Still not in Houston, but getting closer.
By the end of January, Galveston Island will be crawling with Crab…Scooters.
Ryan O’Neal of Galveston said he expects to officially launch his new business Crab Scooters come late January or early February. O’Neal said the scooters will provide visitors and residents with a low-cost, environmentally friendly form of transportation that hasn’t been offered to the island before.
“The issue that comes with scooters is dockless ride sharing [and] that is not a sustainable model,” O’Neal said.
The dockless ride sharing model other scooter companies like Bird and Lime use can create an eyesore for cities when riders leave the scooters on sidewalks and in streets, or vandalize them.
Scooter companies have fought with cities over ordinances to fix this problem in the past, but O’Neal said his company side sweeps the issue of dockless ride sharing with a new model he hopes to eventually bring to other markets.
“It’s basically an online service with local delivery,” O’Neal said. “What we are trying to do is just take a more responsible, controlled approach to integrating scooters into society and we don’t think it’s been done before.”
Similar to Uber or Lyft, Crab Scooters are delivered directly to the rider and then picked up once a rider is done travelling. Users must be 18 and up to ride and safety equipment and a 5 minute safety and traffic etiquette class are provided upon delivery.
I like the idea of keeping scooters from cluttering up the sidewalks, but I wonder how viable this model is. Maybe it’ll work, I don’t know – I’m not the scootering type, so I can’t judge by my own level of interest. I also don’t see Galveston as being all that amenable to scooters as a means of transportation. Most of where you want to go on the island involves the main roads, none of which I’d want to travel via scooter. But again, maybe I’m wrong. I wish them luck, and we’ll see how this works.
They are all over Corpus Christi, including neighborhoods. Saw hundreds of people riding them.
Loved them in San Antonio