Bikes and Scooters, all look same? - Problems with Micromobility Lumping

Micromobility is a newer term in transportation parlance which emerged around the time of scootershare. It's used to describe the segment of modalities between walking and driving. Why did we start lumping these, and should we? 

There's a good case for unlumping. Bikes and Scooters are radically different. When JUMP (Uber) had scooters in SF, their market manager told me most customers who use one wouldn't use the other. That meant very few folks were scooter-bike agnostic, given the choice in a shared dockless system. Controlling for price, function, availability, and infrastructure, micromobilities don't have coherent user group identity. Why is that?

How, and to whom, is lumping micromobility useful? And how is it problematic?

Culture

Before ~2018, we didn’t lump smaller-than-car modes together. Bikes, scooters, skateboards, roller blades, roller skates, heelies, hoverboards, and segways, have obvious physical differences, which are amplified in their cultural representation.

Bicycling has inspired movies like Breaking Away and The Bicycle Thief, along with this delightful short Jitensha by Dean Yamada.

Roller blades inspired Prayer for the Rollerboys (RIP Cory Haim)

Roller skates and Skateboards have documentaries, hip hop songs, video games, and famous movie scenes ode to them. Here are a few.

 

I've never seen a movie about powered scooters or motorized unicycles. But somehow Johnny Hart prophesied motorized unicycles before they existed.

History

Pieces of April has a scene where the boyfriend of the Katie Holmes character is riding through Union Square on a gas-powered motorized scooter, somewhere from the mid-2000s when scooters had one of their mini-bubbles. It was somewhere between the fad of the Razor and the mainstreaming of the X-Games, which launched kid's toys into serious adult stuff. 

The scene captures a moment in the long comparative history of scooter and bike design popularity. The original powered scooters "autopeds" were invented about 100 years ago and morphed into Vespas over the next few decades, evolving for safety, larger engines, seats for lower center of gravity, and bigger wheels. But the stand-up autoped form fell out of favor quickly, and only resurfaced en masse with scootershare. 

The original safety pedal bike was introduced a bit less than 150 years ago, and has never fallen out of favor. Not only has it remained the same basic shape and form, it has served as an icon of revolution and empowerment. Remember that time a revolution used a powered scooter as a symbol of political empowerment? No you don't because it never happened. Design-wise, the scooter vs bike question was well-settled by history until large private investment propped up access to them via scootershare.

Here is a useful review of scooter/autoped history.

Markets

Micromobility in transportation is almost exclusively bikes and scooters (and bikeshare and scootershare), not rollerblading (which is goofy) or skateboarding (which is criminalized), or motorized unicycling (which is impossibly dangerous). More than that, we typically mean it in a framework of marketing privately-owned or rentable devices, often in pursuit of venture capital dollars in the public realm. It's fair to say micromobility has become a term to lump the market.

Same But Different

When The North American Bike Share Association (NABSA) became the North American Bikeshare Scootershare Association (NABSA), the transportation profession formally embraced lumping micromobility. I've previously drawn the parallel of the burden of representation of race to the burden of representation in bicycling. Monolithic projection encourages monolithic perception, and discourages consideration of a group's inherent differences. 

Comparatively, bikeshare and scootershare have some similarities. They are devices in the public realm, maintained and operated by private parties, intended to add flexibility to travel options. Closer inspection reveals a bevvy of differences. Bikes have big wheels; scooters have small ones. Bike riders sit down; scooter riders stand up. Bikeshare is mostly docked; scootershare is mostly dockless.

Safety

Here is an especially important difference: In San Francisco, bike and bikeshare injuries are decreasing; scooter and scootershare injuries are increasing. In fact, bike fatalities reached San Francisco Vision Zero goals in 2023. The city reached zero bike fatalities within jurisdiction and inside the 10-year target. There is still a long way to go towards making bicycling a wholly comfortable and preferred mode for the majority of people. But getting to zero fatalities within the prescribed timeline is no small feat, and given that there may unfortunately be other fatalities in the future, we should continue to vigilantly improve our transportation system with safety as a top priority. On the other hand, Scooter fatalities have only grown in the last five years since scootershare helped repopularize this mode.

  

Why lump? Why not lump?

Given that micromobility is a marketing term, people lump bikes and scooters when we want to frame the transportation ecosystem as a marketplace, and mode choice as a consumer decision. This is in line with the Mobility As A Service movement. In that context, it also overlaps as a convenient bucket for people who don't ride bikes or scooters, or in marketing-speak, the consumers who would never choose these products. This doesn't mean people who aren't physically or fiscally capable of choice; it means people who could ride bikes are scooters, but choose to drive or transit instead. A very real danger in micromobility lumping is how it discourages drivers from realistically considering alternative modes, or challenging how lumping may reinforce oppositional identities. Micromobility hides how these bikes and scooters have radically polarized safety records. And perceptions of safety continue to be the top reason people cite for not choosing to try a bicycle.

In grad school, I often heard the mantra of "Transportation is derived demand," to start an economic analysis. This is a convenient way to shrink complications and reduce transportation understanding to an interpretation of markets and cost efficiency, not as a manifestation of cultural phenomenon and human behavior. While micromobility is a wonderful tool for bifurcating road users into drivers and non-drivers*, it muddies the reality of separate scootershare and bikeshare identities.

Scootershare and Bikeshare Identities

If scooters and bikes have such disparate safety outcomes, why do people market them like they're equivalently similar to potential non-drivers? Why are they the most relatable wheeled devices smaller than a car?

Here’s where it gets weird: even though bicycling is safer than scootering, scooters are psychologically more accessible than bikes. I've talked to numerous individuals who say they won't ride a bike, but will ride a scooter. I believe this stems from three factors. 

• First, bicycling has developed its own cultural identity pole, which simultaneously attracts and repels people who might consider it. Choice bicycling is often perceived as a kind of commitment to a struggle. Scooters, on the other hand, benefit from being perceived as toys. Some states even classify them as "toy devices." This leads to lots of other hidden confusions about how to ride a scooter, like sidewalk riding. To many adults, bikes are work, commute, traffic navigation, activism, serious stuff; scooters are play.
• Second, scooters take no human energy. They aren't active transportation like walking and bicycling, which means you can be lazy and luxurious, not like moving in a way that might make you sweat. 
• Third, scooters are a standup device, and on the spectrum of standing versus sitting/squatting, many of us have internalized that standing is more dignified. Homo erectus evolved to live on two feet, not to sit down. 

Addressing these in reverse order:

1) Squatting/Sitting is just as dignified as standing. Squat toilets are actually healthier and squatting is an excellent form for flexible repose. Squatting has persisted as a standard resting position in some places, though not in America or most other western countries. This doesn't mean we need a device where people can squat. But we should question how the physics of rider positioning may affect and differ from cultural perceptions of dignity. Here is a useful consideration of squatting.

2) We should better asses how transportation modes exist on a spectrum of human cognition/activity. Bicycling and Walking are active in that all the propulsion is from a discrete individual (human) and one must be conscious to propel oneself deliberately and safely. Transit is passive because it doesn't use any human power, and you can be totally unconscious while riding it to your destination. Cars and Scooters are somewhere in between. They don't take human energy, but they do require cognition and awareness. It's useful to consider how, as luxurious as they may seem by not requiring energy, they are still stressful because you have to consider your surroundings. True luxury in a car is being driven, which is the equivalent to transit, though more private. the equivalent of this luxury on a bike, is being a passenger in a pedicab (or as a child on a parent's bike).

3) Bicycling culture needs to reorient around all the benefits it offers in and outside of struggle, from an individual to a societal level. Bicycling should be established as healthy, friendly, engaging, fun, economically empowering, socially environmentally and politically just. It needs to inspire and unify the middle majority, rather than repel. How do we do that?

Scootershare and bikeshare arrived on the doorstep in close succession, but we should disconnect them soon because they are different, and if we don't, it's easy to see how the externalities of scootershare could hurt bikeshare. This arises at a unique moment when we are collectively moving towards public funding of shared mobility. Which parts of micromobility should receive more resources, and from which ones should we divest? 

*there is a beautifully nebulous gray area between driving and non-driving, which is motorcycling. Early motorcycles looked like eBikes, regular bikes with small motors. They've evolved into Harley Davidsons and Yamaha Supersports, with mopeds and vespas sometime in between. People don't usually mean any of these when they say micromobility, except when we talk about "seated powered scooters, which get to be about the same as throttle e-bikes, with no pedals, and a lower step-over height.