Micro-Mobility: Challenges and Opportunities for Cities & Regions

The rise of shared dockless (e-)bikes and electric scooters alongside ride-sourcing and other demand-responsive mobility services are changing urban mobility landscapes. Micro-mobility is now a commonly used term covering shared-use fleets of small, fully or partially human-powered vehicles such as bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters.

Bike-share

Where does the success of sharing bikes, or sharing in general, come from? The demand for shared mobility has grown over the past decade, as a result of new societal trends, business models and technology developments, and bicycles have become an increasingly popular means for daily transport rather than just being used for recreational purposes.

Since the launch of Europe’s first large public bike-share scheme, Vélib’ in Paris in 2007, an increasing number of cities and towns have procured docked bike-share services. Bike-sharing schemes are often implemented as part of a city’s sustainable urban mobility strategy that addresses the adverse impacts of transport: air pollution, congestion, traffic crashes, noise. An essential change on the way to boosting the quality of life in cities is an improved modal shift in favor of walking and cycling.

Building a local cycling culture and improving cycling conditions (infrastructure, parking, tax incentives) is the way forward to promote active transport modes for short distances and first and last mile trips. Bike-sharing schemes have the potential to help local governments deliver clean, healthy and efficient urban mobility.

Conventional bike-share (docked or dockless) has fast evolved into the 5th generation of data-driven bike-share. To date, a variety of schemes are available across European cities, featuring traditional or electric-powered bicycles, cargo bicycles, light docking infrastructure, photovoltaic energy recharge stations, smart locks, geo-fence solutions, and GPS tracking.

Meanwhile, new private mobility providers saw opportunities to sell sustainability and eco-consciousness through new, door-to-door services, tailored to the permanently connected mobility consumer. Conventionally procured (and usually but not exclusively docked) bikeshare schemes now operate side by side to commercially operated dockless bikeshare services, and more recently free-floating electric scooters and (electric) bicycles.

This new business model was based on introducing much larger bicycle fleets at a much quicker pace than conventional bikeshare could do, enabled by free-floating technology not requiring expensive docking stations. Some first-generation commercial fleets were literally deployed overnight, surely lacking integration with the city’s sustainable transport strategy. On the other hand, this type of dockless bikeshare system has been brought to city streets at zero or small cost for the local authority, making it attractive for cities and towns which cannot afford the higher operational costs of conventional and publicly procured bikeshare schemes.

Electric scooters

A new category of portable, fun and compact shared transport devices was launched in 2018, the so-called scooters or kick-scooters, electrically- powered and with a speed up to 30- 40km/h. Similar to shared bikes, shared e-scooters are made available through an app-based service, which locates the device through GPS and unlocks it with the help of a smartphone.

There’s a growing and increasingly competitive market for scooters, which have popped up massively in the streets of cities such as Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, and Brussels, but also in central and Eastern Europe, in cities like Bucharest. Sharing schemes have been launched by large providers coming from the United States, but the number of European companies is growing every day.

E-scooters cater for the rising demand for quick, individual mobility solutions and door-to-door trips that can bypass congested traffic with little effort. In an ideal scenario they complement and fill the gap left by public transport and serve as first and last mile connectors, without replacing active and therefore healthier modes of travel such as walking or cycling.

As with any new vehicle, safety concerns are important, such as maximum speed, visibility, stability, the size of the wheels and braking. On the infrastructure side, there is the issue of potholes, which are already a danger to cyclists and could be even more of a threat to fast e-scooters. UK statistics show that over the last 10 years, 400 cyclists have been seriously injured or killed due to poorly maintained roads.

The placement and parking of e-scoot- ers raises concerns especially when sidewalks are not wide enough. These should remain the space where the pedestrian has priority over all other modes. Some companies require their customers to take a photo before completing the ride to assess how the e-scooter was parked. Geofencing the e-scooters can solve issues regarding cluttering in certain areas. What this problem reveals, however, is the lack of dedicated parking space for bikes and e-scooters in the urban environment. If you consider that one car parking spot could already accommodate several e-scooters and bikes, we should clearly be reallocating urban space away from the private car to micro-mobility modes of moving around. Lisbon, for example, addressed the problem of chaotic scooter parking by reallocating a number of car parking spaces to e-scooters.

Local Regulation

Cities across the European Union are looking hard at all these questions and have pursued different approaches towards e-scooters or docked and dockless bikeshare operations. These policy options vary to some extent from country to country, depending on the overarching regulatory and legislative framework and the degree to which the city administration itself has any regulatory autonomy over such issues. The Innovation Brief Regulating dockless bike-sharing schemes, developed by the CIVITAS 2020 PROSPERITY project, identified six types of policy options for cities, including the hands-off approach, regulative ground rules, operational permits, contracts for concessions, pilots, and banning/not allowing operations.

However, the bikeshare policy options mentioned above are not as clear cut in practice, and many cities find themselves ticking more options when dealing with micro-mobility regulations. Given the new and fast-evolving nature of the services to be regulated, local authorities are unavoidably going through a stage of trial and error, where they experience that some regulatory approaches or specific rules may work better than others. This is inherent to the nature of these innovations, where cities may feel they are constantly trying to catch up with reality and fast-paced disruptions. Regulations should become more flexible to be able to accommodate these sometimes still unknown changes in a faster way and enable more pro-active interventions. Regulatory sandboxing to trial the impact of new solutions as well as of regulatory approaches can only be recommended.

A city needs the ability to manage, design, and understand what is happening in the public realm. Traffic and mobility data are one of the crucial sets of information needed for that purpose. Digital mobility services such as dockless bikes and e-scooters can provide the city with unique information to which they never had access. It can explain and justify modal share, thus helping to make the case for investing in more dedicated infrastructure, such as bike lanes.

Taking stock of and documenting the most recent developments and governance approaches for commercially operated shared micro-mobility schemes, Polis is working on the regulation schemes of shared micro-mobility services in cities with the aim to support local governments and transport authorities in developing governance frameworks and regulations which are suitable to their needs and align these new mobility services with their sustainable, multimodal and integrated sustainable transport policy goals. Stay tuned!

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