Review of yellow’s electric scooter-sharing system

Electric scooters are all the rage as I write this post: scooter-sharing startups are becoming unicorns, the streets are getting flooded with this new transportation fad and the governments are working hard to figure out their role in this revolution. As a tech enthusiast myself, I got pretty excited with all of this movement around different trendy technologies changing the way we relate to our cities, and I got even more excited when all of this arrived at the city where I live: Belo Horizonte.

When the startup Yellow started operating its electric scooters at Belo Horizonte, during the beginning of 2019, my city soon became the stage to all of the “electric scooters disrupting the city” stories I saw on the internet happening at other capitals around the world: vandalism, death, and the government trying to regulate it with some controversy along the way. I couldn’t stay away from the opportunity of trying this new way of transportation, so I tried it.

Enjoying the ride

Last Sunday morning I was at the city center and, after seeing one of the yellow scooters on the sidewalk, I realized I had the perfect opportunity of trying one of them going back to university. After some time looking for a fully charged one, I found it close to Praça Sete and took it all the way to UFMG.

Here I got to my first question: “Can I even take this route?”. Some days earlier I read inside the Yellow App, at the scooter area of the help center section, the following statement: “Walk only within our area and aways respect the traffic laws.” and the “Where drive and park” section states: “The clear area of the map delimited by the black color indicates the area of operation of the scooters […] Never park outside the area […] otherwise a fee of R$ 30,00 will be charged.”. As shown in the image above, my route would start and stop at the “area of operation”, but I would need to get out of it along the way, would I be charged R$ 30,00 for it then?. The instructions weren’t clear, so I contacted the Yellow support through the app. They answered me one day later saying it was ok to go through a non-clear area, as long as I parked the scooter at a clear one. They took a full day to answer, so if I had this doubt the moment I decided to take this route I would end up not using Yellow.

Once I knew I was good to go, I unlocked the scooter using the app (which was fast and easy) and started my journey. Driving a Yellow scooter is fun and easy. I enjoyed very much my trip through the empty Sunday morning city center streets until I almost feel due to a hole in the middle of the sidewalk, as seen below.

Once I remembered that the public infrastructure of Brazilian cities is a far cry from the ones in Europe and the USA I started paying more attention to my path. I traveled out of the city center and got to a more residential area in the middle of the way between the beginning and the end of my journey, where I was faced with new challenges.

At the residential area cited above, I was able to test the scooter against a very steep climb. The scooter started doing great, but by the end of the climb it gave up and I needed to help it pushing against the floor with my foot. Once I was at the top, I then had the chance to go down the hill as fast as I could. That was one of the most fun parts of the whole trip and I could gauge the scooter maximum speed, which is electronically limited to 20 Km/h.

After going all the way through the residential area I got to the last part of my trip, going all the way up Presidente Antonio Carlos Avenue until the finishing point of my journey. I had a great time zipping up the large and continuous sidewalks of the avenue. It was all fun and games until I got to an area paved with hexagonal cement tiles where the rough terrain changed my smooth ride into a continuous vibration. Suddenly it felt like I was driving a soviet-era farming tractor, not a scooter. My hand’s phalanx bones were still sore 72 hours after my ride. These scooters definitely are in need of a good damping system.

During this part, also, the app started finishing the trip by itself, so to finish my route I got to unlock the scooter 2 more times (remembering that I paid R$ 3,00 only to unlock it every time!!!). Well then, After a rough but fun trip, I finally got to my destination at UFMG.

Finishing my journey

After a short walk, I got home, where I could rest and think about what I just had been through.

Overall it was a fun experience, but the price I paid (that could easily pay an Uber ride through the same distance) and the constant dangers along the way are probably going to motivate me to not use the Yellow electric scooter again. To be fair, my 12.6 Km trip was much longer than the “last mile” this kind of service tries to cover, but still, I can’t think of a distance short enough that I would prefer to take a scooter rather than a walk or a distance long enough that I would prefer to take a scooter rather than an Uber.