Salient Weekly Challenge - Mario Kart but Electric Scooters

“Within the span of a week, I’ll be trying to accomplish a long-term task just to see if it’s possible, and to see what I can get out of it. Life lessons? Skills? Resilience training? The stimulation alone should be enough motivation.”

A story my dad will never stop bringing up is how, when I was nine, I managed to crash our homemade Go-Cart into a local Primary School building. From that point on, I realized I have zero fear when it comes to vehicular speeds. Moving to Welly, I left my car at home and relied on public transport, yet felt impatient—I had a need for speed. That’s why I quickly opted to use the electric Flamingo scooters littered around the city. I am proud to say I am one of those knobs that barrel past you on a scooter. However, in early March, a newcomer entered the ring that hadn’t been seen since 2018: Lime Scooters. Being a longtime Flamingo fan, I decided to enact a perilous mission: Discovering which electric scooter is ultimately better.

I wanted to know a few things: How quickly can you get between all three Victoria University Campuses? What’s the distance between them? And how cheap can it be? This meant that I would be bouncing between Pipitea, Kelburn, and Te Aro in different orders on both electric scooters. Considering that there’s six different combinations to visit each campus and two kinds of scooters, that meant I was about to go on twelve scooter rides. Each track, I would find a fully-charged Flamingo or Lime scooter near campus, start the ride, then travel to the other two campuses as quickly as I could. I decided to enact all my rides in the dead of night on a Sunday, as there was barely any traffic around—meaning I could commit road violations to my heart's content.

(Pictured) Will at Pipitea with a Flamingo

Budgeting for this was no easy feat either, and involved a bit of math. Both scooter companies charge a $1.00 unlock fee as soon as you start the ride, then charge money the longer you’re driving. Flamingo charges $0.55 a minute, with Lime charging less at $0.49. However, both scooter companies offer discounted options. Flamingo has both a Student Discount and a Community Discount plan, both free to join for students or Community Service Card holders. The Community plan gave me 50% off essentially for free! Lime, however, has a subscription model where if you pay $4.99 a month, all your rides below 20 minutes are only $3.00. Stupidly, I didn’t end up using “LimePrime”. I probably should have for the sake of the challenge, but didn’t want another subscription to deal with.

Driving the scooters around the city, I quickly felt the differences between the two brands. Flamingos are very light and dexterable. Limes are more heavy and beefy, but great for steep hills. Flamingos aren’t great for that, and have an acceleration speed cap of only 26km/hr, which is shown on the handlebars. Weirdly, Lime doesn’t allow you to see how fast you can go, which feels a bit dangerous and shady. Lime also doesn’t seem to have an emergency brake if you go downhill too fast, which luckily the Flamingos do have. But if you’re not lucky and choose to go downhill too fast on Bolton Street without braking, you’ll run the risk of crashing into Volco Cafe… which I admittedly almost did each time I headed to Pipitea.

(Pictured) A real picture of Will doing the famous “Akira Slide” on a Flamingo Scooter.

At the time of my challenge, I mentioned in passing to a friend that I was trying to see which scooter would be faster, and was disappointed that Lime scooters seemed speedier than Flamingos. He mentioned, “you know you can get up past the Flamingo speed cap, right?” Turns out, he gave me a real-life cheat code to reach up to 32km/hr on a Flamingo scooter. Some generations of the Flamingo models have a flaw in their speed blocking, so if you lightly grab the brakes the software deactivates the speed limit as it thinks it's going to slow down and doesn’t want to be redundant. This flaw mixed with a steep hill would give the ability to reach well past the Flamingo limit!

Going through with riding around on the dinky scooters, I did run into some problems. When starting a lap at a campus, there would never be any scooters around Pipitea. Or Kelburn. Or sometimes even Te Aro! I think it’s a little ridiculous that the main group of people I see riding the scooters are students, yet there’s no designated parking spots near the campuses. Another problem was that I couldn’t follow the same route every time, and had to take some detours. For example, I couldn’t scoot up Mount Street when passing Kelburn (obviously), but I could certainly scoot down it if I was starting at Kelburn and heading to Te Aro. The largest problem with each course was always getting to Kelburn campus. I’m eternally annoyed that they decided to situate an institute of learning at the top of a mountain, and made this challenge a literal uphill battle.

Conclusion:

In the end, I found out that the faster option turned out to be the Lime scooters, with my quickest time visiting all campuses taking only 7 minutes and 28 seconds! However, even if I did subscribe to LimePrime, Flamingo proved to be the cheaper option—a Community Service ride from Te Aro > Kelburn > Pipitea is only $2.83! So ultimately, I think Flamingo is better and less likely to kill you. Overall, I spent $55.80 on electric scooter rides this week, which is only a third of what I spent on coffee when I tried every flat white on Cuba St. Surprisingly, I ended this challenge with no broken bones, and only slightly less of a dent in my wallet! It’s still probably cheaper than dealing with the fossil fuel crisis.

LIME (Standard Price)

Campus Course	Cost	Time	Quickest Route
Kelburn > Pipitea > Te Aro	$7.27	12:53 sec	3.5km
Te Aro > Kelburn > Pipitea	$4.92	07:28 sec	2.5km
Pipitea > Te Aro > Kelburn	$6.39	10:39 sec	3.3km
Kelburn > Te Aro > Pipitea	$6.88	11:17 sec	3.1km
Pipitea > Kelburn > Te Aro	$4.92	07:51 sec	3.0km
Te Aro > Pipitea > Kelburn	$5.80	09:41 sec	3.5km

FLAMINGO (Community Service Discount)

Campus Course	Cost	Time	Quickest Route
Kelburn > Pipitea > Te Aro	$3.33	10:28 sec	3.5km
Te Aro > Kelburn > Pipitea	$2.83	08:37 sec	2.5km
Pipitea > Te Aro > Kelburn	$3.36	12:26 sec	3.3km
Kelburn > Te Aro > Pipitea	$3.17	09:53 sec	3.1km
Pipitea > Kelburn > Te Aro	$3.40	10.44 sec	3.0km
Te Aro > Pipitea > Kelburn	$3.53	11:14 sec	3.5km