Thanks to the ubiquity of bicycle rental and ride sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft, the concept of electric scooter sharing won’t be difficult for most people to understand. Thanks to e-scooter apps, a scooter can be hired for short periods. In most apps, users will unlock their ride by scanning the QR code on the scooter handle.
Of course, it’s still early days and the regulation around scooter sharing is not clearly defined in much of the country. Yet, the future is looking bright. Here’s why you are likely to swap your bus ride for an electric scooter in the near future.
1. Cut Travel Times
When it comes to beating traffic over short distances, electric scooters are the perfect compromise between bicycles and motorcycles. Scooters are faster than bicycles but are cheaper to run than motorbikes.
However, scooters aren’t just good for you. By taking another car off the road and serving as an example to other road users that it’s indeed a practical way to travel, you’ll have played your part in reducing overall traffic congestion.
2. Low Cost
One of the reasons ride sharing apps like Uber took off so quickly and so massively was due to how much they revolutionized the cost and convenience of a taxi. If Uber is relatively cheap, scooter sharing will be dirt cheap.
Electric scooters have a much lower operating cost than a car and can therefore be provided at a substantially cheaper rate. As the world’s oil reserves are gradually exhausted, the drive toward fuel that isn’t fossil-based will only accelerate. Electric scooters are in prime position to tap into this rising demand.
3. Eco-friendly
Gone are the days when people’s spending decisions were solely driven by financial considerations. With widespread awareness of the need for sustainable living, environmental factors are now an important influence in personal and corporate expenditure.
Electric scooters are a clean mode of personal transportation that reduce an individual’s carbon footprint. E-scooter apps are therefore emerging in perhaps the most accepting conducive conditions they could ever find. Combined with the fairly low cost of scooter sharing, the stars are aligned for a new phenomenon in commuting.
4. Big Guns Are Taking Notice
When the big guns of the tech industry start to make moves, everyone sits up. So one of the most important signs that e-scooter sharing is on the upswing is the deluge of cash the startups are attracting from industry behemoths.
The more notable announcements include Alphabet and Uber leading a team of high profile investors in pumping more than US$300 million in sharing startup Lime (this valued Lime at an astonishing 1.1 billion dollars). Not to be outdone, Lime’s leading rival Bird raised a similar amount that valued it at over US$2 billion.
5. Millennials Love Them
Scooter startups aren’t releasing much data on the profile of their riders. But by looking at their focus on urban areas including Washington D.C., San Diego, Los Angeles and Austin, that typically have a high concentration of millennials, you get a picture of rider demographics.
It’s not surprising though. Scooters have always appealed to the young. That and the fact that millennials have been found to be more open to seeking out non-car alternatives to commuting make e-scooters so attractive to this section of the population.
The tech world is fast evolving. There are new fads coming up every other month. Some of these fizzle away in a matter of weeks while a select few trends are here to stay. Whereas it’s impossible to predict market behavior with absolute certainty, e-scooter sharing is one that has shown all the signs of an impending breakthrough.
