The case for personal scooters

Being a big user of electric scooters in the past few months I think electric scooters are definitely the future of last-mile personal transportation. But are scooter-sharing companies necessary in this future?

A lot of investors seem to think so, judging by the amount of money pouring into these startups and talks about network effects and marketplaces. I however think that, while scooter-sharing services bring a lot of value to the users, the more traditional model of personal ownership will ultimately dominate the marketplace.

Economics

Let’s start with economics. I recently read this article about the economics of Bird. The article provides good insights into Bird’s business model and how the company will make a profit. Now let’s make the rough calculations from the perspective of the user:

Let’s assume that you use an electric scooter for your daily commute. That means you’ll use your scooter roughly 260 days a year. Lets assume your ride is 2 miles (~20 minutes) in each direction. This means 2*260 rides * 20 minutes = 2*260*($1+20*$0.15)=$2080

This means that for a daily commuter, a scooter-sharing service is definitely not the right move financially. You could buy 4 scooters a year for the same amount.

Convenience and Availability

However, price is not the only variable, convenience is probably the most important feature when using a scooter-sharing service.

Using a service has very little friction as you only need to download an app and pay for what you use. It also allows you not having to think about where you leave the scooter. You don’t have to carry it around when not riding it and you don’t have to worry about what happens to it while it’s parked on the street.

But not everything is rosy. I’ve used scooters a lot lately within Marina del Rey and Venice. These areas have a dense coverage of scooters and still many times I’ve had a hard time finding one. All the convenience of not having to worry about carrying a scooter around is hindered by their unavailability.

In order to make sure there’s always scooters available, companies would need to have an oversupply of scooters optimally distributed around the city. This could cause a problem of clutter when they’re not properly distributed as it has been extensively documented in China and Dallas with dockless bikes. The problem that scooter-sharing services could brings to side walks is perceived to be so bad that some cities are temporarily taking them off the street pending regulation.

In comparison, owning a scooter means you couldn’t just drop it on the side of the street and forget about it. You’d either need to secure it or bring it with you, which might be inconvenient. But not that much, scooters are not the same as bicycles, they’re way smaller and could be made way lighter. You can bring them into your office, you can bring them in the train or bus without having to strap them to the front. You can bring them into a small apartment and just store them in the closet. On the other hand, you wouldn’t need to worry about availability as you always have them with you ready to go.

Charging & Maintenance

Scooter-sharing services are crowdsourcing the charging, maintenance and distribution of the scooters, which is a clever way to go about it. Although it can also lead to some weird behavior by competing chargers.

Owning a scooter would mean you do your own charging, which its no added problem since you already have to store it. Maintenance could be more problematic, but now that you own the scooter you’ll be more careful with how you use it which should make the problem rare. Even then, you might not need to go out of your way as on-demand services will pop-up, same as they did for bikes.

Form Factor

Form factor is already a big advantage that makes electric scooters a better option than bikes. This will also play a major role on making personal ownership overtake scooter-sharing services.

I recently bought one of these 4-x foldable scooters to try them out. I don’t really recommend it. It’s fragile, slow, heavy and the ride isn’t as smooth as the popular Xiaomi Mi. But you can already spot the opportunity of a super portable and robust scooter that you could bring anywhere in a backpack without breaking a sweat. This would minimize the only downside of owning vs. renting.

The Future

I believe scooters have the potential to revolutionize personal transportation, reduce traffic and transform our cities. But in order to really make an impact they need to take over the daily commutes to and from work. Scooters + public transportation might be all we need to cover the majority of our commuting needs within cities.

The long tail of casual users of scooters will be served by the scooter-sharing companies. But for the daily commuters, personal ownership is the best option, with the added bonus of nullifying most of the current negative sentiment around scooters.