Scooters: a cautionary tale for eVTOLs
A critical analysis with urban air mobility expert Clint Harper
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By Clint Harper and Robert Carroll
Hear us out: a new type of vehicle that’s both good for the environment and cheap to use. It reduces the number of cars on the road while offering a last-mile mobility option for underserved communities.
Oh, and one more thing: it’s fun.
This could be someone’s 2017-era pitch for electric scooters. But in 2023, we hear similar descriptions for electric, vertical take-off and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs.
Side by side, they’re pretty different: one is small and light, easily flung into a river (a surprisingly popular activity). The other is hulking and glossy—something straight out of a cyberpunk film. But when it comes to their impact on cities, we see parallels in how they are deployed and perceived. Both modes of transportation are fraught with challenges, and both hold great promise (yes, even scooters).
With five bumpy years out in the wild, scooters provide a wealth of data on how not to integrate with local communities. Let’s see what eVTOLs can learn from their terrestrial little cousins.
Rough terrain
Cities and states across the nation have been thinking about eVTOLs in the context of urban air mobility for a long time. When Clint Harper first started talking to community members, he was met with a consistent line of pushback: remember how this went with scooters?
Bird, one of the first electric scooter rideshare programs, launched on the sidewalks of Santa Monica. Other scooter startups got into the game and were soon competing for riders in cities like San Francisco. Thousands of the battery-electric devices spontaneously popped up on sidewalks across the U.S., seemingly overnight.
Local officials were flummoxed. Aaron Peskin, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, summarized the companies’ approach as “a strategy of ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
While many in the public enjoyed using the scooters, the critics made the headlines—and the complaints were serious.
People reported being bulldozed and injured by scooter riders, leading pedestrians to feel unsafe on their sidewalks. At a city council meeting in Santa Monica, one resident complained that pedestrians had become “the bowling pins of Santa Monica.”
Riders were criticized for leaving the scooters strewn along walking paths, making city sidewalks difficult to navigate.
The lithium-ion batteries found in scooters sometimes caught fire. Fire Departments in the U.S. have responded to many incidents—some of them deadly—in the past few years.
Finally, scooters’ record on carbon emissions came into question. Although scooters can reduce emissions by replacing cars on the road, they are also known to have a short shelf life before they need to be replaced. This is especially true when they are purposely destroyed by disgruntled locals.
Scooter companies have expanded their service into more and more cities, but have reported only lackluster financials. Since LA-based Bird went public via SPAC in 2019, public markets have shown little faith in the company. Lime is believed to be in a stronger financial position but has delayed going public, citing macroeconomic considerations.
Other players, including Uber, Lyft, and the Ford Motor Company, have entered the field with mixed results.
Redemption on wheels
If you’ve been following the scooter narrative for a while, you may be noticing a gradual decline in negative press.
It seems scooters have entered into a new era: the early stages of a healthy integration with our cities. Not every city has allowed scooter companies to operate—New York City has notably abstained—but it seems that most major cities currently play host to a fleet of scooters.
The guiding principle of successful deployment appears to be tight coordination between scooter companies and local authorities.
Some cities, including San Francisco, banned scooters after a disastrous start and then reintroduced them with thoughtful regulation. Things are going much better now.
San Diego rolled out a robust scooter policy, with designated pick-up and drop-off areas and a strict limit on the total sum of scooters operating in the city.
In 2020 Britain’s Department for Transport allowed 31 English local authorities to carry out e-scooter rental trials — the early results are encouraging. From The Economist:
If interest is a measure of success, the trials are going well. So far 29 of the 31 councils have chosen to continue them. The trial period has been extended to 2024. But its most tangible result may come sooner if private e-scooters are legalized, which could happen in a transport bill expected [in 2023]. Then “e” might also stand for “everywhere.”
The purpose of any mode of transportation is to give people opportunities. Scooters help people get to new places faster—at lower cost and without carbon emissions. Millions of people are finding that they do just that.
In England’s south coast, Michael Dewey is about to hop onto a coral-colored e-scooter. Mr. Dewey usually drives to and from Portsmouth Harbour, where he works in the docks, but today he left his car in the garage. It will cost him £1.90 ($2.28) to rent the scooter for the four-mile (6km) journey home. He reckons a taxi fare would be four times that.
How eVTOLs are different
Like electric scooters, eVTOLs produce zero carbon emissions during operation, expand the suite of options for getting around cities, and ultimately serve in a multimodal strategy to reduce traffic congestion impacts for users.
Given the similarities, we have to wonder if eVTOLs will present the same problems we’ve seen before. Fortunately, eVTOLs are different from scooters in some important ways.
First, eVTOLs are not personal vehicles. Although sometimes called “flying cars,” that’s simply not what they are. EVTOLs will be flown by professional pilots along already-established routes. While scooters can be rented by someone who just stumbled out of a bar (an ongoing issue for scooter companies), eVTOLs will be certified by the FAA for commercial use; operate under specific rules approved by the FAA—called a Part 135 certification; and have a commercially rated pilot, i.e., someone who knows what they’re doing.
Second, eVTOLs are not “dockless.” eVTOLs cannot, as some initially imagined, take off from any random parking lot or from a single-family-home driveway. Passengers will board and disembark at vertiports, sites designated for highly-orchestrated eVTOL operations. These vertiports may be located at existing airports, or evolve from legacy heliports. Some cities are exploring ways to tightly integrate vertiports with existing transit systems.
Still, eVTOL companies must learn from the mistakes of Bird and Lime if they’re going to have a successful rollout.
What eVTOLs should learn from scooters
So, how do we apply our learnings to eVTOLs? How do we skip the bad part and get to the good? To successfully integrate with cities, we recommend eVTOL companies do three simple things:
Recommendation 1: Engage early with local governments.
Many eVTOL developers come from Silicon Valley software startups, and have used their experience to rapidly develop and test new aviation technology (note: this has caused anxiety among some of the more cautious parties). In the world of FAA regulation and city-level politics, however, they have found that things don’t move as quickly; technology readiness does not align with regulatory readiness. The creation of new policy takes time and resources (e.g., taxpayer support), and if eVTOL companies hope to be successful, they need to work with local officials early in the process, staying in touch every step of the way. Many eVTOL companies have started doing just that through partnerships, such as the AAM Partnership between Urban Movement Labs and the City of Los Angeles.
Recommendation 2: Listen to the public.
Companies in the UAM space have made promises about alleviating congestion in cities by reducing the demand for gas-burning cars. They stopped short, however, of identifying who would benefit from these changes. It’s likely that the first passengers on eVTOLs are going to be those with more disposable income. How do we bring the bar down so that flying taxi services benefit everyone?
Additionally, where will vertiports be placed? Which communities will be most affected by noise? Companies need to listen to citizens and design a product and service that benefits as many people as possible. Locals deserve to be heard and have their questions answered.
Recommendation 3: Share data.
The introduction of micro-mobility and e-scooters offer a lesson on how cities can integrate advanced air mobility technology. Through data-sharing initiatives and digital policies, cities have been able to quickly identify potential risks associated with e-scooter usage and respond by putting in place comprehensive safety measures. This relationship gives cities a framework for managing the integration of eVTOLs and cargo drones into the wider transportation system, and gives them a seat at the table in ensuring safe and efficient operations while protecting the public interest. Cities should use their experience with micro-mobility technologies to inform policymaking for AAM.
As an example, the Open Mobility Foundation runs an open-source platform called Mobility Data Specification (MDS), which allows mobility companies and cities to seamlessly share operational data. The result is better policy. For example, dockless scooter companies have been able to offer greater access for lower prices in the communities that need it most. Cities have been able to enact policy quickly with digital tools. If eVTOL companies share data too, we can work collaboratively toward better outcomes for communities. [1]
Cities are evolving with transportation technology
Cities have always been shaped by the way we move within them. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser walks us through the history of urban form in Triumph of the City:
“Transportation technologies have always determined urban form. In walking cities, like central Florence or Jerusalem’s old city, the streets are narrow, winding, and crammed with shops. When people had to use their legs to get around, they tried to get as close as possible to each other and to the waterways that provided the fastest way into or out of the city. Areas built around trains and elevators, like midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, have wider streets often organized in a grid. There are still shops on the streets, but most of the office space is much further from the ground. Cities built around the car, like much of Los Angeles and Phoenix, and Houston, have enormous, gently curving roads and often lack sidewalks. In those places, shops and pedestrians retreat from the streets into malls. While older cities usually have an obvious center, dictated by an erstwhile port or a rail station, car cities do not. They just stretch toward the horizon in undifferentiated urban sprawl.”
Car-centric design is hardly the ideal end state for our beloved cities. We should be targeting a more human-centric design akin to European cities, while preserving access to opportunities and connectivity. If they can improve the way we live and integrate with one another, we should welcome new modes of transportation. Despite not being legal in NYC, The New York Times thinks scooters are a good idea:
“There always will be New Yorkers who complain about cyclists — and, perhaps soon, scooters — blaming them for ills both real and imagined. But bikes and similar vehicles take up far less public space and are much more environmentally sustainable than cars. If the city is serious about wanting safe, reliable ways for people in all areas of New York to get around, the path ahead is clear.”
The path ahead for flying taxis is also clear: work with local governments, listen to the public, and share data. If we get things right, eVTOLs will make our cities better.
[1] Transportation Emerges as Crucial to Escaping Poverty (New York Times)