As of last week, e-scooters are legal in Germany, as a result, a bunch of startups have landed their scooters all over the city.
For context, Berlin already ranks among the best European cities when it comes to availability and access of public transportations. Both, the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe(BVG) and Deutsche Bahn(DB) offer a range of options to take you from any point A to point B in the city and even outside to surrounding towns.
My own experience
When I moved to Berlin four years ago, I was already impressed by the easiness and affordability of transportation in the city; however, that feeling is understandable if you take into consideration that I moved from Casablanca, Morocco where transportation is neither easy nor affordable, but that’s another topic for another day.
In order to move from point A to point B, I can use the underground trains (U-Bahn), Trams, Buses, or the normal trains (S-Bahn), those are all accessible options through a unified ticketing system that meant I could buy a ticket for EUR 2.7 and hop on/off any of the mentioned options as many times as I want for the next 2 hours and trips usually lasted for ~30min. Thus, all you need was a ticket and 30 min to move around.
Shared Bikes
Moreover, another way people moved around the city was using Bikes and I have joined them since the day I discovered the bike sharing service Mobike.
For people moving around with bikes, they have cycling lanes and a relatively friendly driver community roaming the streets. Thus, once the weather starts getting better, I renew my monthly Mobike subscription and start using the service as many times as possible.
As a result, I never felt the need to use a taxi, buy a car or a scooter, my transportation life was complete. Well, until e-scooters carpet-bombed the streets, bike-lanes and the sidewalks.
E-scooters
It started with a simple Google Maps search and suddenly I noticed this new transportation option that was clearly an Ad run by one of the biggest e-scooter players, Lime. I clicked, installed the app and used the first e-scooter I could find, the journey cost 3 euros and it was great fun. The app even listed “fun” as one of the options when they ask for your feedback after the ride. After a week of using the service and tens of euros spent, I came up with the conclusion that this was fun but not fixing any problem in my life if not potentially creating a new way to spend money. Thus, thanks but no.
As per the impact such a service would have on the city, I am already on the side that doesn’t want to see them established here. People throw them everywhere, they need to be charged quite regularly, they really need drivers to be aware of driving laws and I expect people to start writing about accidents where e-scooters are involved very soon. Also, going back to the basic question any similar service shall answer, what problem are you solving? and the answer in a city like Berlin is not much, maybe.. fun? cool? but are those enough reasons we have to tolerate them, their monetary cost, their environmental cost and the landscape disruption they will end up having on the city once the gazillion startups in the sector finish dropping them all over the place.
Parking
Some people already think that shared mobility in general results in “chaotic parking”. This means that when you have people parking shared bikes, cars, scooters and e-scooters, it becomes a total mess all over the place. This becomes more critical with bikes and e-scooters. However, I would argue that e-scooters are the worst in this regards because they are easy to fall. Hence, it is already more frequent that I see an e-scooter on the ground than bikes and this will only keep getting worse.
Costs
Public transportation and shared bikes services both offer subscription plans. This is a relatively big advantage they have, especially for a regular user. However, e-scooters charge users a fee for unlocking the device and then a fee of 15ct per minute.
For example, during a hypothetical month, commuting to and from work would cost the following:
- Public transportation: EUR2.7 x2(two-way) x20 (working days) = EUR108 (or EUR63 subscription)
- E-scooter (assuming 20mins journey to work): (EUR1 + EUR0.15 x20) x2 x20 = EUR160
- Bike (assuming 20mins journey to work): EUR1 x2 x20 = EUR40 (or EUR9.9 subscription)
After spending a considerable amount of time doing research and running the numbers, I came up with the following conclusion:
- E-scooter(EUR160) >>> BVG(EUR63) >>>>>> Bike(EUR9.9)
Conclusion
We are currently going through a grand mobility experiment, a lot of things will change, a lot of people will hate the new options they see and a lot of people will at least try them once. Also, there will be people who are going to be fans of those options and the luxury of choice we currently have.
Let’s see how things will evolve..
Thanks for the time you spent reading this :)
