E-Scooters: A So-So Product in a Terrible Market
This piece was originally written on Strong Towns member Steffen Berr’s LinkedIn. It is republished here with permission.
(Source: Flickr/Ivan Radic.)
In a recent public consultation, 89% of Parisians voted against e-scooters. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo was quoted in Agence France-Presse last week saying “self-service scooters are the source of tension and worry,” and a ban would “reduce nuisance” in public spaces.
The news of Paris restricting e-scooters has been widely criticized by urbanists and mobility advocates across the web. This is a tough topic for me to comment on, as I know many people who work in this space who do good and honest work making cities more livable, but here's my honest two cents.
Although these restrictions can be interpreted as a step backwards, they can also be a sign of positive evolution.
As many of you know, the Netherlands is one of the best countries for getting around in a vehicle smaller than a car. You would expect it to be flooded with e-scooters. But it's not. There are two big reasons.
The first is that it’s mostly illegal: Dutch law requires devices with a motor to have a license plate.
The second reason that few people discuss is that there is no way one of these programs would be successful in the Netherlands, where you can rent a bicycle for 24 hours from Dutch railways for a flat € 4,45. You don't have to worry about someone else using it. You don’t need to take a photo of it. You just bring it back when done. The 24-hour cost is four times cheaper than the cost of riding a scooter from most of the sharing schemes for one hour.
Some of you might wonder how this program manages to be profitable, especially when you factor in the construction costs of all the cycle garages appearing lately by most Dutch train stations.
The truth is, it’s not.
The main purpose isn't to make money off rentals, but rather to attract more train customers.
With the cost of buying a few hundred bicycles and stalls, Dutch railways can double or even triple its radius of customers. The person who previously did not want to wait for a 30-minute bus connection can now go directly or continue their journey from the final train station that didn’t get you close enough.
This is a different strategy and model than scooter-sharing companies who need to eventually show profits to investors on Wall Street.
To me, the scooter share is a transitory product. An honest attempt to improve the world, but also a flawed one: banned and out of place in a city that stays with car infestation, but also doomed by competition in the bicycle-friendly city.
Think about it. Your city just took its first baby steps to get people out of cars. Some painted bike lanes. Bollards are coming in. You hear words like "active travel,” but it's also mainly downtown. And there's almost nowhere to securely park your bicycle, and your seat has been stolen one too many times. Enter the scooter share. It's expensive. You're never sure if one is available. But it's still the best option in the awful market of micro-mobility options in the city dominated by parking lots. Plus, you don’t care if it gets stolen.
As the city improves and cycling feels safer and parking becomes easier, rather than hunting a scooter down on your phone, you'll probably just unlock and use your own private bike or scooter, since buying one for a few hundred dollars means free travel for years. But tourists and pub crawlers will still use them, since a couple dozen bucks beats buying a bike…until they get left on the sidewalk enough for local residents to ban them via local referendum, out of exasperation.
Steffen Berr is a design engineer in the Netherlands and a Strong Towns member. He studied civil engineering at California State University Sacramento.
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