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NEW YORK (AP) – Whether we like them or hate them, electric scooters are ubiquitous: they crisscross the streets of the city and strew the sidewalks, to the dismay of pedestrians and drivers who have to share the road.
And now, they have overtaken parked bicycles as the most popular means of shared transportation outside public transit and cars in the United States.
According to a new report released Wednesday by the National Association of Transportation Managers of the city, motorcyclists made 38.5 million trips in shared electric scooters in 2018, eclipsing the 36.5 million shared bike trips to dock.
Runners have also made trips on 3 million dockless pedal bikes, which can be picked up and dropped off anywhere, and 6.5 million dockless electric bicycles in 2018, but the report notes that these numbers are down.
One of the reasons for the rapid growth of electric scooters: companies compete for a strategic position in the so-called micromobility revolution, where consumers adopt scooters and shared bicycles for short trips and explore alternatives to owning the car , supported by the omnipresence of smartphones.
The riders made 84 million trips on micromobility services in 2018, more than double the number in the previous year, according to the report. Electric scooters have contributed to this trend: more than 85,000 of them have been made available to the public in the United States, compared to 57,000 equipped bikes.
Certainly, scooter manufacturers face challenges from all directions, including vandalism, theft, biker injuries, intense competition and aggressive regulations in cities across the country.
Yet the industry persists, and venture capitalists, bicycle companies, and traditional automakers have poured millions of dollars into this nascent sector.
Kate Fillin-Yeh, director of strategy for the National Association of City Transportation Officials, said Kate Fillin-Yeh.
"For a year and a half, it's a very different animal," she said. "Companies sometimes try to fight in the market."
Bird, a scooter company based in Santa Monica, launched at the end of 2017, raised $ 418 million and made more than 10 million trips in its first year. Lime, which offers shared bikes and scooters, has logged more than 12 million trips and a $ 467 million investment in its first 15 months.
The automakers and the companies that make it there are becoming aware of it, and some have created their own game in the space with bigger ambitions than scooters alone.
Uber bought Jump Bikes, a company of electric bicycles and scooters established in about twenty cities. Last year, she invested $ 30 million in Lime, which is installed in more than 100 cities around the world.
Ford, which bought the Spin scooter company in November, said the deployment of electric scooters would help it deploy autonomous vehicles by building critical relationships with US cities as they collaborated to develop regulations and create infrastructure.
"In this next micromobility revolution, cities are taking a more active stance in their way of participating," said Sunny Madra, vice president of Ford's mobility activities, at the Associated Press at the end of the conference. Last year. "By doing this now, ahead of standalone programs and other forms of mobility, it's a great way for us to be part of the transformation of mobility."
If electric scooters appeared overnight, it's because they did it. Several companies distributed them in cities without permission or permits, reminding local officials when companies such as Uber, like Uber, entered their markets years ago without notice.
But cities have learned from this experience and have been more aggressive in regulating scooters. San Francisco, for example, chased Bird, Lime and Spin and set up a licensing contest, awarding them to relative underdogs, Scoot and Skip, and limiting the number of scooters that could be deployed. New York City does not allow shared electric scooters, although legislation has been introduced to change the rule.
Many cities require scooter companies to share their treasure troves of location data, which shows where the scooters are and the routes they use. This can be useful for planning bike lanes and berths or for understanding traffic patterns.
This also raises questions about user privacy. The location data provided to cities is not tied to names, emails or other directly identifiable information, but 'if you take enough GPS data points and start attaching other sets of data, they can be used to identify specific people, "said Regina Clewlow, CEO. Populus, a company that helps cities to securely access data for planning and planning purposes, while protecting privacy.
Injuries to the head are another consequence of electric scooters. Dr. Vishal Bansal, director of the trauma department at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego, noticed that many cyclists were riding on scooters while intoxicated at night, without wearing a helmet, taking " 30 to 40 years of what we learned about the prevention of thrown out the window, he says.
"If your head hits the concrete 20 miles to the hour, you're not going to get up," said Christopher Ziebell, medical director of the emergency room at Dell Seton Medical Center in Austin. . "These have tiny little wheels, so it does not take much for a runner to take off."
Some industry observers are wondering how long the electric scooter phenomenon will last. Maryann Keller, an experienced automotive analyst, estimates that the $ 1 billion valuations reported by some scooter companies are absurd. Scooters are a capital-intensive business and there are few ways to differentiate themselves from competing models, which prevents companies from distinguishing themselves, she said.
"These little fads come and go," said Keller.
For those who want the scooter mode to disappear, they may have to wait a little longer.
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Follow Cathy Bussewitz on Twitter: @cbussewitz
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