From California to Italy, what seemed like a vintage object destined for a niche audience has transformed into the most revolutionary and talked-about vehicle in shared urban mobility. Electric scooters are rapidly climbing the approval ratings of users in many of our cities. Against a backdrop of new mobility needs, an increasingly varied range of offers, safety concerns and the infrastructure required, the topic took centre stage at the sixth event of the National Conference on Sharing Mobility, which brought together three of the largest operators on the continental market.

Giulio Del Balzo recounted the experience of Bird, founded three years ago in Santa Monica and now active in over a hundred cities worldwide, six of them Italian (Pesaro, Turin, Rome, Verona, Rimini and Milan), with a fleet of around 5,000 vehicles. Alessio Raccagna described the projects of Lime, founded in 2017 on the US West Coast and today present on five continents, in 30 countries and 120 cities (Turin, Rome, Verona and Rimini in Italy, with around 3,000 vehicles). Dott has a different story: as Andrea Giaretta recalled, it was founded in 2018 in Europe and is firmly focused on the Old Continent. It is a product company and not merely a service provider, having developed its own vehicles and technologies, and has recently arrived in Turin, Milan and Rome with over 2,000 vehicles.

Coronavirus and the new mobility

The coronavirus emergency represented a major test for operators in the sector, above all due to the collapse in tourist flows. And yet the use of shared scooters is in constant growth, with figures that are already realigning with those recorded at the start of the year. For Bird, the challenge is to reach all those who have never tried getting around on this type of vehicle, "turning 50 per cent of urban journeys of under three kilometres — currently almost entirely monopolised by cars — into light micromobility". Moreover, after several difficult months, as Lime highlighted, "the Italian regulatory framework has become clearer, which is favourable for expansion plans that have long been in the pipeline, soon to extend to the South as well". Italy, in Dott's view, "has very favourable characteristics compared to other contexts, including the climate, not to mention the layout of the cities themselves, which is very well suited to micromobility".

More broadly, the health emergency linked to Covid-19 has created an entirely new situation that has probably accelerated processes already under way: data from the National Observatory on Sharing Mobility showed that Italians, during this period of emergency, prefer to get around using light vehicles — scooters or bikes. As a result, operators are increasingly focused on attracting citizens who use these services on a daily basis: Lime has calculated that in Rome these new "regulars" have managed to offset the absence of tourists. Furthermore, compared to the pre-coronavirus period, all operators have recorded journeys of longer duration and less intermodality: whereas scooters were previously used in combination with public transport, the tendency now is to use them exclusively.

"Last mile" and beyond

These vehicles are often discussed in relation to "last mile" mobility — a solution for covering shorter distances in combination with public transport. Research by 6T, a French think tank, shows, for instance, that the average journey is around 15 minutes. But even from this perspective the situation is evolving, with scooters also being used for longer trips. A Bird vehicle, for example, has a maximum range of over 55 kilometres: yet it is easy to predict that within three years this will reach 90 kilometres. The technologies available on the market are advancing in leaps and bounds, and around them ever-new sharing mobility offerings will develop, much as has happened with mobile telephony. This evolution is also linked to the disposal of older vehicles, which can be repaired and sold on the market or recycled, with the vast majority of their components reused.

Safety, subscriptions and parking

The issues that have arisen in these first few months — and will continue to arise in the months ahead — are therefore numerous, starting with parking. Dott, for example, has developed a technology that allows the status and position of vehicles to be monitored around the clock: "In the past, many bike-sharing services wrote off a great many bikes because they couldn't manage them, whereas in this way we guarantee the maximum possible lifespan for our scooters." In Milan, moreover — the only European city alongside Paris — the company has recently introduced smart parking in the city centre, with dedicated spaces where users can park their vehicle at the end of a journey: a solution that keeps an eye on safety and urban decorum, but one that "obviously requires an investment in infrastructure on the part of the cities concerned".

Lime has introduced the "LimePass" subscription to reward regular customers: "We adopted it specifically in response to the coronavirus emergency, and the response from Italian users has been excellent — between two and three times higher than in other countries." With first-time users in mind, Bird has instead introduced the "Warm Up" mode: "We need responsible users, so vehicles initially have a maximum speed lower than the norm, until the user has become comfortable with our scooters." On the subject of safety, all operators agree on the importance of making the basic rules clear to users (single use only, no riding on pavements, keeping to the right-hand side of the road where possible) — though this must go hand in hand with a commitment from local authorities to build the necessary infrastructure, starting with dedicated lanes and parking spaces.

The new challenges facing operators in the sector

If this first phase has revealed a strong appetite among Italians for sustainable micromobility, the path that has been set must now be stayed in order to avoid the phenomenon of "carmageddon" — a mass return to the private car, possibly as early as September. For Andrea Giaretta of Dott, public oversight is necessary, provided it is not excessively restrictive: "The way forward should be through tenders and expressions of interest involving a limited number of operators, prioritising the size of the fleet rather than spreading vehicles across various parties. Operators should then be selected on the basis of the quality of their vehicles and services, the results achieved in other cities, and their commitment to maintenance: it is better to carry out the selection process upfront rather than letting it happen naturally."

This is even more important in smaller cities like Rimini and Pesaro, where Bird started out: "The lower the population density, the more important the rules are, especially in relation to the number of operators present, because the system must be able to sustain itself economically." When it comes to large cities, Lime aspires to offer "sustainable multi-modality," insisting on a range of alternatives spanning from scooters to bicycles to "guarantee a greater range of choice and reach an ever-larger share of the population."