Dive Brief:

• Transit now aggregates the locations of four dockless electric scooters: Bird, Spin Waybots and LimeBike in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington, DC, the company announced Thursday.
• The app added the new service to its current offerings, which include tracking dockless and docked bike-share, shared cars and ride,s and public transportation. LimeBike tracking is only available in DC.
• "Now instead of triple-checking between each scooter app, we’ll help you find the closest scooter (regardless of operator) and plan a trip with it," the company wrote. "Best of all, it takes five seconds."

Dive Insight:

In their expanded app service announcement, Transit took aim at people in U.S. cities who have criticized dockless scooters for cluttering sidewalks. And that clutter has caused some jurisdictions to act in California, with San Francisco impounding scooters, while Coronado, CA began confiscating dockless bikes.

Such clutter remains a problem for cities across the country, and while the dockless companies have promised to be good partners, there is still plenty of work to be done. Perhaps an aggregation of all the disparate scooter sharing companies could encourage them to partner more with cities and with each other, work that has already begun with the unveiling of the "Save Our Sidewalks" pledge.

Competition is fierce among dockless scooter companies for a slice of this growing area of mobility, but they are already popular and could be a factor in why car registrations are decreasing in San Francisco for the first time in modern history. By collating all the information from the disparate apps in one place, Transit hopes to make it easier for more people to use the scooters, which could enhance competition between the companies to offer better value for money and availability.