Forget Uber, an e-bike revolution is about to upend urban transport

Micro vehicles will change the way we undertake short journeys and reduce our reliance on cars

Urban transport is at crisis point. During peak hours – and many cities are now always at “peak” – millions of city dwellers across the world find themselves stuck in stationary traffic. Many cities have poor public-transport systems, which push yet more people (if they can afford it) into car ownership. And, according to the World Health Organisation, seven million people per year die from air pollution, much of it caused by city traffic.

Add to that the fact that on average 30 per cent of a city’s real estate is given over to vehicles (in Houston that number is 60 per cent) and we can see that cars and cities are no longer the smooth-running mix that urban architects used to dream of.

2019 will experience an explosion of shared electric bikes (e-bikes) and small electric “push” scooters (e-scooters). Both have a tiny footprint and zero emissions. Both are cheap: rentals in many markets are about $1 to $2 for the first half hour. And their roll-out will largely be paid for by the private sector and the users themselves. These new micro vehicles could transform the way we move for those short –1km to 5km – trips.

In the last couple of years, the micro-vehicle sector has seen significant entrants. JUMP, which rents out bicycles with electric motors, launched in Washington DC in September 2017, as did Bird in Santa Monica, California, a company that specialises in e-scooters. These were followed in 2018 by Spin in San Francisco and and Lime in Paris in June. Between them, these four companies have raised almost $1 billion in funding.

Mobike and Ofo, fierce Chinese competitors, swamped Beijing with five million regular shared bikes, and there are hundreds of thousands more in other cities around the world. But the new fever for motorised microtransit has escalated the competition and the stakes. Didi (the largest ride-hailing company in the world) and Hellobike (a startup backed by Alibaba finance unit, Ant Financial) have both introduced electric bikes, causing Mobike and Ofo, the older and more established bike sharing companies, to make similar announcements of their own.

Read more: The best electric bikes for commuters in 2021

E-bike use is growing fast. Uber, which bought JUMP in April this year, says that trips by new JUMP riders increased by 15 per cent in its first six months of ownership, while use of Uber cars declined by ten per cent. A study of e-scooters, conducted in 2018 by Populus Research, shows their use growing at a faster rate than other shared mobility services.

While many of the micro-vehicle trips replace walking, cycling or transit, many are also replacing taxi and personal car use. This switch offers important opportunities for cities. It could save them infrastructure costs (e-bikes and e-scooters travel on existing infrastructure), reduce congestion and cut pollution. But cities have a critical role to play if this transportation revolution is to come about. Innovations in mobility have been leaving cities flatfooted. They did not anticipate the rise of companies like Uber, for example, nor dockless bikes and scooters.

However, it has not been an entirely smooth ride. Micro vehicles need space to park – Beijing has notoriously suffered from shared (non-motorised) bicycles cluttering sidewalks, and safe spaces in which to ride must be created (preferably not on already constrained pavements). In Manchester, Mobike has withdrawn its dockless bikes due to theft and vandalism. The first introduction of e-scooters into the US market (by Bird in Santa Monica) was met with a surge in both use and in complaints. San Francisco banned e-scooters from its streets three months after they first appeared in March 2018. Many cities have now created pilot programs, requiring companies to meet specifications about numbers of vehicles, response to parking infractions and safety instructions.

Some cities have used these challenges as an excuse to put the brakes on the growth of e-bikes in their jurisdictions. But in 2019 we will see more far-sighted administrations encouraging e-bike use. We’ve spent the last 100 years making cities work for cars. In 2019, we will work out ways of taking back some of that space and making clean, tiny and cheap vehicles the widespread ride of choice.

Robin Chase is the founder and former CEO of Zipcar

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