Electric Avenue

EMBRACED BY commuters of all stripes, e-scooters are more than just a fad— and they’re probably coming soon to a city near you.

- Ann-Marie Alcántara

IF YOU’VE BEEN TO A MAJOR AMERICAN CITY IN THE PAST YEAR, YOU’VE NOTICED IT: sidewalks strewn with discarded pay-per-use electric scooters. Riders seemingly drop them to the ground as soon as they’re done with them, no matter where they are. It’s kind of like a parade of visitors coming to your house and throwing their jackets on the floor wherever they please, multiplied many times over: It’s a mess, someone’s bound to trip and it feels chaotic.

It makes you wonder: Who’s riding these things anyway, and why are they so popular?

First of all, you’re not wrong about the ubiquity of e-scooters. Companies that provide rentable e-scooters have reported millions of rides across the country since the pay-per-use vehicles were introduced in March 2018 by companies like Bird, Lime and Spin in San Francisco. Bird, for example, has notched more than 10 million rides since September 2017. And ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft, sensing an opportunity, have also joined the e-scooter craze. Lyft—which finalized its acquisition of Motivate, the country’s largest bike-share provider, with footprints including Citi Bike in New York and Ford GoBike in San Francisco—is in nine cities with its scooter program. It reported more than 200,000 scooter rides since September.

Uber operates two separate scooter programs: one in conjunction with Jump e-bikes, the company the ride-share behemoth bought in early 2018, and Uber-branded scooters with Lime. Its programs have tallied more than 4.1 million miles of use. Also in the overall e-scooter mix: Scoot, which rents electric, Vespa-style vehicles and scooters in three cities, and Spin, which operates in 10 cities and five college campuses across the U.S.