Will the electric scooter become the transport of the future and change the urban environment?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

This vehicle can really make our life easier, but not as globally as we would like.

What are electric scooters and where did they come from

The easiest way to describe these devices is scooters that ride on their own thanks to an electric motor and a battery.

Modern electric scooters can reach speeds of up to 30 km / h, and one battery charge lasts an average of 30-50 km. It is simple to operate them: turn one of the handles - the scooter accelerates, press the brake lever - the device slows down.

Scooters that ride on their own were first created by Autoped in the United States back in 1915. True, they ran on gasoline. The first electric scooters began to appear, The Man Behind the Scooter Revolution, in the early 2000s, produced by the Razor company.

Since the mid-2010s, this form of transport has been gaining popularity thanks to convenient, fast and light scooter models from manufacturers such as Xiaomi and Segway. At the end of 2017, Santa Monica Selects Bird, Jump, Lime and Lyft for Shared Mobility Pilot opened the first electric scooter rental services in the United States, and six months later, similar companies appeared in Russia. They began to talk about electric scooters as the transport of the future and see great prospects in it.

Why electric scooters are good

First of all, because they are not cars. Cars pollute the environment, destroy the One 20th century mistake made cities horrible, congested, lonely places to live urban space, create traffic jams and, in general, have long been outdated as a mode of transport.

Electric scooters allow you to move around the city 5-6 times faster than on foot. At the same time, they do not emit harmful substances, take up very little space, even when parked, and require almost no money for maintenance (if you charge the device from a home outlet, it will cost only a few rubles).

The ubiquity of electric scooters is beneficial for city dwellers. For many people, they replace Electric Scooters And Micro-Mobility: Here’s Everything You Need To Know cars, which reduces exhaust emissions and frees up space that was previously occupied by parked cars. Scooter users get to work faster, so they have more free time.

Electric scooters are safer and more comfortable than many other means of transportation, including longboards, hoverboards and segways. And anyone can use a scooter: you just need to stand on it and hold on to the wheel. Plus, even if the motor of such a vehicle suddenly fails or the battery runs out, it does not turn into a meaningless pile of iron. You can ride on it, pushing off with your foot - you will also get physical activity.

What is wrong with this mode of transport

One of the main disadvantages of an electric scooter is that it is almost impossible to use it in non-ideal weather conditions. Snow, cold, forcing to wear a lot of clothes, and even just heavy rain make this transport useless. Therefore, for example, in Russian cities, short-term rental services for these devices do not work in late autumn and winter.

Another drawback is the human factor. In 2018, thanks to electric scooter rental services, many cities in the United States were swept by the Scooting Toward Confrontation "scooter epidemic." Thousands of devices have appeared on the streets of Santa Monica, San Francisco, and Los Angeles from virtually nowhere.

The cities and their inhabitants were not ready for this. Due to inexperience and due to the lack of bike paths in many places, scooter users often got into accidents involving cars or ran into pedestrians themselves. People parked their gadgets right in the middle of the street, many devices were stolen or broken.

A year later, the situation improved Electric scooter fleets to double in San Francisco thanks to the intervention of city administrations. But the fact remains: scooters are driven by people who sometimes behave unsafely - on purpose or by accident. By themselves, the devices are not dangerous, except that they occasionally break right while driving, but this is a rarity. In San Francisco, out of tens of thousands of trips per month, no more than 50 of Electric Scooter Statistics end in failure due to a scooter breakdown.

Where to get an electric scooter

The easiest way to get an electric scooter into use is through rental services. Abroad, these are companies like Lime and Bird, in Russia - Delisamokat, YouDrive Lite, Samocat Sharing, UrentBike and others.

The main advantages of these solutions are cheapness and convenience. To go on a trip, you just need to download the application, register and find the nearest scooter or station to issue them. And prices in Russia are from 5 rubles per minute to 250 rubles per hour.

True, judging by the reviews, users are not happy with domestic rental services. The main problem is the lack of scooters. Many also have difficulties with registration and payment, often applications mistakenly charge money for trips, and scooters and stations refuse to work. Few apps have a rating higher than two and a half stars out of five.

The scooter got blocked in the rack when trying to return it, but the trip did not end, and the money continued to be debited. The trip ended only 30 minutes after I inserted it into the station. I had to call technical support twice so that the money would stop being debited. I got upset and demand satisfaction.

Mikhail Amosov Samocat Sharing user

So if you plan to ride a scooter regularly, then it makes sense to purchase your own device for 20-30 thousand rubles. Compared to rental services, it will pay off after a few months of daily use.

Will electric scooters change the situation in cities?

At first glance, an electric scooter seems like an almost ideal city transport. It is lightweight, fast, convenient, cheap, does not pollute the environment, requires almost no maintenance and does not take up much space. But will he be able to replace the Russians with a car for short trips or at least somehow affect the appearance of the city in the near future? Unlikely. And that's why:

• Electric scooter rental is now available only in a few cities of Russia, for example, in Moscow, Sochi and Krasnodar, and it is not known whether it will appear anywhere else.
• In most of the country, scooters can only be used for 4-6 months a year.
• Few cities have bike lanes, and riding scooters on roads or sidewalks is incredibly dangerous. Whether the infrastructure will adapt to the users of electric scooters and how quickly is a big question.
• The scooter will not help if you need to go somewhere with the whole family. Few people want to constantly make sure that children on scooters do not fall into ditches instead of a relaxing ride.

Despite all the advantages of scooters as transport, they have not fundamentally changed the urban environment anywhere. Even judging by the reports of popular foreign rental services, basically all the benefits of devices come down to the fact that people in 20-30% of cases use Brisbane's First Million Scooter Rides Are Changing Urban Mobility In Queensland instead of cars to get to work, university or meeting places with friends.

In cities where the temperature does not drop below zero (Sochi, Krasnodar, Anapa, and so on), these devices over time can provoke some changes in the urban landscape. It will become easier for people to travel short distances, and there will be slightly fewer cars on the roads, as well as emissions in the atmosphere. But electric scooters will most likely not revolutionize urban transport - at least in Russia.