Ideas for Multi-Modal Mobility

October 1, 2018

Sam Abuelsamid

Silicon Valley often gets credit for ideas that have been percolating elsewhere for a long time. Great ideas that are not yet fully refined and need a tweak or two to make them viable. Case in point: micro mobility.

Last March, I was in San Jose for the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference when a flock of Bird electric scooters magically appeared all over the sidewalks of downtown. Within days, there were thousands more in San Francisco and other cities from Bird, Lime and several other startups. Some critics of this sudden flood called it “scootermaggeddon.”

Until these scooters appeared, most of the news had been about automated vehicles. But AVs are just one piece of the mobility ecosystem. They’re not a silver bullet that will solve our transportation problems.

Less than six months later, cities around the world are discussing how to “manage the curb” as they deal with this new influx of tiny two-wheelers littering sidewalks and doorways. City planners are pondering how to reconfigure our streets to support an increasingly broad matrix of mobility modes.

But they are at least two decades late.

Back in 2001, Dean Kamen unveiled his newest creation and was roundly laughed at. He claimed that the Segway gyroscopically-balanced electric scooter would transform urban mobility and design. Kamen was ahead of the curve. Although the Segway never became mainstream, it has become a staple of law enforcement in malls and airports.

In 2007, GM showed the Opel Flextreme concept based on the Volt’s plug-in hybrid powertrain. While the Flextreme fell victim to the financial debacle that ultimately drove GM to bankruptcy, it was another step toward the diverse mobility ecosystem that is emerging today. Tucked away in a special compartment under the Flextreme’s rear cargo area were a pair of Segways, charged directly from the car’s battery.

The premise was that the Segways could be used to provide first-mile/last-mile transportation. But even that concept had a precursor: in the 1980s, Honda offered an optional fold-up motor scooter, the Motocompo, with its diminutive City hatchback.

The fundamental flaw in each of these ideas was the ownership model. To address the problem of congestion in cities, we need to reduce the total number of vehicles, right-size them and use them more. Automated-mobility services are one component of this ecosystem. So are traditional mass transit and smaller-scale micro-transit services like Ford’s Chariot.

Recently, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made the point that for an urban trip of 10 blocks, it makes vastly more sense to grab an e-scooter than wait for a car that has to make its way through traffic. What has made this possible is the addition of wireless connectivity and cloud services to locate, unlock and pay for a scooter that you use for just a few minutes.

Instead of everyone carrying their own Segway around in the back of their car, on-demand access might have made the idea a mainstream success. Drive or take a train or carpool from the suburbs to the urban perimeter and then grab a micromobility ride for the final leg of the trip.

Elon Musk didn’t invent the electric car. It’s been around since the dawn of the automobile. Tom Gage at AC Propulsion applied thousands of small consumer lithium-ion cells to create a high-performance EV. Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, Musk and others commercialized and popularized Gage’s concept to show the world that EVs can be appealing in their own right.

E-scooters, electric sports cars, hyperloops, ubiquitous wireless connectivity, cloud computing — each on their own are precursor components that offer some benefits, just like lithium-ion cells and Segways. Bring them together, in the way that chefs combine separate ingredients to create great meals and you have the potential to create a diverse and effective mobility system. Built on the shoulders of what someone else did first.