In praise of Scooters, and of the right way to MANAGE them

Because Bicycles are great, but where it would REALLY matter scooters are MUCH better

Feb 23, 2024

Bicycles are great, but as far as urban mobility is concerned, there is something that's much better and sorely underrated, if not misunderstood. Cities aiming to really innovate micromobility should promote scooters, including the push/kick powered ones, much more than bicycles. Let's see why.

First, some general problems with bicycles

Bicycle production is becoming increasingly polluting, in ways that also make bicycles less durable, harder to repair and less affordable than they have ever been.

One reason is loss of standardization. Thirty years ago, most bicycle spare parts were reusable across brands, for many years. Today, there are so many incompatible but also short-lived parts, that it's impossible for bike shops to have them all and people are forced, just as it happens with computers or smartphones,to buy new parts, if not a new bike altogether, much more often than they could.

Another reason is the transformation of cycling from an ubiquitous, really democratic practice to a overhyped "new Golf", where "cashed up MAMILS(Middle aged men in lycra)" encourage manufacturers to churn out models full of "high-tech solutions for problems of marginal importance", that would matter only for professional athletes, and 900 Euros was considered the starting price for "real road bikes and MTBs" (in 2021).

Combined with increasing inequality and the "intermodal" limits of bicycles described below, this questionable "race to the top" also pushes bicycle theft to levels as high as one every 7 minutes in England & Wales, and in other countries make bike locks an absolute necessity that may cost as much as the bike itself.

For electric bicycles, the hype is also funny because, at least as urban use cases and design are concerned, they are hardly new: it's really funny to see advertisement and commercials that present e-bikes as if they had been invented yesterday, when several models are just the same glorious mopeds of the 1970s, with just a battery instead of a fuel tank:

LEFTt: great Piaggio mopeds from the 1970s/early 1980s. RIGHT: same, renamed because batteries.

Somehow, it seems to me that bicycles and e-bikes are following exactly the same, dumb trajectory of electric cars, in a world where the biggest EV boom is that of rickshaws, not cars: getting ever more beautiful, and uselessly expensive and sophisticated, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

Where, why and how scooters are much better than bicycles

I argue that all scooters, electric or not, are better inside cities than all bicycles, electric or not, and should be promoted accordingly, as real innovation, for at least the four reasons I am going to list in increasing order of importance.

First, even if driven by the same consumerist logic as bicycles, and even if the electric ones pollute almost more BEFORE they're sold than after, it's much easier to make scooters greener than bicycles, simply because they have less parts and require less materials.

Second, scooters are much more "intermodal", that is much easier to combine with every combination of transportation, public or private, between any combination of destinations.

Twenty people with folded scooters will fit almost unnoticed into an already crowded subway wagon, unless it's really full. Five people with non-foldable bicycles in the same wagon may cause accidents and complaints. Assuming they can fit into the wagon, of course.

Above all, the convenience of scooters lasts even after one has reached the final destination, for many more kinds of trips where bicycles would be equally convenient.

Long and multi-leg commuting? No problem. Four suburbian residents, who may have to drive every day till the closest bus or train station, may fit all their scooters in the trunk of one of their cars, reach that station together, board a train with their scooters and once in town reach their workplaces independently.

Once there, those commuters would enjoy the fact that foldable scooters are much easier than bicycles to fit under office desks, pub tables, the landing of a friend's studio or anywhere else. This fact that scooters can "park" everywhere, that is stay always close to their users, also makes them much harder to steal than bicycles.

Third, scooters are more inclusive. Much storytelling around bicycles is about young or otherwise healthy people living or moving alone, but while everybody who could ride a bike may also ride a scooter, the opposite is not true. Bicycles are an excellent way to stay fit, no question about that. But scooters are much more compatible with senior citizens and everybody else who already were in bad enough shape to not stay on a bicycle, or pedal in very hot weather, when loss of income or new city policies forced them to make do without a car.

Fourth, and most important, scooters of every kind are much more affordable than bicycles, for many more real people, regardless of the prices of both objects. The reason is that scooters are made to order for the many millions of homes too small to contain bicycles that wouldn't last one night if they had to be left in the street. A family of four living in a small apartment where even one bicycle would steal precious space could fit four kick scooters in one IKEA single door wardrobe, or four electric ones in the two door version:

IKEA scooter garages: affordable, and ready for every bedroom or living room

Support for scooters, done right

Whatever their propulsion is, scooters are cheaper, less intrusive and much more versatile than bicycles in urban settings, especially in tandem (what else?) with other means of transportation. If they were just proposed in the right way, scooters would take off congested city streets thousands of cars of people who could never use bicycles for all the reasons above. Cities should support and promote scooters aggressively, even more than bicycles, and it's easier than it may seem. Because, you see, just like the tens of millions of bicycles dumped all over China in 2018...

all the scooters that were (source, 2019) "variously flung into water bodies, tossed from buildings, set on fire, run over, and used in stunts" from Los Angeles to Barcelona were just like...
and all the e-scooters that that San Franciscans rejected in 2018 because they had fell on them "without any warning to local residents or lawmakers"...
and all the ones that Parisians overwhelmingly banned in 2023 ...
and all those of Superpedestrian, that collapsed in 2023…

All those scooters were rentable scooters that we humans are evidently not ready to handle yet, unlike personal possessions. Sad, but true. In other words, if there is something dead about scooters, it's just the "shared" business model powered by expensive for-profit platforms, not the scooter for sure.

After all those failures worldwide, it seems time to try a different, much simpler plan to make micromobility in cities a reality, and life easier and more affordable for all their residents: just heavily promote and subsidize ownership of private scooters, both push up and electric as long as they are:

foldable
as simple as possible, that is harder to break and lasting a lifetime
really, easily repairable by independent technicians, if not by their owners, with standardized, interchangeable parts
usable without mandatory helmets, for the same reason they shouldn't be mandatory with bicycles: proven negative effects.

Yes, this is a plan likely to be labeled "Big Scooter" by the same people who already denounce "Big Bicycle" conspiracies and get 15-minutes cities completely wrong. But is also a plan that, if properly integrated with other measures (discounts on bus fares?), can help millions of city residents worldwide to save lots of money, time and stress, at the smallest possible cost for themselves and their city budgets. Which city will go for it first?

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