A micromobility travel diary.
Preface
It’s been almost two years since I left the sunny Bay Area for rainy Amsterdam in pursuit of getting closer to a lower-consumption lifestyle and the circular economy. This lead me to join Dott, a leading micro-mobility EU-based operator (Layman’s terms: a Lime competitor), at their Amsterdam HQ. The move was strategic both for my career and for my life.
For my life, I wanted to live like a “human being”, not a “human in a car”. In San Francisco, driving is usually the most common, intuitive, fastest and safest option to travel from one end of the city to the other. In Amsterdam, it’s biking. (I recommend watching Youtuber “Not Just Bikes”’ videos, who illustrates this much better.) But it hasn’t always been like this: the switch from cars to bikes was very deliberate. The city has also set a goal to be a “donut city” by 2050: in my day to day I already see this happen in a couple of different ways. (But that’s a topic for another article.)
For my career, I wanted to be part of the circular economy. Dott employs a circular business model in that we sell the service of the product (i.e. usage of our micromobility vehicles) rather than the product itself. It’s in the company’s best interest to keep more of the vehicle fleet in the best shape possible, for as long as possible, so our operational day-to-day includes repairs and quality maintenance. In some cities we also take care of recycling components at end of life.
Just short of a year in working across the pond, I felt I wasn’t getting enough out of my job — so I journeyed a little deeper.
The Motivation behind the Tour de Dott
The Amsterdam HQ is fairly abstracted from the company’s operations. Data and UX analyses, app reviews and Slack messages are starved of the lived, often painful nuances in mobility. It’s one thing to watch an animal documentary from your couch; another to go on a safari.
In my Dutch winter stupor I thought the easiest way for me to learn about the mechanics of this industry was to do precisely that: live, see, and breathe alongside our operations. In addition to understanding the rider experience, I also really wanted to see how the operations and feasibility behind circular business theory worked on the ground. So, I terminated my highly-coveted lease in Amsterdam, and made good use of my “hybrid” job: I went on what I called my little Tour de Dott.
Leaving my desk at our HQ would only let me see the full breadth and depth of our markets. Despite working remotely, I was never too far from the “office” because I have accessible colleagues everywhere I went: Dott is a pan-European company, yet in each market we have folks who are deeply local.
Of course, I’d be lying if I said personal motivations didn’t play a role. Amsterdam living costs are kind of ridiculous. (I mean especially given the weather; at least in the SF Bay Area, I paid for year-round sun!) And it’s not every day that you’re in your 20s, untethered and still (naively) mission-driven in your career.
The Tour Set-up
By the end of this tour I will have visited 7 of our warehouses in 4 different cities, just a small sample set of the dozens that we have. As I mentioned, Dott’s operations are unique in that we are located all over Europe, and hire people in-house all over Europe — including warehouse folks, which isn’t common practice in the industry. Traveling to our markets–both current and potential– meant I was incredibly privileged to be welcomed by some really passionate people in the space: our frontline workers, the warehouse and operations folks. All the way I was guided by the folks who make the magic happen.
For this tour I spent 2 weeks working in Seville, 1 week in Madrid, and 4 weeks in Paris. I’ve also complemented the article with observations from visits to London, Oxford, Tokyo, Antwerp, Barcelona, and Malaga.
One might argue this sounds more like a vacation than a real business trip. And I wouldn’t disagree: I paid for this out of pocket, with no association to my work outside the warehouse visits (which I mostly edited out for fear of NDAs, sorry!). It follows this disclaimer that what I write here is my thoughts only, and not at all those of Dott. (Legal, don’t come at me!)
Without further ado…
Sevilla // 1 week // No Dott warehouse
The first stop on my trip was dreamy, yellow-drenched Sevilla. Maybe I stopped there because I was prompted by the promise of sunshine, maybe prompted by the promise of Dott… I was early enough for an orange-blossom-scented Sevilla, but too early for Dott to be in the market (a little slip in communication). Fortunately Voi, a scooter competitor, was still operating there, and in my eager-beaverness I convinced my friend to take one with me when we were exploring the city one of our first nights there.
And what a mistake that was.
HITTING THE ROADS
We were immediately met with the cobblestone massage of death: hallmarks of roads in historic European old-towns. Then suddenly — our vehicles were speed-throttled in the city centre. I looked for an explanation but couldn’t get one: Voi’s UI didn’t tell me I would get slowed to a halt; Google Map’s navigation didn’t warn me either. And frankly, it wouldn’t make sense: I was on a damn bike path.
It felt like special treatment for us salmon-scooter-riding yuppies: Private scooters, bikes all zipped by just fine. After parking our scooters 400m back the way we came, we warned a fellow tourist who tried to take an incorrectly parked scooter (gasp). Later on, we couldn’t use Voi in a park because they were banned. But you could take private bikes, the small business operated wagon-bikes, even a horse… what makes a shared scooter such a special case? Such a threat?
The city’s micromobility infrastructure also lagged behind in other ways. Most of understanding where you could go on a bike was guesswork. You could bike on pedestrian paths, but only at certain hours of the day. The city centers’ bike paths were marked, but by funny-looking metal discs on the ground. Pedestrians would often confuse the paved space for a walk path. It also wasn’t clear which direction you were allowed to go in: It felt too wide to be one-directional. Were the discs facing in this direction for the aesthetic? Indeed, some people traveled bidirectionally, and the width of the path continued to suggest so as well, but it wasn’t clear at all.
Similarly outside of the city centre, there were some more traditional, green-marked bike paths that ended abruptly. Sometimes you would share paths with cars, but it was ambiguous given the lack of signage.
Needless to say, we never took a scooter again in Sevilla. It was too erratic to use reliably, the cobblestone assault too much, and the electrical boosts spooked whichever retired grandmother or lackadaisical tourist we shared paths with. Instead, we used the Sevici mechanical bikes extensively, and complimented it with car rides and walking. And wow: the contrast between the shared vehicles was night and day.
SEVICI BIKES
Sevici bikes are docked around the city. By our second trip we had already developed a routine: we knew which were prone to being full, which were prone to being empty. Because it was a simple mechanical bike, we could break rules when it made sense to, like when we innocently, accidentally took a wrong turn onto a pedestrian pathway: an easy mistake given the common, sudden disappearance of the bike path in the city.
There was a good ratio of distance-to-dock: if one dock was full, the next was just a 2-min bike ride away. Thankfully for us we were never in a rush enough for that minute to matter (much more predictable routing), and we weren’t charged for it because it was within the 30 minutes we were provided in our initial payment.
The app wasn’t the prettiest, but it worked. Sevici had per-bike reviews complete with timestamps on which bikes were good to use, and which have been recently checked. There was one map view for the number of available bikes; another for the number of parking available. Parking was so easy: docks were physically visible, and leaving the bike was a single-step process, no need to pull out the app. The map also had a search bar for POIs so it made it easy to look for bikes and parking where you wanted to go.
Sevici bikes became our most reliable, controlled form of transportation for intracity travel. And it was affordable, at only 2.40e for the day with unlimited 30 min rides. There were rules, yes — but we knew them, and with the low price tag we were happy to play by them.
Lime bikes were also available, but we didn’t use them at all. For the same Sevici bike price of 2.40e I could only ride for 8 minutes. This was unappealing in several ways: We had no need to go that fast in the (flat) city, especially not with the cobblestones and pedestrians. Plus, we were wary now: given that the Voi scooters had randomly stopped and we had to push it backwards to the next parking spot, running the same bet with an e-bike 3 times the weight seemed foolish, to say the least. And then, your ride likely wouldn’t stay within the estimated 8 minutes anymore…
THE PEOPLE
In early April, we shared the streets with elders and young families. Most of them were on foot, strolling in the sunset-tinged streets of Sevilla, perhaps taking the leisurely 30-minute walk from one end of the city to the other. Most folks didn’t mind our presence even when incorrectly on the path, though it did cause some deer-in-headlights moments.
Just outside of the old town, there were much more cars than bikes, filling the new multi-lane motorways that immured the tight-knit cobblestone roads of the old town. I presumed these folks came in from the surrounding suburbs or beyond. Connectivity between these locales was otherwise limited to busses, which didn’t come reliably the one time we tried using it (and required exact change on hand). Finding parking in such small streets is a nightmare, but at least you were closer to where you wanted to be. It was also easier than finding biking docks (though less predictable). Private cars were open to sharing roads with bikes… taxis, not so much. (Although, when do they ever?)
Nonetheless — we enjoyed the historic, rich, warm city of Sevilla on our brick-coloured Sevici bikes. A small detour but a marvelous warm-up (figuratively and literally) to my Dott tour!
📍 Part 1: Intro & Seville
🛴 Part 2: Malaga
Part 3: Madrid
Part 4: Paris
Part 5: Not the End
Tour de Dott Takeaways
