Transportation

Micromobility: the Prose and Poetry of the Scooter-Faithful


Before he took the stage, before, even, most of the 650 participants’ sat in their seats, James Gross started riding around the cavernous, crowded Craneway Pavilion on a red Jump electric bike. Ding, ding, ding, he rang the bike’s tinny bell: A priest swinging a thurible into the sanctuary, a rabbi tying the belt of his kittel before the first prayers. After a few laps, Gross, the cofounder of a marketing software startup who has taken a sharp turn into all things transport, steered the pedal-assist bicycle onto a platform and convened the faithful. The first-ever Micromobility Conference had begun.

The event’s manifesto, laid out in sentence-long paragraphs on the last page of a thick, graph-replete booklet titled Handbook: Prose & Poetry, gave extra gravity to the Bay Area morning. “Micromobility is a big word for a small idea,” it read. “The idea is small in the sense that it represents machines that are small. Machines that are sized to the job at hand: moving people. And not sized to the process that makes them move. Machines made to fit us, not their internal violent reactions.” Two-ton cars powered by internal combustion, consider yourselves irrelevant.

Toward the back of the hall, the mostly male, investor-heavy conference attendees piloted all manner of wheeled gizmos through an obstacle course of yellow cones: hovershoes, electric unicycles, a slim, white e-scooter that looked like an iPod with wheels. In the middle of the presentations, a man in a suit took an electric skateboard on slow spin about the entire room. Others clustered around the electric-assist velomobile from the Canadian company Veemo. Lyft, which now owns a bike-share company, hosted the “Micromobility Valet”, which seemed to mostly mean that stored attendees’ nifty-looking bikes.

But the people were here, mostly, because of scooters.

And yes, sure, there is reason for the excitement. Since Bird launched in Santa Monica way back in the fall of 2017, investors have funded two dozen so “mobility” companies, which operate fleets of bikes and scooters in cities around the world. These mostly one-syllable startups—Skip, Scoot, Spin, and Grin all appeared at the conference—have been unleashed by a multi-decade trend toward urbanization, the rise of the smartphone, and advances in electric battery tech. And people do seem to like riding their products a lot. Bird, now in more than 100 cities, has reported more than 10 million rides, Lime more than 26 million on its scooters and bikes. In a world where grown adults ride electric scooters to work in more and more cities every day, even the wildest transportation dreams seem ready to spring into flesh and motorized plastic.

There looks to be a business case, too. The majority of taxi trips in New York are under three miles, the industry analyst Horace Dediu said during his keynote. About 70 percent of one-way US car trips are 10 miles and under. Just going after car trips under two miles could be worth $1 trillion, Dediu estimated. Plus, converting them to small, electric vehicles could help fight emissions.

During Dediu’s and others’ talks, a screen above the conference stage occasionally flashed a bright yellow smiley face, another implicit argument potent to the techies, hardware geeks, and longtime cycling advocates in the room. Gosh darnit, riding these things is fun.

Outside the conference halls though, the hype has cooled. It turns out that running scooters and bikes, especially shared ones, is a hard business. “It seems that micromobility is going through something of a rough patch,” said journalist and urbanist Greg Lindsay at the start of a panel on capital in the micromobility business. “Bird was the fastest to $1 billion and also the fastest to hit the trough of disillusionment.” The company and its rival, Lime, have reportedly downgraded their latest valuation expectations. The things are not cheap to buy. They break (and get broken). Humans must collect and charge them every night, and redistribute them every morning (a problem autonomy is unlikely to solve in the near future). Winter puts a dent in ridership numbers. Riders get hurt. The novelty wears off.

The companies have started to acknowledge that the still-growing industry is not a money-printing machine, as it has sometimes been portrayed. A panel of scooter CEOs acknowledged, yes, they are mildly to moderately concerned about seasonality in the business, and about vandalism. In an interview with TechCrunch, Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden acknowledged the unit economics for his business had not worked out as the company had expected, thanks in part to the fact that its off-the-shelf scooters couldn’t eke by outside. “2018 was about scaling,” he told the publication. “2019 is about really focusing on the unit economics of the business.”

(Neither Bird nor Lime execs attended the conference. Spokespeople for both companies said it came down the scheduling issues.)

Still, the disciples remain faithful. The conference distributed tiny, elegant, gold “m” pins; acolytes will be able to spot each other in the wilds. In the back of the hall, a man flew off his hovershoes, stopping himself before he hit the floor. The line for the women’s restroom was blessedly short. Onstage, Rose Song Wang, CEO of the “personal mobility” company InMotion, clicked to the next slide, which showed the latest spin on the classic timeline of man’s evolution from Pierolapithecus catalaunicus to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens. Its apotheosis: man on electric unicycle.


More Great WIRED Stories



READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.