Why Uber and Others See a Billion Dollar Future in Electronic Scooters

Monday, Uber announced a partnership with the company rental of electric scooters Lime. Uber already owns Jump Bikes, an electric bike start. Lyft just bought a bike rental company. All these measures aim to create a one-stop shop for all types of transport – and also to solve a fairly fundamental problem. The average taxi ride is less than three miles, and using a car to make this trip is expensive and inefficient, especially in traffic. Hence this new trend of investment in what is called micro-mobility.

Ralph Buehler is a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. He spoke with Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood about what he calls multimodality. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Ralph Buehler: Multimodality refers to the concept of the same individual who uses different modes of transportation during a day or a week. This means that for some trips you can drive, for other trips, you can use public transport, or you can walk, or you can ride a bike. So you're not mono-modal, which means you're using a mode for all trips, but your multimodal, so you use multiple modes for a day or a week.

Molly Wood: We had all this movement toward sharing the car and autonomous cars, and suddenly we are seeing this huge increase in investment in the United States in technology and electric scooters. Why do you think this is happening now?

Buehler: I think we are on the eve of a few revolutions in the transport sector. Electrification is part of it, so we see it with electric bikes and scooters. At the same time, we have a kind of revolution with these shared vehicles, and then we have the advent of autonomous vehicles. Together, it's sort of the beginning. What we see now, it will evolve and perhaps become a great mobility that we buy according to the trip we want to take.

Wood : As we say, there has been this great move towards different types of car transport, and the kind of scooter and bike is considered a solution to this problem of " last mile. As cities expand and roads fill up with more and more cars, how important is two-wheel or three-wheel or wheel transport?

Buehler : I think we are seeing a big change. or have seen a big change in US cities perhaps since the early 1990s. Cities have begun to offer more transportation options. Previously, it mainly provided for cars, parking lots, larger motorways, more lanes, but over the past 20 years, we have seen cities provide more bike lanes and other accommodations for cyclists. And we also see that people who move to cities, or return to cities, want these options, and that's one of the reasons they return to the city.

Wood: How important will this government be? Buehler: I think it's kind of a double-edged sword, because on the one hand, you need the investment and regulation of the government. Just letting the market go can have negative effects. But at the same time, you do not want to be too fast or too fast and over regulated, because if you do that, you could stifle innovation. The role of the government will be essential, as most roads are owned and managed by the government. Different levels of government of course, but the government's involvement in this will be the key.

Wood: Is accountability as important as this technology provides? It's easy to know who took the scooter, and the scooter knows where it was left, and there's always this Ariane thread.

Buehler: Responsibility is key, especially when you look at bicycle sharing history. It started in the 1960s and 1970s in the Netherlands. Originally, they just had these bikes that were painted white, and they spread them all over Amsterdam, and they disappeared very quickly and were vandalized. And there was no follow-up at all. You could not know who had the bike or what had happened to them. And then there was a second generation mainly in Denmark where you had a piece of 10 krones that you put in the bike to unlock the bike. Then you could go around and bring it back. But still no responsibility, we did not know who was on it. And then the big revolution came with these home-based bike sharing systems that are everywhere in the United States now, where you can actually follow the person with a credit card and other information. who had the bike.