The kids in Madrids El Retiro Park are loving their new on-demand joyriding toys.
Lime launched its scooters in the Spanish capital this summer.Spending a weekend in the city center last month the craze was impossible to miss.
Scooters parked in clusters vying for pay-to-play time.
Sometimes lined up tidily.
All too often not.The bright Lime rides really stood out, though its not the only brand in town.Scooter startups have been quick to hop on the international expansion bandwagon as they gun for growth.Grandly proportioned El Retiro clearly makes a great spot for taking a scooter for a spin.
Test rides beget joyrides, and so the kids were hopping on.
Sometimes two to one.The boulevard linking the Prado with the Reina Sofia was another popular route to scoot.While a busy central bar district was a hot ride-ditching spot later on.
Lines of scooters were vying for space with the vintage street bollards.The appeal was obvious: Bowl up to the bar and drink! No worries about parking or how to get your ride home afterwards.
But for Saturday night revellers there was suddenly a new piece of street furniture to lurch around, with slouching handlebars sticking up all over the place.
Anyone trying to navigate the pavement in a wheelchair wouldnt have had much fun.In another of Spains big tourist cities the scooter story is a little different: Catalan capital Barcelona hasnt had an invasion of on-demand scooter startups yet but scooters have crept in.
In recent years locals have tapped in of their own accord buying not renting.Rides are a front-of-store sight in electronics shops, big and small costing a few hundred euros.
Even for a flashy Italian designElectronic scootersTake a short walk in one of the more hipster barrios and chances are youll pass someone whos bought into the craze for nipping around on two wheels.Theres lots of non-electric scooters too but e-scooters do seem to have carved out a growing niche for themselves with a certain type of Barcelona native.Again, you can see the logic: Well-dressed professionals can zip around narrow streets that arent always great for finding a place to (safely) lock up a bike.Theres actually a pretty wide variety of wheeled e-rides in play for locals with the guts to get on them.
Some with seats and/or handles, others with almost nothing.
(The hands-in-pockets hipsters on self-balancing unicycles are quite the sight.)In both of these Spanish cities its clear people are falling for and, well, sometimes off the micro-mobility trend.But the difference between the on-demand scooters being toyed with in Madrid vs Barcelonas locally owned two wheelers is a level of purpose and intent.The Lime rides in Madrids center seemed mostly a tourist novelty.
At least for now, having only had a couple of months to bed in.Whereas the organic growth of scooters in Barcelona barrios is about people who live there feeling a need.Even the unicycling hipsters seem to be actually on their way somewhere.Hop onWhat does this mean for scooter startups Its another example of how technologys utility and wider societal impacts can vary when you parachute a new thing into a market and hope people jump on board vs growth being organic and more gradual because its led by real-world demand.And its essential to think about impacts where scooters and micro-mobility is concerned because all this stuff must piggyback on shared public spaces.
No one has the luxury of being able to avoid whats buzzing up and down their street.Thats why lots of on-demand scooters have ended up trashed and vandalized as residents make their feelings known (having not been asked about the alien invaders in the first place).In Europe theres a further twist because the spaces scooter startups are seeking to colonize are already well served with all sorts of public transport options.
So theres a clear and present danger that these new kids on the block wont displace anything.
And will just mean more traffic and extra congestion as happened with ride-hailing.In Madrid, the first tranche of on-demand scooters seems to be generating pretty superficial and additive use.
Offering a novel alternative to walking between sights or bars on a trip to-do list.
Just possibly theyre replacing a short taxi or metro hop.In the park, they were being used 100% for fun.
Perhaps takings are down at the boating lake.Barcelona has plenty of electro-powered joyriding down at the beach front in summer where shops rent all sorts of wheels to tourists by the hour.
But away from the beach locals dont seem to be wasting scooter charge riding in circles.Theyre stepping out for regular trips like commuting to and from work.In other words, scooters are useful.Given all this activity and engagement micro-mobility does seem to offer genuine transformative potential in dense urban environments.
At least where the climate doesnt punish for most of the year.This is why investors are so hot on scooters.
But the additive nature of micro-mobility underlines a pressing need for the technology to be properly steered if cities, residents and societies are to get the best benefits.Scooters could certainly replace some moped trips.
Even some local car journeys.
So they could play an important role in reducing pollution and noise by taking trips away from petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles.Because they offer a convenient, low-barrier-to-entry alternative with populist pull.Not being too high speed also means, in and of themselves, theyre fairly safe.If youre just barrio hopping or can map most of your social life across a few city blocks theres no doubting their convenience.
Novelty is not the only lure.Hop offThough, equally, the local-level journeys that scooters are best suited for could just as easily be completed on foot, by bike or via public transit options like a metro.And Barcelonas congested streets dont look any less packed with petrol engines yet.Which means scooters are both an opportunity and a risk.If policymakers get the regulations right, a smart city could leverage their fun factor to nudge commuters away from more powerful but less environmentally friendly vehicles with, potentially, some very major gains up for grabs.Subsidized scooters coupled with a framework of congestion zones that levy fees on petrol/diesel engines is one simple example.A clever policy could open the possibility of excluding cars almost entirely from city centers so that streets could be reclaimed for new leisure and retail opportunities that dont demand masses of parking space on tap.Pollution is a chronic problem in almost all large cities in the world.
So reshaping city centers to be more people-centric and less toxic to human health by displacing cars would be an incredible win for micro-mobility.Even as the hop on, hop off ease of scooters offers a suggestive glimpse of whats possible if we dare to rethink urban architecture to put people rather than four-wheeled vehicles first.Yet get the policy wrong and scooters could end up at very best a frivolous irrelevance.
A joyride thatdisrupts going nowhere.
Yet another nuisance on already choked streets.
An optional extra that feels disposable and gets rudely discarded because no one feels invested.In this scenario the technology is not socially transformative.
Its more likely an antisocial nuisance.
And a pointless drain on resources because its doing no more than disrupting walking.Scooter startups have already run into some of these issues.
And thats not surprising given how fast theyve been trying to grow.
Their early expansionist playbook does also risk looking like Uber all over again.Yet Ubercould have pioneered micro-mobility itself.
But being laser focused on growth seemingly gave the company tunnel vision.
Only now, under a new CEO, its all change.
Now Uber wants to be a one-stop platform forall sorts of transport options.But how many years did it waste missing the disruptive potential of micro-mobility coming down the road because it was too busy trying to fit more cars into cities and ignoring how residents felt about thatAn obsession with growth at all costs may well be a side effect of major VC dollars flooding in.
But for startups it really does pay to stay self-aware, perhaps especially when youre rolling in money.
Else you might find your investors funding your biggest blind spot if you end up missing the next even more transformative disruption.The really clever trick to pull off is not scale fast or die trying; its smart growth thats predicated upon applying innovative technologies in ways that bring whole communities along with them.
Thats true transformation.For scooters that means not just dumping them on cities without any thought beyond creaming a profit off of anything that moves.
But getting residents and communities engaged with the direction of travel.
Partnering with people and policymakers on the right incentives to steer innovation onto its best track.Move people around cities, yes, and shift them out of their cars.Theres little doubt that Ubers old growth at any cost playbook was hugely wasteful and damaging (not least to the companys own reputation).
And now its having to retrofit a more inclusive approach at the same time as unpicking an environmentally insensitive legacy that original playbook really doesnt look so smart.Scooter startups are still young and have made some of their own mistakes trying to chase early scale.
But there are reasons to be cheerful about this new crop of mobility startups too.Signs they see value and opportunities in being pro-actively engaged with the environments theyre operating in.
Having also learnt some hard early lessons about the need to be very sensitive to shared spaces.Bird announced a program this summer offering discounted rides to people on low incomes, for example.
Lime has a similar program.These are small but interesting steps.
Heres hoping were going to see a lot more.