History of the Electric Scooters

At this point, in July 2021, it has become clear that the electric scooter is here to stay. I will refer to the vehicle as a 'scooter' in this post, for brevity. It seems likely that this shorter name will become more common, as the vehicle itself becomes more common relative to the lightweight moped vehicle that is already called a scooter. 

A scooter.

Initial wave

The scooter had its breakthrough in 2017. The first successful commercial application was scooter sharing. The business idea was straightforward: buy a few hundred scooters from China and place them without permission in a city one night. The user downloads an app on their phone which can be used to unlock the scooter. When finished, the user could initially park the scooter anywhere. The service quickly became popular among users. The author can't recall a single city where it flopped. Early companies were Lime and Spin in California. Copycats soon followed; Bird (California), Tier (Berlin), and Voi and Moow (Stockholm). There were many more in other cities. 

Business model

The economics were a bit unsure, however. A scooter purchased from China cost $300-$500. Initially, the price was $1 for unlocking and $0.15-$0.3 per minute of subsequent usage. Vandalism and theft of the scooters quickly became rampant. The author remembers seeing a figure that the average lifetime of a scooter was only 28 days. With an average travel times of 10 minutes, this would mean that each scooter would have to be rented about 5 times per day throughout its lifetime. The companies also had to charge the scooters. Lime did this using gig-workers called 'juicers'. According to the Lime homepage, a juicer is paid $5 for a full charge. Since a full charge was enough for about 60 minutes of usage, about 40% of the minute-fee was eaten up by the juicers. Business models diverged after a while. Lime introduced longer-range scooters, reducing the cost of juicers. Voi introduced a 30-day unlimited ridership pass in the summer of 2020, costing $60 for Stockholm and less for smaller Swedish cities. There were also scooters without the unlocking fee but with a higher per-minute fee, for short trips. 

Regulation catches up

There were many complaints from other road users. Mark Wagenbuur of BicycleDutch, a youtube channel, complained that the scooters were encroaching on space meant for bicycles in a video. Anecdotally, the scooters were used rather recklessly, particularly by teenagers. They were not only used for simple transportation, but also for urban 'sport'. Parked scooters were often in the way on sidewalks. Another common complaint was safety concerns. Most fatal accidents included collisions with motor vehicles, and were similar in kind to fatal bicycle accidents, i.e. occurring when both motor vehicle and scooter are travelling in the same direction but the motor vehicle makes a turn across the lane of the scooter. In Ontario, scooters and other similar vehicles were illegal even before the scooters appeared, due to a preexisting blanket law. In May 2021, the Toronto city council voted unanimously to uphold the ban. Stockholm, as of Spring 2020, had introduced geographic restrictions on riding, high speeds, and parking. The speed of the scooter on a plain surface was limited to about 25km/h from the beginning, due to technical constraints. It was however possible to achieve a higher speed when going downhill, but the user had to promise not to ride the scooter downhill before starting a ride (this was not followed, of course). As of Summer 2020, the scooter would automatically brake when going downhill or being kicked forward, limiting the speed to about 22km/h. The United Kingdom established public tenders for the right to do scooter sharing in several cities. In November 2020, the tender was awarded to three operators. 

Prior systems

Bikesharing had been proposed and tried several times since 1965. In European cities, the concept took hold as municipality-supported initiatives to promote less car traffic starting around 2010. These systems featured fixed locations for parking the bicycles. The cost of a seasonal pass was usually over 10x less per day than a single-day pass, implicitly subsidizing commuters at the expense of tourists. In Malmö, a day pass cost 72 SEK and a 365-day pass cost 250 SEK in 2018. This system was not a complete failure, and may very well have encouraged a few people to leave the car behind. However, it suffered from being overused on some distances, and underused in other places. The user had to worry about not being able to park their bicycle when arriving at their intended destination. There were also several private bikesharing companies, such as Donkey Republic from Copenhagen, started in 2014. This business model was identical to the later scooters, except for the vehicle being a bicycle. It was also much less successful, despite having much lower prices, with 30 minutes costing €2.2, compared to €7 for a scooter (assuming €1 for unlock and €0.2 per minutes). The un-electrified scooter had long been present on the market, under the name 'kickbike', however it was used mainly as a toy vehicle for kids, and for sport by teenagers, similar to the skateboard.

Normalization

The scooter sharing led to social normalization of riding a scooter in public. I saw the first privately owned scooters in Vienna in April 2019, ridden by geeks. As of July 2021, it is a common sight on bike lanes, and sidewalks and car lanes too. People (always teenagers) even ride their privately owned scooters inside supermarkets and the metro. I expect scooters to be banned soon from such places. This would present a problem for scooter owners, since it is not obvious how to lock the scooter when going inside a place. Special scooter parking spaces with locks may appear, and perhaps future models will feature better physical security. A standard scooter costs $300-$700, which is about the same price as a bicycle. 

Related vehicles

A recent addition to the ecosystem of vehicles is scooters with a small seat in the back part of the standing area. Another type of vehicle that has become popular is the 'fatbike', which looks like a crossbreed between a scooter and a motorcycle. It is electric and has very wide wheels. A benefit of this type of bike seems to be that it can climb sidewalk edges with comfort. The fatbike is the SUV of the bicycle world, a heavier vehicle that has the advantage in the case of a collision with a regular bike. The standard electric bicycle has also become popular in recent years, especially among the elderly. An electric bicycle costs about twice as much as a regular bike. 

Media-driven political change: centralized vs decentralized

I'll outline why the 20th century centralized model actually has some advantages over the 21st century decentralized model. I'll also present an idea for what can be done within a decentralized model to improve it.

Some political topics are hot for years. Tax. Immigration. Climate change. They are necessarily controversial: the only way a topic that many people pay a lot of attention to can stay that way, is if there are heated opinions that contradict each other. More marginal topics tend to be asymmetric: on one side is a highly opinionated small group, on the other side is a large group that can't be bothered (perhaps because they are busy caring about their own marginal topics?). A marginal political issue has three possible outcomes. One, the small opinionated group runs out of steam, and the issue dies. Two, the small group manages to push their issues to the agenda of the majority, which yields. Three, another small group is formed around the opposing view of the first. The topic has become controversial. Now let's see how media affects the possibility of the small group of pushing their issue to the majority agenda. 

Centralized news: the issue can be known by insiders (journalists) for a long time, but not published due to lack of interest from the public. Lots of fuel, no spark. Suddenly, an igniting publication leads to a lot of material being published in a seemingly coordinated effort. The issue occupies people's attention for a short time, relatively likely to lead to change due to discomfort of gatekeepers of being scrutinized. The journalists involved have much to cover, so may be relatively objective on most topics. But also less well-read.

Decentralized model: issues immediately published. Over time, Schelling points for complaints are defined. Difficult for gripers to prove objectivity, outsiders tend to assume that they are one-sided. Even if opposite gripe group exists: the average of two extremes is not necessarily good policy. Some of the involved people have really seen a lot of data and may have come to a radical solution, others who propose radical solutions are just biased. The point is that it's difficult for outsiders to tell who is who. 

What can we do to make the decentralized model better, relative to the centralized? The main scarce resource is the attention and understanding of the majority (the majority is not stupid, they may just be busy with their own hobbyhorses). Given that public attention for your topic will be short, intense, and initially very uninformed, some actions follow:

* Produce content that summarizes the topic and position to outsiders, even when almost no-one is paying attention. This content will help people quickly understand your case once the topic becomes hot. 

* It is important to post often. Outsiders who are looking into your subject are pretty much by definition people who care about recent events. The most recent post should not be older than a couple of weeks. Could be a good idea to keep an explanatory post in storage to be published at the right time. Or as a pinned post.

* Make it very easy for outsiders to find out what your policy suggestions are. Most of the gripe during the culture wars has been on the form "You should care more about group X", which doesn't fit this format.

* Since there is a very high bit cost for including exceptions and modifications to your suggested policy, the best strategy may be one of Max-Min. That is, assume that the policy will be misunderstood, perhaps deliberately, so pick a suggested policy which will be beneficial even in its dumbest implementation. 

When is it possible to predict the future?

In a world where the important data is widely available, it is possible to predict the future to the extent that change is limited by processes that are less smart than individual people. The proof is straightforward: if individuals are not operationally constrained by dumber processes than themselves, then they can create value by changing things using the available data. If however, individual freedom is constrained by dumb processes, then there might be a situation where everyone knows what the future will be like, yet no one has the power to change it. 

What processes are dumber than people? Evolution [1], top-down organisations where insights from low-level employees can't propagate up to management, markets with high thresholds to entrance. Such a world will seem to be changing slowly from day to day, even if a lot is changing over the years.

In a world with a very efficient market for starting companies, there is only a thin sliver of opportunities that are imaginable, but unexploited. Such a world will seem to be changing very fast from day to day, even if the fundamental values are not being improved much over the years. 

What has been said: 'dumb' change is more predictable than 'smart' change. However, if we want to tell whether things are improving, we should just look at what is happening to the things that we care about, rather than trying to gauge it based on how fast the world seems to be changing.

[1] Is outsmarted by e.g. selective breeding.