To unlock the dockless shared scooters, users download a smartphone app. Rides generally cost a dollar to start and then twenty-five cents a minute, which makes them economical for short, fast trips, but costly for recreational larking. In renting a scooter—or a bike—you provide the hire company with information about you, your route, your travel speed, your driving style, and your destination. Cities grant scooter concessions in part to have access to these data, which are aggregated and anonymized according to rules that underpin the Mobility Data Specification, an open-source digital tool. This information is far more granular than the data that can be gleaned about subway or bus ridership. What to make of the fact, according to a study commissioned by the Dublin City Council, which fitted cyclists with sensor-enabled lights made by the cycling-technology and data firm See.Sense, that women swerve more than men when they ride, and that they stay closer to the curb, even though the road is rougher there? See.Sense’s Irene McAleese told me, “They could be cycling close to the gutter to feel safer, if good-quality cycle infrastructure is not available.”
Both White, fifty, and a colleague, Graham Gullens, thirty-six, wore heavy parkas, mittens, hats, and face masks. Their eyes lit up as the D.O.T. observers began arriving. One at a time, the observers tried Link’s yellow scooters, heading toward a set of orange cones. Gullens sprinted behind each one to call attention to the precision of Link’s geofencing. A data-driven form of collective intelligence employed in scooter fleets, geofencing uses G.P.S. to create virtual boundaries around terrestrial places. The technology can keep scooters off sidewalks and away from restricted areas by automatically cutting the power to the motor when the scooter crosses the geofence. Geofencing also requires users to end rides in designated scooter-parking areas, reducing sidewalk clutter. You could still pick up a parked scooter, though, if it isn’t locked to anything, and throw it into the East River.
The finalists in the New York pilot all employed a version of geofencing, but they differed in significant ways. Some systems rely on cloud computing, which can entail delays of up to thirty seconds when the scooter hits a boundary. Link does all the mapping and computing on three microcomputers built into the scooter, so its geofencing system kicks in almost instantly.
Gullens wanted to be there when Link’s scooters hit the geofence at the orange cones and stopped. “I was just really excited to show off our system,” he told me. “I was also trying to stay warm.” If nothing else, the day would prove conclusively that scootering is not the best mode of travel in the dead of a New York winter. You can’t put your hands in your pockets while driving or lean into the wind. In a lot of ways, walking that last mile works better, and it’s free.
Still, “we showed that we’re trying really damn hard,” White told me. “I think this is part of the underdog mystique that ultimately wins them over.”
Paul White has been at the forefront of micromobility since before it was a concept. He’s risen to be a colonel in the war on cars during his career, with most of it spent at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit founded in 1973 to fight the supremacy of the automobile in the city. As T.A.’s executive director starting in 2004, White was the public face of cycling in New York, calling for better, safer bike infrastructure, and eulogizing riders killed by cars and trucks. He was friends with the dynamic D.O.T. commissioner under Michael Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan, who created hundreds of miles of bike lanes. He was instrumental in getting cars banned from both Central Park and Prospect Park, and in helping to persuade the city, under the Bloomberg administration, to build the Prospect Park West bikeway, which was installed in June, 2010. Anthony Weiner, who opposed the bike-lane boom when he ran for mayor in 2013, vowing to rip the lanes up if elected, called White and his colleagues “policy jihadists.”
It therefore came as a shock to many in the bike-advocacy community when, in the fall of 2018, White announced that he was leaving the nonprofit world to join Bird, the Silicon Valley unicorn. The company had offered to make him part of its public-policy “dream team,” and after discussing the role with a former colleague, Melinda Hanson, the founder of Electric Avenue, an E.V. consultancy, he decided to take the job. “I was pushing fifty, and I had been at T.A. fourteen years,” White told me. “Young Jedis were coming up through the ranks.” Being an executive director mostly meant fund-raising, and, he said, “that wasn’t what I originally signed up for in terms of trying to kick down doors.” Community boards, which tend to be dominated by car drivers who don’t want to lose their free parking, fought back against bike lanes. Under Mayor de Blasio, City Hall’s top priority was the Vision Zero program, which focussed on reducing auto-related fatalities, rather than on building cycling infrastructure. The pandemic has proved to be a disaster in this regard. Drivers, delighted to find the roads empty for once, floored it. Road fatalities have been the highest since Vision Zero began.
“I saw what was happening with scooter mania,” White explained. “Yes, there were all these issues with sidewalk clutter, but just look at the numbers. More women were riding, more low-income people were riding, and it was more racially diverse.” White felt the same energy around the micromobility movement that he had experienced in bike advocacy during the Bloomberg years.
The lockdowns in the face of the pandemic brought scooter mania to an abrupt halt. After mid-March, 2020, no one wanted to share anything, and, with no one going anywhere, scooters’ data-gathering capabilities were useless. Across the U.S. and Europe, the metal swans went into hibernation, which meant removing thousands of scooters from city streets.
Layoffs followed throughout the industry, and Lime eventually lost its unicorn status. Still, when White got an e-mail from Bird’s management summoning him to a Zoom Webinar on March 26, 2020, he had no inkling of what was to come. A woman’s voice read a statement collectively firing more than four hundred Bird employees, including everyone on the Zoom call. (The mass termination is preserved on YouTube.) “It was pretty brutal,” White said. Immediately after the ninety-second call ended, screens on the company-issued laptops, on which people had been working from home, went to gray and everyone was locked out of e-mail and Slack.
White was “really low” for a couple of weeks, he said, and he considered leaving the transportation field altogether. In 2019, he and his wife, Zoe Ryder, a poet, and their three children had moved to a six-acre farm in Ulster County. He had lots of projects in mind. But, as lockdowns eased and scooter-sharing returned to cities in the summer and fall of 2020, he began lobbying to join Superpedestrian.
“I wanted to work for the good guys,” he said. “I just have so much invested in this personally. I feel like if we don’t win New York, I’m going to be filling potholes for the Ulster County Department of Transportation.”
Electric scooters don’t look like the coming revolution in transportation, but to Horace Dediu, a business analyst and micromobility’s leading evangelist—he coined the term—that is part of their appeal. “The next revolution in transportation will come from the bottom,” Dediu has said. Dediu was born in Romania and came to the U.S. as a child; he attended Tufts and the Harvard Business School. He now lives in Finland, where he is multimodal. On YouTube, he philosophizes about urban mobility while riding his bicycle.
Dediu argues that, just as the heavy desktop computer has been superseded by lighter laptops, tablets, and smartphones, so the automobile will be “unbundled” into much lighter, cleaner, and less resource-dependent E.V.s that can be used for most of the trips people now make by car. (In the U.S., sixty per cent of all car trips are less than six miles.) Lithium-ion batteries, first introduced to consumers by Sony in high-end camcorders, today power an ever-expanding array of mobile devices—not just our phones and laptops but also vehicles like e-bikes, e-scooters, e-monowheels, e-skateboards, and other continually evolving forms of micromobility that no longer require the user’s energy to move them.
Dediu calls e-scooters “smartphones on wheels.” No other vehicle on the road has a higher proportion of brains to brawn. Scooter riders, however, are less reliably intelligent. In the Wild West days, reckless driving and cheaply made scooters reduced the life span of some scooters on the streets to just over twenty-eight days. When Bird and Lime launched, they deployed consumer scooters bought from the Chinese manufacturers Segway-Ninebot and Xiaomi, which weren’t made for the hard-knock street life of a public-transit vehicle. In San Francisco, brakes failed as some users were scootering down steep hills, leading to class-action lawsuits. In Auckland, New Zealand, a software glitch caused scooters to brake suddenly. In October, 2018, Lime recalled two thousand of its scooters from fleets in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Lake Tahoe over fears that the batteries, which are installed under the standing platform, might explode. Lithium-ion-battery fires can occur on rare occasions when a short circuit causes the battery to release a large amount of its stored-up energy at once; that’s why airlines won’t allow lithium-ion batteries in checked baggage. There was a fire at Citi Bike’s main charging hub in Brooklyn, in May, 2019.
Still, Dediu believes that today’s scooters could evolve into tomorrow’s automobiles. The technologies embedded in a state-of-the-art e-scooter and e-bike—mobile communications, autonomous driving capability, and artificial intelligence—will be central to the cars that Apple or another tech company might make in the future. If cities are going to meet the zero-emission goals they’ve set and if automakers like Ford and G.M. are going to electrify their fleets by 2030 and 2035, respectively, as they have pledged, automobiles will have to become smaller, lighter, and more efficient, particularly given the limits of lithium-ion-battery technology. Four-wheeled, covered quadracycles, electric rickshaw-taxis, and electric minibuses resembling three-wheeled tuk-tuks are all possibilities.
But the disposability of shared scooters also raises the question of just how green this new mode of transport really is. There is still no commercially reliable way to recycle lithium-ion batteries—a huge caveat for the sustainability of E.V.s in general. All the superannuated scooters eventually end up in landfills, as did shared bikes, which were widely embraced in China early in the past decade, then abruptly cancelled in many places, leading to shocking photographs of enormous bike-burial sites. Added to the environmental costs of discarded batteries and scooters are the emissions produced by the trucks and vans that bring the scooters to charging stations—or, in some cases, to gig workers’ homes. On important issues, such as labor practices and sustainability, the Wild West of micromobility remains unsettled, even as the go-go early days of disruption have given way to the courtship of regulators like New York’s D.O.T.
To get a better sense of scooters as proto-vehicles of the future, I visited Superpedestrian, the home of Link. The company currently has a hundred and ninety employees, many of whom work at its R. & D. lab, in a former machine shop on a quiet back street in Cambridge. Assaf Biderman, the company’s Israeli-born forty-three-year-old founder, joined me on Zoom for a tour, beaming in from an island in Greece where he, his wife, the Israeli singer-songwriter Nili Ohayon, known as Onili, and their six-year-old daughter, Livia, were spending the pandemic. When they return to the U.S., the family plans to settle in Brooklyn.
After completing his military service in Israel, Biderman majored in physics and architecture at M.I.T. At the university’s Media Lab, he worked under Hiroshi Ishii, whose research into human-computer interfaces was pioneering in the early nineties. Collaborating with Ishii, Biderman told me, “brought me into the idea of using new sensors and digital tools to create a meaningful connection between humans and machines.” Biderman was also inspired by Bill Mitchell, the Australian-born dean of architecture at M.I.T., who foresaw the profound effects that data would have on architecture and city planning. As Biderman put it, “When the urban environment starts to emit data, you can begin to plan it with quantitative tools.”
In 2003, Biderman and Carlo Ratti, a former postdoc in Ishii’s lab who is now a professor at M.I.T., founded the Senseable City Lab, within M.I.T.’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, to explore how introducing digital technologies into the built environment can aid in the study, design, and management of cities. As the lab started consulting with cities around the world, Biderman told me, he kept hearing that demand for urban mobility is expected to triple by mid-century. “Growth in global population, growth in urbanization, and rising incomes are all driving it,” he said. “But the streets we have are what we’ve got. How can you use those streets to move more people more efficiently?”
Superpedestrian was launched in January, 2013. Biderman assembled a team of forty robotics engineers, who spent the next four and a half years coding a machine-learning-based operating system that could be used in any small electric vehicle, including a car, and for which they eventually received thirty-seven patents. “A self-sensing control system” is how Biderman describes it.
In 2017, the company brought out the Copenhagen Wheel. By replacing the back wheel of a conventional bike with the Wheel, you could convert it into an e-bike. In addition to its vehicle intelligence, the Wheel could sense and learn from the city’s infrastructure. It recorded carbon-monoxide levels, reported on traffic congestion, and used algorithms to detect potholes. The Wheel also had the machine-learning capacity to adapt to a rider’s unique pedalling style and pace.
