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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.
Orby TV Carves Out Its Place in the Attention Wars With a New Twist on an Old Model
07:16 AM | May 22, 2020
One way to think about the entertainment industry is as a massive war for attention. Within that war rumbles the battle for at-home video dominance (often itself called a streaming war, which feels a bit like calling the Pacific theater of World War II the Pacific War).
At that battlefront, giants like Netflix and Disney spend boggling amounts of money and rack up mind-numbing debts. On the periphery, several smaller battalions like Tubi and Vudu wield their ad-funded service weapons. And scattered about it all, minor militias scurry in search of a patch to claim their own.
Orby TV thinks it's found one -- starting at about $40 a month compared to more high-priced competitors.
"We're looking at what we feel is an underserved segment," said Michael Thornton, Orby TV founder and chief executive. Previously chief revenue officer of Starz after stints at Disney and DirecTV, Thornton launched Orby TV in early 2019 out of Studio City for "people that are fed up with high prices and want a lean-back experience" where you "hit power, and then it's on."
For an installation fee and a monthly payment of less than half of what most cable or satellite services charge, Orby TV customers get dozens of cable channels via satellite dish, plus dozens more over-the-air (OTA) broadcast channels via digital antenna, all beamed through one coaxial cable into a TV that turns on with the click of a remote, complete with a program guide.
Orby TV's program guide integrates its broadcast and satellite channels
TV for a Toll
One reason Orby TV is relatively affordable is that it doesn't carry sports channels. Foregoing national and regional sports networks means saving on licensing costs, which the company can pass on to customers. Sports coverage from broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) and Turner stations (TNT, TBS) remains available.
Orby TV also eschews channels that can only be had as parts of a bundle, many of which are owned and operated by the networks. Those bundles tend to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
"The industry has been and always will be very paranoid in terms of how it sets itself up," Thornton told dot.LA. "They have most favored nations clauses out the ying-yang (so there's) very little ability to cherry pick services."
The upshot is that Orby TV viewers can lean back and watch Fox (via broadcast), but not its cable channels like Fox News or Fox Sports; NBC, but not Bravo, MSNBC or Telemundo; ABC, but not ESPN, Disney Channel, or National Geographic.
Nevertheless, with a stable that still includes TNT, A&E, CNN, AMC and others, Orby TV's basic package includes 46 satellite cable channels, per its website, with upgrades available for an additional charge.
The digital antenna, meanwhile, picks up not just the major network broadcasts but also the OTA "digital subchannels" that flow alongside these transmissions in the government regulated broadcast spectrum. (Think stations like ABC-2, ABC-3, NBC-7, etc.) Reception quantity varies by location but the company noted that 150 OTA channels are available in Hermosa Beach, and 88 just outside of Denver. These all fit on the broadcast spectrum thanks to decades of digital compression advances, noted an Orby TV representative.
Throw in the technological infrastructure afforded by the cloud, remote communication tools, and data management systems, and Orby TV's innovation is simply taking advantage of a set of "tried and true" technologies and combining it with a prepaid business model to enable a simple, flexible, low-cost service.
Customers can cancel their monthly subscription anytime and return at leisure, and meanwhile keep the broadcast channels coming in from the antenna – which remain on the program guide. Add it all up, and media analyst Dan Rayburn calls Orby TV a "niche service that works well for what it does." Affordability and flexibility, notes Thornton, could be "particularly relevant right now given what people are going through" with the coronavirus crisis.
Who's it for?
Thornton cited the growing pool of the Pay TV-world's net losses–six million in the past year–as a potential source of subscribers, who could be looking for cheaper options.
Michael Thornton, CEO of Orby TV and UCLA Anderson Alum
"The downward trend in traditional (cable) that we've seen for the better part of a decade has been accelerating as consumers look for less expensive and more flexible options," noted Ian Olgeirson, senior analyst at SNL Kagan.
Rayburn sees a smaller addressable market for Orby TV: those who live in rural areas with poor access to broadband. Such technological deprivation often forecloses internet-delivered alternatives like YouTube TV, Hulu TV, or Sling TV
Leichtman generally concurs. Orby TV, he says, is primarily for "rural, non-sports fans."
One plus side of that, added Rayburn, is that "it's much easier for them to have lower customer acquisition costs because they can target specific people in a zip code or zone."
Thornton, though, is more aspirational. He sees an addressable market that includes not just those lacking broadband and Pay TV's net losses, but anyone currently with an OTA-only setup (difficult to precisely quantify) and even the 40 million-plus who "have a prepaid cell phone service and are familiar with the model," he said.
But even modest numbers might be enough.
"They don't need a lot of subscribers to be profitable," said Rayburn.
Thornton pegs it at around 80,000. Already claiming "tens of thousands of subscribers and growing," across all 48 states, with Best Buy as its biggest retailer, the plan is to break even by no later than early next year.
"We're essentially on schedule," he reported.
Orby TV's lead investor, a pension fund that requests anonymity, will presumably be pleased.
"We've always told our investor that we're open to exit strategies," Thornton said. "(But) it was always about providing a self-sustaining service."
"There's value in being a small company that's profitable," said Rayburn. "Everybody is trying to build such a big company. What's wrong with being a small company that grows every year and makes a profit?"
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Sam Blake
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
https://twitter.com/hisamblake
samblake@dot.la
Wavemaker 360 Health Announces $100 Million Fund Aimed at Health Care Amid COVID-19
02:14 PM | April 17, 2020
Pasadena-based venture capital firm Wavemaker 360 Health announced a $100 million fund aimed at digital health and health tech startups — double what it had been planning prior to the global pandemic.
The attention COVID-19 brought to the health care industry has heightened investor interest and pushed the two-year old firm to accelerate fundraising efforts.
"The world has become so much more infatuated — and with good reasons — in health care because of the crisis," said Jay Goss, general partner at Wavemaker 360. The firm is affiliated with Santa Monica-based Wavemaker Capital but operates independently.
Jay Goss is a general partner at Wavemaker 360.
Despite the deep toll the virus is having across the economy, health care is better positioned than other industries like retail and consumer goods.
The novel coronavirus — which has claimed more than 150,000 lives globally — continues to spread and in doing so has reshaped how health care is delivered including a surge in telemedicine. The changes are likely to have long term impacts, experts say.
Wavemaker 360 invests in seed and early stage companies. About a third of their current portfolio hails from Southern California, in part because the firm has benefitted from partnerships or affiliations it has with Southern California's largest medical research institutions including City of Hope, Cedar-Sinai Medical Center, USC Keck School of Medicine and UCLA Biodesign, Goss said.
The local investment is likely to continue in the coming fund. "We naturally hunt for good companies in our backyard," he said.
This fund will be five times the size of its current fund, which covers more than two dozen companies. Wavemaker's operating thesis is that health care is transitioning away from fee-for-service to value-based care, disrupting the old system. About 70% of its investors hail from the health care industry with ties to insurance companies and hospital systems such as Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Mission Community Hospital and UnitedHealth Group.
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Rachel Uranga
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
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