What is scooter sharing?
Introducing a rising star on the global urban mobility stage
With each week that passes it seems that there is a new mobility solution waiting outside on the doorstep in large cities. Whether it’s a kick scooter, an electric bike, or a shareable car, we seem a mixture of being spoilt and overwhelmed by choice. The purpose of this article is to look at one of these offerings in particular: scooter sharing.
The first section covers the recent development of scooter sharing on the global stage. The second investigates how the service differs from other popular services such as kick scooter and car sharing. The article will then end with an attempt to understand and analyse the disruptive nature of scooter sharing.
For reference, we define scooter sharing as the shared, free-floating use of electric and combustion scooters (moped; sit-down scooter, Vespa-like), where operators enable customers to rent scooters directly through the use of a smartphone.
Scooter sharing has exploded in recent years
Scooter sharing got underway back in 2012 with 40 scooters in San Francisco all operated by one company called Scoot. Since the market’s inception, an explosive eight years have followed. There are now 66,000 scooters, which is equivalent to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 152%. The vehicles are active in 88 cities (CAGR 75%), operated by 54 companies (CAGR 65%). There are almost 5 million users worldwide with the majority riding in Europe and Asia. 2018 alone welcomed 3 million users, 41,000 scooters, and 26 cities. The market has never been bigger.
At this point, you may be wondering: what’s the fuss about? The market for scooter sharing seems to pale in comparison to bike sharing in China and the sharing schemes for kick scooters in the US and Europe. They grew at faster rates than Facebook and the iPhone, so why should you give any attention to scooter sharing?
The future of mobility doesn’t have to be a competition
Let’s see the forest for the trees here. The world of mobility is changing. The influx of new mobility solutions is influencing people to reconsider how they get around in their daily lives and there is no vehicle type that ticks all the boxes. Trial and error is part and parcel of change. Put differently, the mobility solutions being experimented with today are going to evolve and take on new forms over time.
For too long now, the car has been the go-to vehicle used for the vast majority of trip distances. With cities continuing to increase the concentration of the world’s population, the demand for travelling shorter distances will grow. This helps to explain why the trend of micromobility is taking the world by storm, but the storm is far from passing. Riders will come to realise that each form factor has its own set of use cases influenced by weather conditions, storage capacity, power, safety, and distance.
With this focus on the promises and limitations of different form factors, let’s look at the form factor in question: scooter sharing.
Scooter sharing is simple, fast, and convenient
Familiarity
Scooter sharing offers riders a vehicle type that is already in use. This is probably most important from the standpoint of regulation and safety. Compared to the other form factors entering the mobility market, public authorities don’t have to formulate and implement new rules of the road. This is a good thing, not only for scooter sharing riders themselves, but also for the other commuters with whom they share the road. They’re not allowed in bike lanes, helmets must be worn, and a driving license is required. This degree of clarity does not exist for all vehicle types.
Speed and distance
At this stage, the range and top speed of the vehicles used in scooter sharing are longer and faster compared to other form factors on the micromobility market. This captures a growing number of urban commuters who expect to be able to move around the city freely and quickly. This point of difference is arguably going to get more and more pronounced as scooters are improved across successive product generations.
Carrying capacity
With the ability to safely and legally carry two people and some personal belongings that they may have, scooter sharing offers increased utility by enabling trips that include going to the shops, the gym, or simply a social mode of transport.
The overarching point is that people are being liberated from having to choose only between a car, public transport, and a bike to meet their daily travel needs, and are progressively gaining access to a more diverse and desirable suite of different mobility solutions. The micromobility is a world that is too diverse and nascent to try and claim that one form factor is better than the other; they all accord to differing needs. This is not about arguing which mobility solution is the best, it is about how the overall mobility situation in cities is getting better.
A common description for this era of micromobility is its ability to disrupt the pre-existing form factors. Not wanting to speak in buzzwords, we’d rather add to the discussion by trying to understand and explain the disruption at hand.
Scooter sharing disrupts by democratising mobility
As described by Professor Christensen from Harvard Business School, disruption is not as simple as making a good product better. Disruption requires entering new markets, finding new customers, with a product that is much more affordable and simple. It is a democratising process as more people have access to the technology in question (Christensen 2012).
How can we apply this to scooter sharing? For starters, scooter sharing is not the invention of any new or extremely fascinating technologies, so to speak. Rather, it is the adaptation and combination of pre-existing technologies into a new context. The small electric motors, lithium ion batteries, GPS, and smartphone applications are all things that were invented independent of scooter sharing. A similar point can be made for Amazon and how much it benefitted from the infrastructure of the US postal service. Jeff Bezos relied on it; he did not need to invent it.
The innovation here is that these technologies are being combined in a way that they have not been before. And, when you innovate in such a way, you will have users starting to innovate the way they move themselves. Some commuters will even begin to reconsider the meaning of a valuable commute.
It’s not just about a faster commute
This is where it is important to challenge the idea that scooter sharing is meeting an existing demand. What is actually happening is the creation of new demand, for new and existing trips, for new opportunities. Scooters have always been available to users, but the scooter sharing networks have not.
Implementing scooter sharing networks increases the demand for enjoyable mobility. Being stuck in gridlock everyday is a very different experience to a spacious train journey spent reading even if the former is significantly faster. Being able to choose commutes according to preference instead of necessity can be explained with an idea known as Marchetti’s constant.
It stipulates that no matter where people live and how they travel, they will always be willing to commute for an hour, on average, each day. The thrust of this idea is that no matter how fast we can commute, we’ll always be happy to spend, on average, 30 minutes each-way. Better mobility and faster mobility are not one and the same.
Conclusion
Modern urbanites have higher standards when it comes to the daily commute. They want it to be pleasant in order to avoid the feeling of having a rushed daily grind. And maybe, just maybe, the fun of riding around the city on a motorised, lightweight vehicle is what people want at the moment. One refreshingly different trip through their city may be all that is needed to nudge commuters to try new modes of transport.
The aim of this article was to give an overview on the recent developments of scooter sharing on the global stage, investigate how the service differs from others, and show how scooter sharing reconceptualises how we think about mobility. It would go beyond the scope of this article to look at how scooter sharing works or how much it costs, so these two topics will be addressed in forthcoming articles.
As always, we’re happy to keep the discussion going through any critiques or additions you may have, so please do not hesitate to get in touch. We believe our insights should be like the future of mobility: shared!
This article is published by unu. Find out more about what we offer by visiting share.unumotors.com
