Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: micromobility

  • Should Paris ban electric scooters?

    This Sunday, Paris will be hosting an important referendum that has nothing to do with France’s retirement age. The question is whether shared electric scooters should be banned citywide. And while there are concerns about whether this single-question referendum will draw many people out to vote, the city has said that, whatever the outcome, the results will be binding.

    To be clear, this would only apply to the three micromobility rental companies that operate in the capital: Lime, Dott, and Tier. It would not apply to privately-owned scooters, of which there are many. In fact, France might just be one of the scooter capitals of the world. Over 900,000 scooters were purchased across France in 2021, and last year the number was about 759,000.

    Mayor Anne Hidalgo has publicly said that she thinks these scooters should be banned. But does that really solve things given the number of private scooters in circulation? And are the current problems truly ones we can’t solve? As I have said many times before, I like scooters. I like them a lot. They’re convenient and fun to ride, and I see their value in helping to solve the last-mile problem.

    I also can’t help but think back to the early 1900s when cars were just starting to infiltrate our cities and there were absolutely no traffic regulations to think of. It was chaos, it was dangerous, and I’m sure it was similarly divisive at the time. So should we have banned them and stuck with horses? Hmm. Maybe.

  • French people like electric scooters

    Toronto doesn’t like electric scooters. Something about them being dangerous. But here are some interesting statistics for France, which has apparently become the leading scooter market in Europe:

    • The Fédération des Professionnels de la Micromobilité (FPMM) — yes, this exists — estimates that there are about 2.5 million regular scooter users in France.
    • In 2021, about 900,000 units were sold in the country, which represents a 42% increase compared to 2020.
    • Sales directly to users is outstripping the revenue from self-service operators such as Lime, Bird, Dott, and Voi. Current annual estimates are in the range of €310 million and €40 million, respectively.
    • About 50% of scooter sales are happening at grocery stores, compared to 30% at other retailers, and 20% online. (This is kind of interesting. I wonder if people are impulse buying while shopping for food.)

    I am a big fan of electric scooters. And all of this suggests to me that scooter adoption is likely to continue, that we are going to need to start thinking more about how best to incorporate them into our cities, and that eventually Toronto will have to stop being so conservative.

  • Cycling to the office

    Right now my typical morning commute consists of a 15 minute walk and a quick stop off for a coffee. I must admit that I’m spoiled. But next year I’ll be moving to the Junction and so that means I’m going to need to make some minor adjustments to my routine.

    I fully expect that on warm summer nights I’ll probably still walk home on occasion. But broadly speaking, my loose plan is a combination of cycling, e-scootering, and taking the Union Pearson Express train.

    Then this evening I was out for drinks with one of our partners and two of the guys were talking about how they cycle to work each morning and compete on Strava to make sure everything gets properly logged. One of them actually lives near the Junction and his regular route is down through High Park and then across along the lake.

    Naturally I got inspired and decided — after two beers — that I too should join this competition. So I have now obligated myself to cycling to the office starting next year. That said, I could probably use a new bike, and I’m hoping that some of you will have recommendations.

    My criteria is as follows: it should look impossibly cool, it should work for a daily commute, and it should be at least somewhat suitable for tight-fitting clothes and long rides through the French countryside (even though I currently have no concrete plans of doing such a thing).

    Any thoughts?

  • What Seattle learned from its electric scooter pilot program

    Electric scooters are an unsanctioned form of mobility here in Toronto, mostly because people think they’re dangerous, but also because I think people are worried about them cluttering up our sidewalks.

    The problem with this position is that electric scooters are also a lot of fun to ride and people seem to find them useful. The last time I rode one was in Paris and it seemed perfectly safe to me, though it may have been because there were two of us on it and we were kind of overloading the thing.

    In any event, lots of cities either have them or are piloting them. Seattle just finished year one of its pilot program and here’s what they learned:

    • From September 2020 to October 2021, Seattle saw 1.4 million trips taken by over 260,000 riders
    • Electric scooter ridership greatly exceeded that of public bicycles, with 300,000 scooter trips taken in September alone, compared to about 35,000 bike trips
    • 54% of surveyed scooter riders said that they would have taken a taxi or driven their personal vehicle had a scooter not been available
    • 21% of riders said that they used it to connect to public transit (helping to solve that pesky last-mile problem)
    • 17 collisions involving a scooter and a car were reported during the pilot year (though, for what it’s worth, some/many of the incidents involved a scooter that was privately owned and not part of the actual pilot program)

    As much as I love riding a bike, it’s a bit more of a commitment compared to riding an e-scooter, which is why I think the numbers look the way that they do here. Not everybody wants to bring a change of clothes and shower at the office.

    So I think it’s really too bad that Toronto just shut these down before exploring ways to make them both safe and useful.

  • The 10 commandments of micromobility

    This is a great 30 minute talk by Horace Dediu that is structured around his 10 commandments of micromobility. If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here. What I think that many of you will appreciate about the talk is that he focuses on smaller interventions. Think bike lanes over big hyperloop moonshoots. In his words, we’re going to get to where we want to go not through hyperbole, but through humility. And micromobility is all about humility.

    I’m also a big fan of his last commandment. It is titled: cities always win. Yup.

  • Scooter trips surpassed bike share last year

    According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), scooter trips in the US surpassed station-based bike share trips for the first time in 2018. Here is a chart taken from Streetsblog:

    Dockless electric scooters have created a public nuisance in many of our cities, but what is clear is that the demand is there. Which perhaps isn’t all that surprising given that they require less effort than traditional cycling.

    The other interesting takeaway from NACTO’s analysis, which is likely also not that surprising, is that bike share trips are heavily concentrated in a select few cities.

    In 2018, there were about 36.5 million bike share trips across the US. And about 84% of them took place in just 6 cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, DC, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

    Almost half of the 36.5 million trips were on NYC’s Citi Bike network.

  • Electric scooter startup Lime raises $310 million series D round

    Earlier this month it was announced that the on-demand electric scooter and bike startup, Lime, had closed a $310 million series D round. This values the 18-month old company at around $2.4 billion and brings its total raise to $867.1 million. For comparison, Bird — its main competitor — has raised around $400 million.

    These numbers should tell you about the kind of growth that the “micromobility” startup is seeing. They are now in 15 countries and its riders have taken over 34 million trips. In the last 7 months alone, the company reports that it has seen a 5.5x increase in ridership. They are seen as an affordable last-mile solution. Supposedly 1/3 of its users report an income of less than $50,000 per year.

    Lime entered the Canadian market last fall via Waterloo. They have yet to expand anywhere else, though I suspect we’ll see them in Toronto this spring/summer. One of the barriers is that their scooters (with airless tires) aren’t equipped to deal with snow, so they currently pack them up during the winter months.

    This is in addition to the regulatory challenges they are facing in cities all around the world. But like Uber, I am sure there is a compromise to be had.