Numlock Sunday: March 10, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to my friend Alison Griswold, who a few weeks ago wrote about the perilous math behind the scooter craze in her wonderful newsletter, Oversharing. Here's what I wrote about it:

An analysis of scooter usage in Louisville, Kentucky seems to undercut the economics of the business of parachuting electric scooters into a metropolis and renting them for a fee. Here’s the math: the average scooter did 3.49 rides per day, with the average trip going 1.63 miles in 18 minutes, generating $3.70 per trip in revenue and $12.91 per scooter per day. However, deducting per ride costs, leaves only $0.95 in net revenue per ride or $3.32 in net revenue per scooter per day, or $2.32 after a municipal fee. Here’s the problem: the average scooter in Louisville only seemed to last fo…