Trying to capture the subtleties of several weeks’ worth of observations resulted in a lengthy article (don’t know what I’m talking about? Part 1 of 5 is here 😉). I originally considered going through each attribute with examples from each city, but it’s truly the combination of them that makes a city move the way it does. (Plus, nobody has another 30 minutes to spare now, right?)
Holistically, here are my four main takeaways:
- Each city is different, and international companies need to treat it that way.
- Shared mobility is private — but it’s actually public transportation.
- Operators need to team up to win in the long term because we’re all really doing the same thing.
- Clean mobility needs everyone.
And an overview at the end.
No1.
Each city is different, and international companies need to treat it that way.
From inside the corporate office building or the concrete bubble of Silicon Valley, it’s simple to assume that anybody can build a one-size-fits-all solution that works everywhere. This tour has utterly humbled me because this couldn’t be farther from the truth, especially with such a physically and politically-driven space like mobility. Our teams have to deal with anything and everything, obvious and unexpected: from demystifying scooters for French voters that never rode one, to bike seats exploding from the Spanish summer sun. Hyperlocal exceptions are the devil in the detail.
Each region — not even city, necessarily — has its unique set of human management: conflicting stakeholders, imbalanced authority, and limited jurisdiction. Take London, for example: each borough has its own governing body that can control whether there are shared vehicles. Great in theory, terrible in practice: I can’t take a 20-minute ride in a direction without accidentally entering a no-go zone somewhere. Within jurisdiction limits, there are also issues with attitude: Speaking with other peers in the industry (not just micromobility), I hear TfL is constantly on the offence with operators. Conversely the attitude in Vilnius is collaborative — I vividly remember attending their mayor’s talk at MOVE 2022 about how he understands the need for equality in these relationships and is willing to meet operators to work in unison. (Unfortunately, it looks like neither Lime, Tier, Dott, nor Voi — has made it out that far east yet today.)
Each region also has its unique set of movement behaviours: the shape of the city, the direction and time of flow, the climate, the price influence, and of course the size all contribute to how people move. Paris moves arondissement to arondissement, within a ring; Malaga is a semicircle coastal city, with movement between suburb to beach, and along the coast. This impacts magnitude and direction of vehicle supply. Stockholm has a small operating window of a few months; Sardinia is available year-round. This impacts fleet balancing across the continent. Per-minute ride price in Madrid competes against the metro; in Seville it competes against city bikes. This impacts pricing and marketing tactics. How does the business cater to the city, to maximize throughput?
There is also nuance in culture and demographic. For residents, this can mean anything from respect for shared commodities (some cities see more vandalism and trash in the bike baskets than others), to attitude towards two-wheelers (some populations have less physical mobility, or favour cars more as a society). For companies, this should translate into different local procedures, whether it’s warehouse shift management or language tweaks in-app, marketing language or lobbying. It’s important to integrate local team input, and give them the authority to manage their own processes. Customization is inevitable.
No2.
Shared mobility is private — but it’s actually public transportation.
Despite being private entities, what operators like Dott provide for the citizen is actually public transportation. It should be paired alongside busses, trains, and metros. But the collaboration isn’t there. To start, public transport operators are separate entities in themselves. Additionally, city-operator relationship dynamic is often not the partner-partner that would best help its residents move, but rather modern-day employer-to-slave-employee: subjecting operators to moving targets, seemingly arbitrary expectations, and always the looming threat of getting kicked out of the city altogether. It’s difficult to compete, much less excel, when almost all responsibility and risk is placed exclusively on operators.
One might argue that this is just governments “upholding high standards”, being “better for the citizen”…Which would be true, if cities were actually capable of upholding their own end of the bargain. The daily struggle results in both city and operator rushing to meet goals that ultimately don’t make much of a dent for who really matters: the rider. Let’s walk through some examples:
Operators like Dott have the onus of dealing with upset riders who are fined for poorly parking a vehicle, because the city requires vehicles to be parked in specific spots. But in some cases, the city hasn’t provided enough of them. To add insult to injury, we are forced to consider small white paint markings on the pavement with no other signage as “parking”: Perhaps such subtlety is suitable for the well-accepted and grossly visible automobile — not so much for a delicately budding form of transportation like shared vehicles. The operator, then, has no choice but to enforce such parking, usually through fines, and pays for leagues of user support to mediate angry commuters.
Another example of a city-parking requirement is “improving parking accuracy” down to 2 meters. But… some parking spots are shorter than 2 meters. Sometimes it’s actually appropriate to park outside of the spot, for example if parked cars or dumpsters are in the spots. Why, then, are we concerned about accuracy down to 2 meters, when users can’t even find the parking spot to begin with? If we drew a parallel with cars, it would be the equivalent of asking a parking garage to control whether or not cars were parked within the lines. (Imagine if the parking lot operator came around fining every person who didn’t park properly). Instead of worrying about parking accuracy, we should be focused on visibility and availability of parking spots.
My personal favourite, the pièce de resistance, is how in London you are permitted to ride a 35kg, motorized bike with no prerequisite training — but to operate a scooter, you need a driver’s license. And while I understand the need to verify whether a rider is capable of operating a vehicle, I don’t understand why the prerequisite is a heavily motorized vehicle. How does this cater to someone who takes public transport to complement the ride?
This comedy escalates insidiously as other cities catch wind of this (“whoa, 2 meter accuracy!”) and also include — or worse, one-up– such non-sensical requirements. This tug-of-war results in both city and operator rushing to meet goals that ultimately don’t make much of a dent for who really matters: the rider.
No3.
Operators need to team up to win in the long term because we’re all really doing the same thing.
The tussle to get shared vehicles as a viable form of transport is pulled in yet another direction because we also have capitalism-driven competition in the game. Each operator has their own (moral) agenda, but their actions impact how all operators are treated, and behind the scenes we’re not actually that different from one another.
Take the shared e-scooter, for example. On its own, scooters are an innocuous form of micromobility. A coworker once described riding it as being “the closest you get to a magic carpet”. But the brand of shared e-scooters has been smeared by early operators’ strategy of “dump everywhere and free-float anywhere”. Its reputation is so deeply associated with irresponsible fleet management, cluttered streets, and unregulated usage that Paris threw down a vote — one that held no consideration for a representative democratic process (see why here, under Low Voter Turnout) — and now all shared e-scooters are banned. VC-rocketship-fueled, unsustainable execution ironically nuked the hundreds of “emission-free” rides Parisians take per day on shared e-scooters, along with the jobs they generated for the local teams — not only hurting the balance sheets this year and beyond, but more importantly ultimately detouring the path to clean mobility.
The real irony is that all the operators are really just doing the same thing. There’s competition in market share and presence– even childish play like tipping over competitor vehicles — but speaking to warehouse folks all over the continent who have worked at now-extinct operators, they tell me even the in-house tools we’ve built are the same, with nearly unnoticeable differences beyond branding. And it makes sense: everyone is using highly similar hardware, the same operational concepts, with the same political games. The baseline is the same. But nobody has gotten far enough yet to begin to pay attention to subtleties for each city. (See №1.)
We’re not totally blind to this, though; there’s already a joint Best Practice Recommendation from Dott, Lime, Tier, Superpedestrian, Voi, and Bird (ref 2, ref 3 which links to the PDF) and its localized variations. It’s a start! We just gotta keep it going.
No4.
Clean mobility needs everyone.
If it wasn’t already obvious: climate change is an everyone-job. From government officials, to on-street operations; from software engineers, to policy makers; from marketing to riders; non-riders, anti-riders, tourists, residents… the path to clean mobility is anything but clear. Everyone has their role to play in making this work.
Observing how each city handles shared mobility has shown how it’s all about mindset. Like I said in the Tour de Dott article, Amsterdam being notoriously bike-friendly is not an accident. It was a deliberate choice, that every person, regardless of how much stake they have in the game, contributes to making real. It’s a breeze to ride a bike in Amsterdam because tourists, store owners — everyone respects the bike on the street. The Gemeente considers it in their construction plans; GVB (public transport operator) allows them on public transport; there are enough bikes and accessible, visible parking, and nobody thinks it’s just the operator’s problem. Everything, everybody needs to come together for clean mobility to be a truly viable transportation option.
Overall
Each city is unique in how it moves. Traveling through them with both an operator and commuter POV, I felt the success of (shared) micromobility is based on three main pillars, below:
- CITY: Infrastructure, regulation
Are there dedicated bike paths? Do you need a drivers license to operate a scooter, or insurance to ride a bike? - OPERATOR: Offerings, vehicle types
What other operators are in the city; e-bikes, e-scooters, mopeds, cars? Are only mechanical bikes available? Are there government-subsidized options? - USER: Cultural attitude, demographic
Do people like their cars? Is it an older (less physically mobile) population?
I lay out a breakdown of these for each city in a table (although, it’s very much a qualitative and anecdotal analysis): Google sheet here. And if you haven’t already read my “travel diary” for Tour de Dott (more of a picture book than a pseudo-research essay), you can find that here.
Each city’s ride is a different summation of these factors. The success of micromobility needs everyone, working in synergetic unison. A smooth ride is nothing short of a modern, man-made miracle.
Happy riding! 🛴 🚲
Read the Tour de Dott travel diary here:
Part 1: Intro & Seville
Part 2: Malaga
Part 3: Madrid
Part 4: Paris
Part 5: Not the End
