Micromobility and its Role in Urban Mobility Ecosystems
Micromobility has been a hot topic in the mobility market for a few years. Obviously Bird’s fastest to unicorn status really catapulted the sector into media darlings. Many other massive global and regional players have emergined in the e-scooter sharing space such as Lime, Circ, Tier and more. In Madrid alone there are 22 company with licenses to operate e-scooter sharing services.
Of course the sector had arrived well before Bird, with the introduction of bikesharing services decades ago. Micromobility Industries, founded by Horace Dediu and Oliver Bruce, have really helped advocate for the industry and to create a conversation and a voice to the many different perspectives on the explosion of micromobility in cities.
In the past year or so we have seen a growing number of debates about the implications of the rise of shared micromobility in cities which I would like to summarize here and to take a stand where we at iomob.net stand on these issues.
- Safety of micromobility
I hear few arguments about bikesharing in cities since it seems to be assumed by most that cities should support bikesharing and in general advocate for and create infrastructure that supports safe cycling opportunities for residents and visitors. The big rub of late has been regarding the safety of e-scooters to the riders themselves and to others trying to share the roads or cycle paths or sidewalks with them.
About a dozen deaths were reported globally by users of scooters by middle of 2019. Compare that to the 1.35 million traffic related deaths reported globally in 2018. Obviously the number of people driving in vehicles drawfs the nubmers using e-scooters but even so, it begs the question why aren’t more people complaining about traffic deaths from vehicles? And to me, there is a bigger question I am not hearing enough, why aren’t we accelerating the transition away from private vehicles in the urban core? Cities (at least Europeans ones and many Asian cities too), were mostly built before cars. We used to believe cities and their infrastructure were to support citizen well being and people, not cars. There is a growing movement in European cities to transition away from cars in urban centers.
I believe e-scooters and bikesharing can be an important part of this transition and that what we need to do is make cities safter for non-car usage. This means, we need to see dedicated pedestrian areas, dedicated non-motorized micromobility lanes (e.g. pedal-powered bikes, skateboards, etc) and dedicated motorized micromobility lanes. If we really want to improve safety of our cities and of e-scooter use, the best way to achieve this, in my opinion, is reduce the availability of public infrastructure for private cars and turn over that space to more people-friendly and environmentally friendly infrastructure for movement.
2. Does micromobility help solve the first mile/last mile in cities?
Just last week I actively participated in a debate stimulated by David Zipper regarding the cost of e-scooter sharing in cities.
The provocative question he proposed is, can e-scooter sharing really be part of a first-mile/last-mile solution if it can cost up to $8–10 round trip from transit hubs to and from offices? One question I posed is do e-scooters have to be affordable to the masses for daily roundtrip use in order for them to be part of an integrated mobility system? Just as ridehailing like Uber, Lyft, Careem and more are not mean to be used by all of us on a daily basis, maybe that is the case with e-scooter sharing as well. He rightly said fine, but should cities actively support e-scooter sharing if it is a service out of the reach for most commuters on a daily basis?
This led to a discussion of if cities could consider subsidizing private operators of e-scooter sharing as a part of the greater mobility ecosystem, if it can be demonstrated that widescale adoption of e-scooter sharing and strategies to ensure sufficient vehicle availability adjacent to transit hubs could lead to a reduction in car use in city centers. I personally believe we will see some cities subsidize their use. We have decades of history of cities subsidising bikesharing, why not e-scooter sharing, again, if done right, they could be an important part of the shift away from car dependence in urban areas?
3. Should dockless micromobility be allowed to park freely around cities?
A common complaint about the rapid rise of dockless micromobility, both bikes and scooters, is that they clutter public spaces and often make pedestrian passing difficult.
I am 100% in agreement that micromobility use and parking must be regulated. I believe dockless solutions are extremely valuable for users as they can improve the ubiquitous access to them, reducing anxiety there may not be a scooter near you. However, cities are coming up with solutions. The designated painted areas of sidewalks for dockless parking of micromobility is a great idea, I first discovered in Singapore a few years ago. Users failing to park in the designated dockless areas are banned from accessing any micromobility operator for a period of time.
For those who may complain about the use of public space for dockless (or docked) micromobility parking should consider the amount of public space in cities allocated to the parking of private passenger vehicles! In Los Angeles, for example, 17 million square meters of land are allocated to parking private cars.
4. Can micromobility support the transition to low-carbon cities
There is another ongoing debate about the ecological impact of micromobility, especially e-scooters on the environment. A bit part of the concern is the short shelf-life current e-scooters have due to the excessive use and damage they experience. The concern is warranted. One of Iomob’s investors, B4Motion, recently shared with us their view of how e-scooter sharing services from acquiring toys not meant for shared and frequent use towards more R&D being done to develop industrial extended-use scooters by the big players.
As Oliver Bruce recently articulated, the original Bird scooters lasted only 28 days! while the latest Tier scooter has been built to last up to 24 months! Of course all well funded scooter startups (or scale ups), including Bird, have embraced investment in more durable scooters as that is the fastest way to improve their unit economis. In that same article by Bruce, he highlights the research about the current and improving GHG emissions from e-scooter use compared with cars and other forms of transit. Again, as durability of the scooter hardware increases, coupled with continually imrpoving efficiency of their batteries we are likely to see even further improvements in e-scooter’s contribution to lower carbon cities.
Conclusion
Any reader of this post can see I am bullish on the future of micromobility and the importance of its emergence in helping reshape urban mobility ecosystems. In other posts I have articulated Iomob’s views regarding how micromobility operators can improve the utility of their vehicles in Mobility as a Service platforms like those we build. A lot is happening in this space, and we are sure to see continued innovation, as well as M& activity such as the recent acquisition of Circ by Bird.
About us:
Iomob, which stands for the Internet of Mobility, headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, has built a white label Mobility as a Service solution which combines proprietary algorithms enabling multimodal combinations of public and private services and an application that allows end users to discover mobility services, receive multimodal combinations for their journeys, book and pay for a range of mobility services. Iomob has won numerous open innovation challenges from organizations like Ford Motors, Renfe and Sweden’s Sustainable Mobility Challenge. Iomob has also participated in prestigious startup accelerators such as Techstars and Wayra and in 2019 has won the Best Mobility Startup of 2019 at the South Summit, The Public Choice Award from ERTICO in 2019, Top Mobility Startup in the Federation of International Automobiles (FiA) Startup Challenge and selected Top 100 Smart Cities Partners by Newsweek.
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