Burritos in an SUV: The Case for Micromobility

Humans have a fundamental need to move around their cities on a daily basis. Whether it is a commute to work, a trip to the grocery store, or a night out with friends, the journey from Point A to Point B is taken today through a number of transportation options that often present significant hassle and cost to the traveler. Lack of integration between last-mile mobility options and public transit has created an environment in most US cities where, assuming they can afford it, the average commuter chooses to drive to work in a personal vehicle rather than navigate the complex and sometimes-uncomfortable public transit landscape. Packages, food, and other goods similarly need to be transported to homes and businesses. Today, these items are delivered to last-mile distribution centers and homes within a city much in the same way they are delivered between cities: through a mixture of long-haul trucks and large vans. Given the trend towards urbanization and the crowding of cities expected to follow, along with increasing rates of climate change caused by vehicle emissions, municipal governments around the world are looking for ways to take large, gas-powered vehicles out of dense urban cores. And while more packages can indeed fit into an 18-wheeler than can fit on a delivery e-bike, and more people can fit into an SUV than a Smart Car, we can achieve a more optimized city environment where people and goods can freely move in smaller vehicles without trucks or single-occupant cars causing crippling traffic congestion.

Micromobility, or the movement of people and goods over short distances in a city via light electric vehicles, will be a crucial component of efficient future urban transportation systems. In this article, I will discuss the current state of the micromobility industry, highlight key issues with available services, and offer a view of how micromobility could more naturally fit into the future of mobility ecosystem.

Brief History and Current State of the Micromobility Industry

Modern bikeshare systems were introduced in the US for the first time in 2010 in Portland, Oregon and Washington, D.C. Earlier services were available in Europe (there has been a bike share system in Amsterdam since the 1960s), which has generally been more culturally receptive to shared micromobility. These early bikeshare systems were low-tech, but developments in smartphone technology have since enabled much more accessible and robust services. Starting in the early 2010s, mobile technology enabled precise vehicle and fleet tracking, which in turn allowed operators for the first time to be able to quickly flex supply to where the network was experiencing demand.

The landscape started changing at a much faster pace when shared electric scooter fleet operators deployed in the US in 2017, starting with Bird in Santa Monica, California and followed soon after by Lime, Spin, Jump, and Lyft. Many of these companies took the approach of deploying their vehicles in cities without asking permission of local governments, which caused tension between operators and regulators. Cities had been burned by Uber and Lyft less than five years prior, who had used a similar tactic and significantly impacted city planning and traffic patterns as a result. So shared micromobility operators had the misfortune of coming into an already hostile local environment for mobility tech. Cities exerted their control by impounding fleets of scooters and bikes, instituting city-wide bans to the services, and giving tickets to operators and riders. In recent years, cities have pushed back on the wide scale deployment of scooter and dockless bike fleets, in many cases only awarding permits to one or two operators and for a maximum number of vehicles. But in almost all cases, the relationship between city and operator is strained.

After three years of meteoric growth from 2017 to 2020, micromobility ridership took a steep decline in March 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, ridership levels in many cities were back to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2020. As I write this at the beginning of 2023, bike and scooter ridership has surpassed pre-COVID levels. But globally, the shared operators are struggling to stay alive and the personally owned micromobility is taking off.

Problems with Today’s Shared Micromobility Services

The concept of using lightweight vehicles to travel has obviously been around for a long time. But the tech industry finally turned its attention - and its billions of dollars in VC funding - to tech-enabled shared bike and scooter services in 2017. In much the same way that Uber or other recent tech startups approached their first few years, these shared operators (Bird, Lime, Spin, Jump, etc.) prioritized growth above all other things, burning through cash to stake claim on high-value markets in the US and around the world. A company would launch in a city by deploying hundreds or thousands of scooter vehicles essentially overnight and enticing riders to download their app and try the service. As I mentioned before, city officials were not happy with this approach. The tense relationship with cities has caused lasting problems for the industry, including the following:

• Caps on dockless vehicles imposed by cities on operators do not allow for increasing vehicle supply to meet increased rider demand. In some cities, there are way too many vehicles sitting around not being utilized; in other cases, it is impossible to find a vehicle when you need it.

• Similarly, docked or station-based vehicles are more predictable and easier to control, and are more popular with city governments for that reason, but do not allow operators to flexibly balance fleets to meet dynamic demand in a useful way.

• Dockless scooters and bikes are often left blocking sidewalks or public rights of way, which creates a significant hassle for pedestrians and barriers to mobility for the disabled. This is a narrative that has been a significant problem for shared operators, with many people viewing bikes and scooters as useless city clutter. I’d challenge this view by saying that we have dedicated MASSIVE amounts of city space to cars that stay parked almost all day (It is estimated that parking lots cover roughly 5% of all urban land in the US. In Los Angeles, parking occupies more land than housing. This is a wild statistic...). For some reason, society has collectively decided that we are okay with the type of clutter and waste creating by car culture. Parking lots spread cities out, creating much longer walking distances between destinations and making that walk really uncomfortable. It is obvious that cars create much more significant physical barriers to mobility than scooters.

The business model of shared micromobility is also challenging. The VC-preferred (at the time) approach to growth above everything comes with massive risk in the hardware space. Today, none of the shared scooter operators are making positive profits due to the high cost of manually charging and rebalancing fleets. Additionally, virtually all operators have had issues with theft and vandalism of their vehicles in many markets, further cutting into profits. Due to the nature of the business model, high operating costs prevent shared operators from setting prices low enough to attract more riders to the service. For example, a 2-mile ride on a Bird in LA can cost more than $10 (anecdotally, but I’ve seen high prices at some point in every city). This brings the service out of reach for many people that could benefit from it, like low income essential workers, purely for financial reasons. High prices have hindered ridership growth across the shared industry. Simply put - if you’re going to pay $15 anyway, you might as well just call an Uber unless you’re truly seeking a joyride, which is not a big enough rider segment to drive the whole market.

Another issue is the prevailing form factor for shared scooter fleets. Data from the past several years suggests that shared scooter rider demographics skew heavily young and male. Scooters are small, fast, and relatively unstable, making them an unsafe mode of transportation for many people. The vehicle is totally inaccessible to people with physical disabilities, and learning how to ride safely seems like a scary and daunting task for many other would-be users.

Micromobility in the Future of Mobility Ecosystem

As stated above, maybe the services we have today aren’t the final answer, but we need to keeping moving in this direction. Micromobility and light electric vehicle adoption is a critical part of urban mobility of the future. Put another way, our cities cannot reach their full potential - and in fact will continue to decline steadily - if we continue giving as much space and subsidizing use of full-size automobiles as we have for the past 70 years. We must have more responsible options for getting around, and micromobility unlocks major benefits for society. And if we can get there, it will be because the right vehicles were accompanied by a cultural shift around transportation (which is a harder problem).

Part of improving the transportation landscape of our cities requires an evolution in our thinking around efficiency. We must challenge ourselves to reject the notion that a car is more efficient or better because it can be used for more kinds of trips and thus we should default to it. This thinking has created enormous waste - yes it’s convenient, but you don’t need a full-size SUV to deliver a burrito 1 mile. We simply don’t have the resources to continue using cars in this way forever (even if the SUV is electric). In place of this one-size-fits-all approach to mobility, we should embrace the nuance of each trip’s context and adopt purpose-built, fit-for-use, light electric vehicles for different mobility use cases. Food delivery, large package delivery, and people moving are use cases that all require a different amount of physical space…so a system optimized for energy conservation and waste reduction would use a different vehicle for each, right? The full-size SUV is probably the right vehicle for taking a family of 5 from their home to a restaurant 10 miles away. But a 1-seat light electric trike is a better choice for delivering that burrito around the block.

The mental shift from one-size-fits-all car centricity to being intentional about which type of vehicle to use for each trip is hard for Americans. Many European and Asian countries have real light vehicle options that we simply don’t yet. Local governments in the US have the power to partner with mobility providers and shared fleet operators that are building these fit-for-use light vehicles, and they should actively look to do so. These sorts of public-private partnerships should be constructed to bring new vehicle technologies to the public in a financially viable way while meeting the unique mobility needs of each community. ‘Partnership’ also implies working together to deploy shared mobility in the right places and in the right way to make the service successful. It has to be a hyper-local approach, and that requires more investment and cooperation from the private sector, too.

It is still unknown which specific technologies or micromobility vehicle designs will achieve broad adoption in the US, but I’d like to offer a possible view. Consider a future city that has a fleet of shared LEVs. These vehicles look like something between a scooter and a car. They have 3 or 4 wheels and are covered (they might even have basic heating and AC so that they work in Boston in February AND Phoenix in August), but only fit 1-2 people and some small packages. Some vehicles are designed for delivery, so maybe they only have 1 seat and a large trunk. Others are optimized for people-moving, so they have 2 in-line seats. But both types are only slightly larger than a big, wide bike. Just like an Uber, you can summon one of these vehicles with an app on your phone and it will be either autonomously guided or teleoperated to your location. You get in and drive it to your destination, maybe up to 3 miles away. Once you get to where you’re going, the vehicle drives off in search of its next passenger.

This is an example of a trip that is taken via large vehicles thousands of times per day in every major US city - usually in an Uber, cab, or personal vehicle. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could dodge traffic by traveling in a small vehicle in the bike lane? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about parking because the vehicle is shared, but still available to you wherever you are in the city? Wouldn’t it be nice to have an option like this, while still also being able to hail a large vehicle if traveling with your family, or pick up a shared bike if the weather is nice and you want some exercise?

In transportation, one size does not fit all. We are forcing cars to do so today…and it has created a lot of problems for our cities. Micromobility as a concept has been around for a long time, but is still in its infancy as an industry. We must support the responsible growth of this industry to relieve ourselves from the problems of car centricity.