, as well as plans to launch in Glendale.
Practically speaking, that means a user could ride a Wheels device between municipalities to get to work or school without worrying about landing in a no-parking zone (Beverly Hills, for instance, is geofenced and off-limits for scooter riding and parking).
Wheels was founded in 2018 in West Hollywood by Jonathan and Joshua Viner, who previously co-founded pet-walking startup Wag. The company’s scooters are designed for traveling longer distances. While a typical standup scooter goes one mile per ride, a Wheels seated mini-bike goes about one and a half miles. Along with its app-based service, the company also offers monthly rentals.
So far, the company has raised $96.3M in funding..
As part of its “Wheels for All” program, riders in all four municipalities who use state or federal benefits can ride at a steep discount. Currently, Wheels devices are $1.10 to unlock and then $0.39 per minute to ride. But underserved riders get unlimited rides of 30 minutes or less, paying only the unlocking fee.
The program is also more expansive than L.A. requires. In addition to low-income riders, people with disabilities and older adults who the city designates as “underserved populations,” Wheels program is also available for unhoused people.
To qualify, applicants fill out a form online and provide proof of enrollment in a state or federal program.
In comparison, its competitor Lime offers rides for $0.50 to unlock plus $0.07 per minute plus tax through its Lime Access program; Bird offers 50% off rides for low-income Angelenos through its Community Pricing program.
Although Wheels has the most interconnected equity program, enrollment is low. Only about 1,000 riders are signed up across the greater L.A. area. The program has provided just over 23,000 rides in the last year.
Sowers said this is an issue his company is doing its best to address. He added that he frequently talks to social service workers and organizations to help spread the word. Many, he said, are initially skeptical of recommending micromobility options to their clients.
One such person called him after seeing someone with a disability riding a Wheels device:
“They called me and were like, ‘That makes sense to me. It makes sense that someone can sit down and potentially have an accessibility challenge, but still be able to ride your device’.”
Berkeley professor and co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center Dr. Susan A. Shaheen told dot.LA over email that Wheels’ approach to equity has potential.
“It could provide a more affordable alternative to private vehicle use, particularly during these times of high gas prices,” she said.
Image courtesy of Wheels
No Equity Without Infrastructure
Another challenge that Wheels, like its competitors, deals with is infrastructure. California law bans e-scooters from operating on sidewalks. But not everyone is comfortable riding an e-scooter or e-bike in the street, especially where there are no bike lanes and little infrastructure to keep riders safe. That’s especially true in many low-income neighborhoods.
“If you want to prioritize equity, you need to build infrastructure for micromobility in the places that are the most dangerous to use micromobility, which is in the least-invested communities,” said Michael Schneider, founder of advocacy group Streets For All. He added that providing equity means building interconnected cycling infrastructure throughout the city, especially along L.A.’s high injury network.
The city has said it's trying to address the disparity.
Los Angeles has brought in $4 million over two fiscal years through its micromobility permit program, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. It’s using some of that money to fund a redesign of the 7th Street corridor, including protected bike lanes, after data showed that this segment of Downtown was one of the busiest for e-scooters and e-bikes, Public Information Director Colin Sweeney said via email.
In the future, Sowers sees the potential for L.A. to use that funding, along with the data it collects from operators, to build better infrastructure in underserved areas.
“If someone in a transit desert is riding one of our devices, and I give the city good data and say, ‘Hey, I've got tons of rides in this neighborhood, but there's no protected bike lanes,’ then that creates a reason for the city to build that.”
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Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
'Our Customer Is Not the Police Department': Ring’s CTO Pushes Back On Privacy Concerns
12:10 PM | June 28, 2021
It's been a busy year for Ring, the home security giant best known for its video doorbells. In January, Ring rolled out the Ring Video Doorbell Wired, its smallest and least expensive doorbell yet. The Santa Monica-based company also unveiled an end-to-end encryption feature that adds an additional layer of protection to videos captured by a user's device. And Ring is now working on additional features, including a pet tracking system and a roving camera that can be remotely activated by customers to investigate disturbances.
But as Ring expands its user base, it is also drawing increased scrutiny from privacy and social justice advocates who are concerned about the Amazon-owned subsidiary's partnerships with law enforcement agencies and reports of racial profiling by users of Ring's Neighbors app.
Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth spoke to dot.la about Ring's product development process and how his company approaches privacy and neighborhood safety.
Since the Amazon acquisition, Ring has developed some integrations with the Alexa system and other Amazon products. Are there ways this relationship may become even closer in the future?
Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth
At the end of the day it comes down to what we call a "better together" story. From our side, we can create better solutions and systems that aggregate devices in your home and give you a better way of leveraging those devices together—whether that's interactions between an alarm system and a light, or your Alexa acting as a sensor for other things. There's a tremendous amount of work to continue to iterate and improve on that. No doubt about it, there will be future integrations that continue to enhance that experience.
How much do you see Ring as a smart home company vs. a home security company? Are there ways you might use the tech stack you've developed in ways that move away from the home security focus you've had thus far?
Our mission is to make neighborhoods safer. I don't see that mission changing. We are a safety and security company. With that being said, things you may not think of as safety and security at the end of the day can become part of a safety and security system. An example of that would be anything that can give awareness about the state of a home. Your thermostat has home and away modes so that it can turn itself hotter or cooler depending on whether someone is at home. If you can integrate that into an IoT system to leverage that awareness and tie it to your alarm system, there's tremendous benefit for your safety and security. There's not always this cut-and-dry IoT space and safety and security space. The reality is that if you do things correctly, they actually merge into one.
And of course as more of these functions become automated, there's going to be growing concern about security. There have been some horror stories about hackers being able to spy on families through their Ring systems. How are you alleviating concerns that someone might gain access to a customer's footage?
Privacy and security are really foundational to everything we build. We start with a security and privacy-first mindset and then we try to introduce those features to our customers, and we try to do it in the quickest fashion possible. If you take a look back historically, Ring was the first in the safety and security space to require two-step verification; we were the first to introduce end-to-end encryption. Ring has never been breached, but we put things in place constantly to improve on security. Where we have to, we put in tighter controls. But when we do it, we make it extremely transparent to the customer. From my perspective, security is of the utmost importance, and I think everyone at Ring and Amazon would tell you the same thing.
You rolled out the end-to-end encryption feature earlier this year, but it's turned off by default. Why make it an opt-in setting rather than an opt-out?
End-to-end encryption implies that there's a key that can only be used by a very specific system or user. It requires us to actually turn off some features that our users actually like to have, because those keys can't be shared in all situations. For example, with the iteration of end-to-end encryption out there today you can't have a shared user. The reason for that is key management and how you would actually hand those keys off that shared user for a temporary or permanent amount of time, and which videos you would give access to. We opted to give something that was the most stringent control we could at launch, and to give the users asking for that the ability to turn it on—with the intent of iterating over time and adding more features like shared users.
There's a handful of items like that. Another use case would be a third-party integration. If you use Alexa, for example, to do video recall or to see who's at the front door, they don't have the keys because we don't have a method to pass the keys from a user's phone to Alexa devices. It would break our user promise around encryption and privacy. We really wanted to focus on the beginning experience of end-to-end encryption being as tight as we could, and then adding to it over time based on customer feedback.
How do you balance privacy concerns with the desire to give customers access to new features?
The baseline default experience that a user gets is the highest level of security that can be provided, and we constantly iterate and improve on that. I look at end-to-end encryption as an advanced security feature. I use the analogy of a hotel room. You have the top lock and you lock the door and you put the sign on the door. You may find you don't necessarily need all that, but it gives you peace of mind. So we want to offer that to our users. But the default standard encryption we provide still provides encryption in transit and encryption at rest. And we always examine it to see if we can improve on that. There is a tradeoff between end-to-end encryption and some of the features we know our users like. But I can tell you as a promise from Ring: We will always push toward providing more security and more options for our users with increased transparency. Any time we add something new they are going to have awareness of it. Any time we give them something around security, we're going to give them a choice to enable those items or not.
You mentioned that Ring's goal is to make neighborhoods safer. Is there an evaluation process as you add features to ensure that you are meeting this goal?
We believe in the power of the community and the power of the neighborhood. We also believe in the privacy of the neighborhood. In addition to privacy shutters on our cameras, we also have privacy zones. When you set up a motion zone, you can block out certain areas to respect the privacy of your neighbors if you choose to do so. Again, it's all put in the hands of customers for customer choice.
We also work with public safety agencies. We've been a great resource for COVID-19 information. We work with local fire and police departments. What that means is they have the ability to request videos (through the Neighbors app). They provide requests in a public way so that everyone is completely aware and it's transparent to the entire community what's being asked of them.
Those partnerships with law enforcement have been controversial. Are there ways you approach product development to ensure devices aren't being used as tools for mass surveillance?
Everything we do is customer first. Our customers are the neighbors who live in those neighborhoods. Our customer is not the police department. It's not the fire department. Our customer is the user who has a home, who's putting a Ring doorbell on their house. We start with that premise, and we build everything around that from a privacy and security perspective. Any time that there's anything involving a public safety agency, users have a choice and it's entirely up to them when and if they share information, when and if they share videos, when and if they work with those agencies. We've seen nothing but positive things come out of that. Kidnappings have been solved because of people working with neighborhood agencies. Neighbor advocates are helping track down things like package theft. We're big believers in people working together. We're big believers in customer choice.
Is there a limit to customer choice? Ring has said in the past it won't use facial recognition technology. What if customers want it? And are there other features that may be off the table?
It's a hard question to answer because I can't predict the future of what I haven't built yet. What I can tell you is we don't use facial recognition on any of our devices or services and we will never sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement. Privacy is so important to us. Anything we build will include these strong privacy protections for our neighbors.
We go through privacy reviews, legal reviews, customer reviews, and internal discussions. We make decisions as to whether we think the items we want to build meet the mission to make neighborhoods safer. Is it in the customer's best interest? Is it providing additional privacy, security, and transparency to the customer? If we can say yes to all of those things, I think we are able to build them. If we have question marks, we don't build them.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Watch: Exploring Relativity Space With Tim Ellis and Spencer Rascoff
05:00 PM | April 28, 2020
dot.LA Co-founder and Executive Chairman Spencer Rascoff speaks with Relativity Space Co-Founder and CEO Tim Ellis about 3D printing in manufacturing, going to Mars, and the future of the new space race in the latest Strategy Session.
Strategy Session: Exploring Relativity Space With Tim Ellis and Spencer Rascoffwww.youtube.com
Tim Ellis
Tim Ellis is the co-founder and CEO of Relativity, the first autonomous factory and launch service for rockets. Relativity recently created the largest robotic metal 3D printer in the world and has tested our entirely 3D printed Aeon rocket engine over 180 times. Previously responsible for bringing metal 3D printing into Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, and a propulsion development engineer on Crew Capsule RCS thrusters, BE-4, and New Glenn. Alumni of USC and played a leadership role in launching the first student designed and built rocket into near space. Testified to the US Senate on commercial space policy and is the youngest member on the National Space Council UAG by nearly 2 decades, and directly advises the United States White House on all space policy. Has spoken at numerous conferences including CBInsights Aha! and TEDx. Relativity is backed by Playground Global, Social Capital, Y Combinator, Mark Cuban, USC, and Stanford.
Spencer Rascoff
Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. He is currently executive chairman of dot.LA and a board member at TripAdvisor. In the fall of 2019 Spencer was a Visiting Executive Professor at Harvard Business School where he co-taught the "Managing Tech Ventures" course. In 2015, Spencer co-wrote and published his first book, the New York Times' Best Seller "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate." Spencer is the host of "Office Hours," a monthly podcast on dot.LA featuring candid conversations between prominent executives on leadership, diversity and inclusion, and startups.
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Annie Burford
Annie Burford is dot.LA's director of events. She's an event marketing pro with over ten years of experience producing innovative corporate events, activations and summits for tech startups to Fortune 500 companies. Annie has produced over 200 programs in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City working most recently for a China-based investment bank heading the CEC Capital Tech & Media Summit, formally the Siemer Summit.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/annieburford
annie@dot.la
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