The micromobility revolution being led by tech startups
By: Adam Greenwood
Tags: Future, Uber, Micromobility, Scooters

How do they work?

Start by finding a scooter, either with your app or by spotting one. Within your app, you then scan the QR code on the handlebars, read a few messages about safety and you are off.

They travel about 10–15 mph depending on battery charge, road/sidewalk condition and how flat the surface is.

When you have arrived at your destination, you simply push down the kick stand and click end ride in the app. Some apps require you take a photo of the scooter to show you have parked it responsibly. Finally, you get an itemised receipt of your ride emailed to you.

They are great fun to ride, very simple to operate with good steering and brakes.

I rode uber and lime scooters, there is no minimum cost for uber, just $0.15 per minute, Lime has a minimum ride fee of $1 and is $0.15 per minute.

They transformed my SXSW experience from the year before, because last year there were some talks you simply could not get to because the locations were too far away to reach in the 30 minutes between talks, especially popular ones that required some queuing. With scooters, every venue is easily accessible within your app.

There were about 5,000 e-scooters in the downtown area for SXSW which meant that you didn’t have to wait for more than a few minutes before you found an available one.

Scooters everywhere in Austin, TX

Lime and Bird are less than two years old. They’ve both raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Lime is currently valued at $3 billion and Bird is valued at £2 billion.

Each of the scooter startups has had hundreds of millions of dollars invested. Are they making money? The cost of each scooter, plus operational costs, damage, loss, theft, collection, charging all must mount up. I did some research and found this over at QUARTZ.

The average Bird scooter does 5–6 trips per day

The average length of a Bird trip is 1.6 miles.

Bird charges $1 per trip plus $0.15 per minute.

Assuming an average speed of 7.5 miles per hour, the average trip lasts 12.8 minutes.

In which case the average trip costs the user $2.92.

At 5.5 trips per day, the average scooter earns about $16 a day.

The Xiaomi scooter that Bird uses sells for about $320 in China. Taking into account the vendor costs above, after about 2 months each scooter will have paid for itself and will then be generating about $10-$15 per day.

How are they collected and charged?

This is one of the many ingenious parts of the service, the operators encourage users to become chargers. They pay you $5 per scooter charge. You simply sign up and start driving around town picking up the ones with dead batteries, take them home and charge them. Then drop them back off. (Apparently on a domestic supply, it only costs approx 7 cents to charge a scooter so its fairly profitable for the chargers.

You can use the same app to find scooters that need to charge. They are colour coded on the map with a dollar value depending on the level of charge and how hard they are to access.

Catching birdys

There are whole communities dedicated to the collection and charging of electric scooters, the whole thing feels like a video game, with people hoarding them, waiting for bounties and then releasing them, chargers getting in fights, being lured with stray scooters and robbed and all kinds of other issues. Still such a clever idea to get these things collected and charged by customers. I got most of this info from a great article here.

What is the environmental impact?

It would appear that the more people using scooters, the less people are driving which should be great for the environment. However, initial research is showing that these journeys are replacing journeys that would actually be taken by foot. If this is the case it could be that they are worse for the environment. It could also be the case that they are still a novelty and that in time people will use them less for fun small journeys and more instead of longer drives or bus journeys.

Safety

How dangerous are these scooters? Well, they can travel up to 15mph and most people don’t wear helmets or look where they are going, some go the wrong way along the street and even along the freeway! So, they could be considered dangerous, but, like any new method of transport, it will take some getting used to.

When I was growing up (1980s) no one wore a helmet when they were cycling, now you rarely see people without them. Also, for the first 10 years or so that I snowboarded, very few boarders or skiers wore helmets, now very few don’t.

One Uber driver I spoke to said that he felt pedestrians were far more dangerous as so many of them have their heads down looking at their phones that they often walk into traffic! This has become such an issue that cities across Europe have started to install traffic lights into the pavements so pedestrians still notice them. A great idea, for sure, but also part of me thinks let Darwin do his thing ;)

Pavement traffic lights

What do the locals think?

I spoke to locals, bartenders, SXSW volunteers and uber drivers about this, the general consensus is that those who use them love them and those who don’t dislike them. The main issues are people driving around like maniacs on the wrong side of the road and dumping the scooters on the sidewalks. Only a small percentage of users will act like this but it is this behaviour that stands out.

Could they work in the UK?

There are already Lime scooters in Milton Keynes and North London, Milton Keynes is perfect for e-scooters as they have the redways (Cycle paths all over the city). The ‘Boris bikes’ have been a big success in London so there does appear to be a desire for micromobility .

However, in most of the UK we have narrow pavements, compared to the huge sidewalks in the USA, so we will have to wait and see if local councils embrace this and create the physical infrastructure needed to support this.

I personally cannot wait.