Electric scooters have been found hanging in trees, thrown in lakes, hotwired and stripped. When Scoot first launched its scooters in San Francisco in 2018, one of the biggest issues it said it faced was theft and vandalism. No wonder it would get to work building a tougher model to resist such abuse. Scoot, now …

Lyft hasn’t experienced a smooth ride on Wall Street since it went public last March. In an attempt to rein in costs, the ride-hailing company announced Wednesday that it’s laying off 90 employees from its marketing and enterprise sales departments. The news was first reported by The New York Times. “We’ve carefully evaluated the resources we need to achieve our …

Not all electric scooter riders follow the rules of the road. Those rules include obeying traffic signals, signaling, and not riding on sidewalks where the motorized vehicles can endanger pedestrians.  Lime said Tuesday that it’s launched a new initiative aimed at stopping such sidewalk riding. The scooter company calls it a “first-of-its kind technology” that can detect when someone is …

Bird’s stronghold has been the US, but the scooter company appears to be branching out further into the international market. On Monday, it announced that it acquired the European scooter company Circ, along with getting a new investment of $75 million. That means Bird’s scooters will now be available in more than a dozen countries. In 2018, Bird was the …

A small battle is brewing in the scooter world. It involves an app called Scooter Map, which its developer said was created to help people find scooters from all companies grouped together in one app. Problem is, one of the world’s largest rental scooter companies doesn’t like it. Lime sent Victor Pontis, Scooter Map’s developer, a cease-and-desist letter last April. …

Dozens of women have filed lawsuits against Lyft over the last few months alleging the company hasn’t done enough to protect passengers from sexual assault. On Friday, a California state judge ruled these lawsuits can potentially be combined together into one case. The ruling was confirmed on Tuesday. The women in these suits say they’ve been assaulted by Lyft drivers, …

Another of Uber’s longtime executives is leaving the company. Rachel Holt, who’d been with Uber for nearly nine years, said Tuesday that she’s moving on to launch a venture capital firm. Her most recent position at Uber was vice president of the division that oversees bikes, scooters and public transit partnerships. “Making a change like this is never easy. Uber …

Uber drivers in California finally got a feature last month that they’d been requesting for years — the ability to view passengers’ destinations before accepting trips. That means they also get to see how much they will earn from rides and have the ability to reject ones that don’t seem worthwhile. For drivers, the feature has widely been seen as …

For Uber, maybe this time’s the charm. Over the past year, Uber has made various attempts to stop a California labor law from going through, but nothing’s worked. The law, Assembly Bill 5 (or AB 5) was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September and set to go into effect Wednesday. But in an eleventh-hour attempt, Uber is trying something …

Travis Kalanick, the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, will resign from the company’s board of directors by the end of the year. This comes after he sold more than $2.5 billion of company stock since early November. His departure will be effective Dec. 31.  “Uber has been a part of my life for the past 10 years,” Kalanick said in a …