What’s scootering got to do with it? Why “last mile” matters for cities and their citizens
How the public and private sectors can work together — and how I want to be a part of it
On a tour of the New York Transit Museum, my guide asked a provocative question: “What would New York City be without its subway? The city is a melting pot because its subway brings people from its furthest reaches together. The city is an economic engine because its subway brings the region’s people to work to invent the future. The city is an access point to the American Dream because its subway moves everyone irrespective of socioeconomic or ethnic background.”
Effective transit enriches human lives. After working in and studying urban tech and transportation, I also see transit isn’t working well for everyone.
Today, new “last mile services” (e.g. electric scooter and bike share services like Lime) are touted as the next chapter. While this new technology and its large market excite much of Silicon Valley, I don’t hear enough folks asking, “How will this actually improve human lives? Why does humanity need this stuff?”
Here’s what I believe:
Cities globally should enable all their citizens to live prosperous, healthy, joyful, and fulfilling lives.
Below, I share why I think last mile services tie to this vision and how I hope to build to that aspiration.
As subways transformed New York in the last century, I hope over the next decade we build a transportation system to serve all citizens better. Last mile and transportation alone won’t solve all urban problems, but they can provide a critical square in the broader quilt of progress.
Cities globally should enable all their citizens…
For last mile to improve cities, these must not be services by the rich for the rich. Companies must prioritize inclusion to help residents across incomes, neighborhoods, countries, and even current transportation mode (e.g. drivers and non-drivers alike).
Today, transit doesn’t serve everyone. For too many, transit is too far, too slow, or involves long or unreliable transfers. These users either pay in time (long walks or journeys), money (paying for a car or Uber), or comfort (sweating while biking). The first and last mile of the trip is critical; if it’s too inconvenient, users switch the whole trip to a car. This isn’t a story of villainous drivers but about people making rational tradeoffs between bad choices. For those of low income, this isn’t a choice; it’s a tax.
Last mile services could make transit viable for more people. Electric last mile services (e.g. e-scooters or e-bikes) could offer a convenient and cheap alternative for short trips, which are the majority of car trips today — and users just find them fun. For longer journeys, these services link to public transit by solving the last (and first) mile problem and eliminating burdensome transfers by replacing shorter legs (e.g. the 30-minute walk or short bus ride to the Caltrain commuter rail).
These benefits can accrue widely. Drivers benefit when other drivers “mode switch” off cars, reducing congestion, while the city moves more humans-per-hour on a road full of scooters and bikes vs. single passenger cars. If built and regulated correctly, the benefits spread across neighborhoods and income levels, because these devices are cheap to operate and can be quickly and widely distributed.
…to live prosperous, …
With improved transportation comes the ability to reach the furthest corners of the city for economic activity. For example, today’s offices, restaurants, and shops in the Richmond neighborhood in SF likely draw employees and customers from their immediate vicinity because of limited transportation options.
Imagine if the Richmond become easier to access. New customers arrive, the neighborhood’s economy grows, and a virtuous cycle ensures (and I get yummy food more often!). In the middle of a housing crunch, more homes in the further reaches become accessible to employees. Thus as with past improvements in transit, increased neighborhood accessibility can grow land values across the city.
…healthy, …
Cars have well known negative externalities: CO2 and other harmful emissions, noise, and traffic injuries and deaths. Last-mile services reduce these harms for all city residents.
How can last mile services be safe with the news of injuries on scooters? This will require both designing services that train users effectively and working with governments to redesign urban roads with protected bike lanes for “medium speed” traffic. Today, we allocate nearly all of the road to cars. Even after decades of R&D and policy-making, cars annually injure 115,000 and kill nearly 7,000 pedestrians and cyclists. That’s separate from the car passengers also hurt and killed. While e-scooters or e-bikes will not be accident-free, their slower speed and lower weight (<1% of cars) make those magnitudes of lost lives impossible to recreate.
…joyful, and fulfilling lives.
Last mile services’ short-run benefits include moving people to live rich professional and social lives and beautifying cities by reducing the clutter of parked cars lining our streets today.
The biggest impacts are longer term. As we move more people more densely, using journey data we can begin reallocating the 25% of San Francisco allocated to roadways and sidewalks, most of which goes to cars and parking.
We can and therefore must transform the urban design of our cities to be more functional for residents without the status quo holding us back. Imagine if some of the public asphalt you and I own instead hosted housing, parks, schools, cafes, offices, or other uses of real economic and human value. We don’t yet know if scooters can get us there, but with an opportunity for cities this big, we must experiment and build sustainable, mutually beneficial public-private partnerships today.
Ultimately, we must build an environment where individuals have a choice to participate fully in the urban ecosystem no matter what zip code they grew up in. Through effective transportation and more land allocated to what’s important to them, we can give more people a real choice.
On a personal note
This is a unique moment for last mile services. Electric scooters and bikes are now sufficiently cheap to deploy widely, but we haven’t figured out the ideal service offering or government partnerships that will decide whether last mile technologies deliver on this promise. We must get both the private and public sector parts right, and I want to help make that happen.
After speaking with companies across the transportation and last mile space, I’m excited to join Lime today as a Product Manager to build towards this vision. I’ve found they have similar aspirations, a desire to work alongside governments to widely distribute the benefits across cities, and a team that can execute well.
