Micro-mobility revolution has just begun

Friday, 3 May 2019

Bike share schemes and other micro-mobility innovations could displace the motor vehicle, especially in cities.

Lime Scooters, Onzo Bikes and the like may seem like novelties at the moment but will likely revolutionise urban transport within 20 years, says micro-mobility analyst and advocate Horace Dediu.

He compares the advent of small, electric-powered, short-haul vehicles in many New Zealand cities to the first mobile phones.

Those earliest devices were bulky and made only voice calls. Over time, manufacturers added features and larger screens and sorted out what software consumers most wanted in their hands. The result was the smartphones that most Kiwis use every day.

'It took a few generations [of phones] to find the best form factor or configuration that suited most people and balanced all of their requirements,' says Dediu, a Romania-born, US-educated tech industry analyst and Apple expert who turned his attention to smart transportation a few years ago.

* Scooters and bikes are the thin edge of a carless wedge, if history is correct

Horace Dediu, micro-mobility analyst and advocate, has little time for autonomous vehicles.

* What happens when a mobility scooter, a bike and and an e-scooter go neck-and-neck?

* Editorial: Teething problems no reason to simply abandon trial**

Scooters and bikes such as Lime and Onzo are like those earliest phones – ripe for improvement as entrepreneurs add features and improve hardware.

'I don't advocate for scooters, I advocate for right-sized mobility,' he says in an interview.

Over recent years, Dediu has grappled with the definition of micro-mobility – a word he may have coined – and now defines it as vehicles weighing less than 500 kilograms, powered by electricity, owned by someone other than the driver, used on-demand, often for a small fee, and given frequent software upgrades.

Software is the key, he says.

Mobile phones, tablet computers and other hardware are often made obsolete by upgrades to their operating systems, he notes.

'Once we get to that point in transportation … where software determines device cycles, then it evolves very quickly,' he says.

Micro-mobility will probably be 'powerful enough to displace the automobile from its perch as the dominant species for transportation', he says. 'A good estimate is 20 years.'

Lime Scooters and their competitors are ripe for improvement as entrepreneurs add features and improve hardware.

A point is that micro-mobility devices such as scooters have a short life – say two years. Manufacturers and software coders have the opportunity for frequent upgrades.

It won't be long before mico-mobility can handle three bags of groceries, or whatever it is that consumers want from this transport mode.

He's also speaking here of urban environments, not rural ones. And he defines the dominant position for micro-mobility as 50 per cent of kilometres travelled.

Dediu will be the keynote speaker at T-Tech, a future transport conference being held in Christchurch Monday and Tuesday this week. Speakers include senior folks from Uber, NZTA, Callaghan Innovation and many NZ universities.

He is not likely to thrill analogue cyclists. 'Human-powered vehicles will be as obsolete and as rare as black-and-white televisions or monochrome cell phones,' he told the Forbes website in March.

Nor will he thrill autonomous vehicle fans. Despite decades of research and billions in investment, autonomous vehicles are not ready for widespread adoption., he says. They still need to be proven and produced in bulk. And regulation has not been sorted out.

Dediu also expects the car to be 'unbundled'. Most drivers don't need cargo space most of the time, for example. But they pay for cargo space when they buy a car. Unbundling means drivers won't pay for cargo space until the need it. This might be a short-term rental of a shared cargo vehicle, for example.

Dediu podcasts on micro-mobility at medium.com/micromobility