After a Year of Upheaval, Clarity—and One Big Question—for Shared Scooters

By Mark Bennett, Senior Planner

A few years back, when the future of shared scooters was still hazy, I had three key questions I thought were important to answer to understand their place in the urban mobility landscape. The past year brought major upheaval to the shared scooter industry globally—with shutdowns, consolidations, and bankruptcies—but also some important clarity to these questions:

Are Shared Scooters Safe?

E-scooter crash and injury data is largely under-tracked, but some of the best research on the question was just published by Rutgers and suggests e-scooters are no less safe than pedal bikes or e-bikes.

Further, over the last couple years, we’ve seen the roll-out of more substantial devices that are designed for heavy use and urban streets. Early shared scooters were flimsy and handled city streets terribly. Today, shared scooters are much more robust, have larger tires, better balance, stronger brakes, and even turn signals. Rider education remains key, but devices deployed today are vastly improved over a couple years ago and much better suited for urban streets.

Are Shared Scooters Useful?

While shared scooter ridership is down from its 2019 peak, recent NACTO data shows riders took more than 58 million trips in the US and Canada in 2022. As novelty has worn off and prices increase, ridership has receded a bit, but more than six years after shared scooters arrived on the scene, the data shows sustained interest.

People find shared scooters useful. When the City of Chicago surveyed scooter riders during a 2020 pilot, half said they had never used the city’s Divvy bikeshare system, indicating that scooters were growing the shared micromobility pie and filling unmet mobility needs. Further, an analysis by my colleague Jake Vissers of device utilization within areas of Chicago’s Divvy system where pedal bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters are all now available reveals e-scooter utilization slightly below e-bikes and on par with classic pedal bikes. This tells us that in a system where riders have a choice of devices, a strong cohort prefers e-scooters (and another still definitely prefers bikes).

What’s the Right Operations Model?

News at the end of 2023 that major US operator Superpedestrian was shutting down, and that longstanding operator Bird (which had recently acquired Spin) was entering bankruptcy, highlighted that the predominant shared scooter operating model in the US—paying cities for business licenses/permits—is a tenuous one. Meanwhile, shared micromobility systems that have strong city/operator partnerships, like those in Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, and the Bay Area, are seeing record ridership and ambitious expansions.

It’s possible that once the dust settles, one or two shared scooter operators will find stability through decreased competition. But those remaining operators may also use new leverage to push back on permit costs and regulations. Some cities that continue with paid permit models may find themselves with no operators interested in their permits (in fact, people I’ve talked to in the industry say this is already happening). If these cities still believe in shared micromobility as a safe and useful concept, they will need to focus on establishing a strong and sustainable co-beneficial partnership with an operator to deliver service going forward.

What’s old is new again as the industry appears ready to shift back towards city/operator partnership models that look a lot like the bikeshare ecosystem before scooters arrived. The free scooter lunch may be over for many cities, but six years into the shared scooter experiment, we have a new device type that has proven popular and useful. Paired with the boom in shared e-bikes in recent years, the world of bikeshare has evolved into a shared micromobility ecosystem that’s helping more riders meet more mobility needs than ever before. The next couple years will be all about whether cities can establish more sustainable models to keep bringing these devices to their residents.