Shared electric scooters are here scene five years ago A vision to get people out of cars and towards greener forms of transportation.despite this Billions of dollars in venture capital funding with a lot of hypethe future promised by micromobility companies hasn’t quite arrived yet.
In a city like Paris, Most people won’t replace car travel share e-scooters in a meaningful way; the cost of riding a scooter makes it an expensive option for last-mile transport connections and fair access; and Bird’s Public Disclosure with Chamber of Commerce Show us that achieving profitability is extremely difficult. In addition, cities that allow shared electric scooter companies to enter are increasingly difficult for scooter companies to operate sustainably.
for traffic flow and carbon emission, need to have car substitutes. Are shared electric scooters the answer to this problem, or just another bad option? What do we gain by introducing shared micromobility to cities?
We decided to take a look at two cities that are at the forefront of the e-scooter revolution – Los Angeles with ParisThe former is known for its laissez-faire capitalist approach to regulation, allowing multiple operators to compete for rides and space. The latter has some of the strictest regulations in the game, including limited operator licenses, and is in fact still considering a complete ban on shared e-scooters.
“From a societal standpoint, I’m more worried about e-scooters leaving Los Angeles than Paris,” David Zipper, a visiting scholar at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, told TechCrunch. “Paris is densely populated and has a great subway. Scooters could potentially replace greener modes of transportation. Los Angeles is different. It’s so car-centric and hungry for car alternatives.”
Despite palpable hunger, the two scooter operators – Lyft with to rotate – Recently exited the Los Angeles area, blaming a lack of favorable regulations and too much competition, which apparently made profitability difficult. Los Angeles still has a total of six operators – Bird, Lime, Veo, Superpedestrian, Wheels (now owned by Helbiz) and new entrant Tuk Tuk.
In fact, the two cities – one huge, the other dense; one under-regulated (such as shared scooter companies) with a few operators, and the other heavily regulated with fewer operators – still haven’t quite got it right Electric scooters, which raises a key question. What type of market, if any, is suitable?
Paris: To ban or not to ban?
People walk or ride electric scooters past the Marechal Joffre statue in Paris on May 19, 2020. (Photo: THOMAS COEX/AFP via Getty Images)
If you thought there was one city where shared electric scooters would thrive, it’s Paris. The city is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe. Most households do not own a car, and if they do, they rarely use it. Paris is led by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who advocates for a more livable “15-minute city” by reclaiming public space from roads and vehicles. During her tenure, Hidalgo removed parking spaces, turned streets into walkable areas and opened new bike lanes.
However, Paris is in the May ban its 15,000 shared e-scooters as multiparty politician Called on Hidalgo not to renew Lime, Dott and Tier contracts when they expire in February 2023.She’s expected to make a decision any minute now, and there are some rumor Floating where she already had it.
Paris has been an important market for the entire e-scooter industry, but the city is unhappy with the vehicles, citing security incidentsome of them is fatal.
Over the years, Paris has responded to security concerns with increasingly stringent regulations.Last summer, following someone’s death Paris has implemented a scooter “slow zone” after it was hit by two women riding a scooter near the Seine. one year later, The whole city becomes a slow zonethe speed limit for shared electric scooters is just over 6 miles per hour.
Despite these tough rules, the city is on the brink of saying goodbye to shared scooters forever.
Shock. Shock. depressed. These were my feelings when I first heard the news of a possible ban. So what if an accident happens? Accidents happen from time to time! Shoutout to your complaints about scooters on sidewalks! Then build better bike lanes!
But looking at the scattered statistics on how scooters are used in Paris, scooters may not be delivering the value the city needs — namely, limiting car use.
Lime told TechCrunch that 90 percent of its fleet in Paris is in daily use, and that a scooter starts a trip every four seconds in the city. In 2021, more than 1.2 million scooter riders, 85% of whom are residents of Paris, took a combined 10 million rides on all three operators. Lime can replace an estimated 1.6 million car trips. could havebut did they do it?
A study in 2021 It was found that e-scooter users in Paris are mainly men aged 18 to 29, with a high level of education, who usually hop on a scooter to save travel time. The majority of riders in the study (72%) said they shifted from walking and public transport rather than cars. another survey of French scooter riders found that shared scooters are “more likely than other modes of transport to replace walking travel”.
These results are not limited to Paris. a survey Among customers who signed up to five different e-scooter-sharing apps in Norway in autumn 2021, it was found that e-scooters most often replaced walking in all situations except nighttime riding. Studies have shown that e-scooters do replace cars with longer e-scooter trips if the user is male, if the e-scooters are privately owned, and to destinations that are poorly served by public transport.
What stands in the way of the ultimate goal—getting travelers out of cars? Probably most people, at least in Paris, wouldn’t use a car anyway since the city is walkable and public transport is adequate. Or maybe future car drivers and taxi drivers need more time to get used to the concept of scooters as a way of life. Or maybe scooters aren’t reliable as transportation for long trips.
Fluctuo, an aggregator of shared mobility data, found that in July 2022, the average scooter trip length in Paris was 2.67 kilometers, compared with 2.53 kilometers in November. A journey long enough that you probably don’t want to walk, but too short to drive in a place like Paris.
Whether or not scooters get people off their bikes, they’re sure to be popular in Paris. In September, an Ipsos poll commissioned by Lime, Dott and Tier (hence reservations) found that a majority of Parisians see e-scooters as part of their daily mobility in the city and in line with the city hall’s wider transport policy. Most respondents (68%) said they were satisfied with the number of self-service scooters on the streets of Paris, while a quarter said they would actually like to see more.
In response to a potential ban, a recent petition by a Paris resident garnered more than 19,000 signatures in opposition.
Hannah Landau, Lime’s communications manager for France and Southern Europe, told TechCrunch that a ban would make Paris a global outlier.
“No major city in the world that has introduced shared e-scooter services has permanently banned them,” she said. “In fact, today’s major global trend is for cities to renew their projects – like London – or even expand their projects with more vehicles or larger service areas (New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Rome, Madrid , Lyon).”
Lime, Dott and Tier have proposed various measures to Paris City Hall that they say will address safety concerns and ensure scooter licenses are renewed next year.The proposals include joint campaigns to raise awareness of traffic laws; a good system for using cameras on public roads; expanded use of Scooter ADAS Prevent riding on sidewalks; and equip scooters with registration plates.
Paris may be unique among major cities in weighing a total ban, but other regions have recently shown a willingness to restrict scooters, including stockholm, Tenerife, Spain, boston college with Fordham University.
– Rebecca Beran
Los Angeles: Car City
A shared scooter is parked on a sidewalk in Koreatown, a neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles, on Dec. 29, 2022.
Let’s add more wheels to this discussion. Yes, I’m about to start talking about cars. fasten your seatbelt!
Automobile manufacturers rewiring american city in the last century, if you ask me, we all suffer from this — especially Angelenos.Notorious Gas-Powered Cars, SUVs and Trucks clogging the arteries of los angeles. them dirty airdrive climate change with health problems Same. add, while I was standing on the sidewalk naively looking for a nearby ramen place, the driver of an SUV hit me once. See, I told you it was personal!
All of this is to say that, as an occasional driver and grudge pedestrian (the kind who yells in a vague New York accent, “I’m walking here!”) when I see micromobility operators abandon cities , my heart aches, as Spin, Bolt, and Lyft did in Los Angeles.
It’s not because I ride a scooter a lot, or because scooters are scarce right now (a block from my apartment in downtown LA, I can find a few Limes and Link on sidewalks and curb bends). I just want to see cars reined in, cities rebalanced around public transit, walking, biking and even scooters – clearing up streets and reducing smog at all costs.But given recent exports, what does the future hold for things like scooters, and Byrd’s financial woes start up?
It depends on who you ask. At least one operator — Lime — says things have never been better in Hollywood. A spokesperson recently told us that Los Angeles is Lime’s largest U.S. market today.
While acknowledging that Los Angeles has shortcomings when it comes to scooters, including its sheer size, the spokesperson likened 2022 to an “amazing moment,” suggesting that “micromobility is here to stay.” Lime credited its local staff, partnerships with city officials, and hardware investments for an apparently strong year, but the company didn’t respond when TechCrunch asked if its Los Angeles operations were currently profitable. Lime is privately held, so we don’t know as much about it as Lyft and Bird.
Rhyme’s experience in Los Angeles may be an exception. Both Spin and Lyft told TechCrunch they would need to reach new long-term agreements with municipalities here to return. “In short: The challenge for Los Angeles is that it is an open supplier market with no vehicle cap,” Spin CEO Philip Reinckens said in an email to TechCrunch. “This creates an imbalance between vehicle supply and passenger demand as operators oversaturate the market.”
“Long-term arrangements for limited operators will be necessary to consider re-entry,” Reinckens added.
The coastal city of Santa Monica in Los Angeles County appears to have begun to adopt this approach.Next year, Santa Monica says it plans to limit the number of scooter operators allowed from four to just one or two.
Zoom out: Greater Los Angeles area has mixed reputation Among cyclists, but officials have recently shown some willingness to accommodate more than cars.Some interesting public initiatives are underway, including a recently announced effort to promote cycling south los angeles, North Hollywood and San Pedro. It’s not a revolution, but it could make cities safer for all forms of light transportation, including electric scooters.
All in all, LA’s free scooters seem destined to consolidate, with fewer operators owning a whole lots of ground cover. But in general, shared electric scooters do not seem to be at risk of being sued, which is very different from Paris.
– Harry Webb
