Scooters Flock Back, More Sustainable Than Ever

Scoot, scoot: Climate Neutral-certified LINK holds 500 of the city's currently active 10,100 scooter licenses (Courtesy of LINK)

As Austinites adjust to the post-COVID world, usage of micromobility vehicles, including shared scooters and electric bikes, has shot up. While that might mean more scooters flocking on your sidewalk, or perhaps more viral posts of scooters in places they shouldn't be, it also means the city of Austin and micromobility companies are working to increase the vehicles' positive impact.

Joseph Al-Hajeri, the mobility demand program manager at the Austin Transport­a­tion Department, said the pandemic has given the city and the providers both a chance to look more critically at sustainability. Surprisingly, Austinites seem to have become more comfortable with using scooters or having them around. "People want them in their neighborhoods just to get out, even if it's just to drive down the street," Al-Hajeri said.

That's led to the average trip length of each scooter ride – a metric the city has tracked since scooters first got dropped without warning on Austin in 2018 – increasing from 1 mile to 1.5 miles. All scooters in the city are electric, so if that extra half-mile means more people are replacing auto travel with scooter trips, it could have a major impact on the carbon footprint of commuters. Scooters throughout the city also use swappable batteries, which means companies can replace those instead of the entire vehicle.

Ridership overall is also on the rise, though from a baseline that had declined drastically at the beginning of the pandemic. ATD recorded just 10,000 scooter rides in April 2020; that surged to over 250,000 in April this year, which is a remarkable increase but still only a little more than half of the ridership in April 2019.

As the shutdown of Central Austin offices, bars and restaurants, and venues and events due to COVID squeezed the market, the city ended up with just four scooter providers: Bird, Lime, Wheels, and LINK, the newest kid on the block. LINK, founded in January 2020, has just 500 of the city's currently active 10,100 scooter licenses (including the 1,000 for Wheels' sit-down scooters), but it has big plans for steering the micromobility industry in a more sustainable direction. Climate Neutral, an organization that provides certification for companies that "offset and reduce all of their greenhouse gas emissions," certified LINK as carbon neutral in April. Meredith Stark­man, a LINK spokesperson, said the company has designed a safer, more durable vehicle that will extend their lifespans.

"Whereas other competitors who tout their own sustainability initiatives are doing their own thing, a lot of their scooters break down and end up in the landfill," Starkman said. "Whereas our scooters are on the street for much longer." She added that LINK's Vehicle Intelligence safety system, which continuously evaluates the performance of each vehicle, leads to reduced maintenance need.

The operations of scooter companies – how they get vehicles deployed and recharged throughout a market – play a key role in their sustainability. Spin, a micromobility company owned by Ford that no longer operates in Austin, recently announced plans to electrify its operations fleets in San Fran­cisco and Washington, D.C., as it moves toward carbon neutrality. While LINK currently uses gas-powered vans to distribute scooters throughout the city, it plans to shift to hybrid vehicles. It also uses cargo e-bikes for scooter distribution in other cities and hopes to expand the practice to Austin.

Al-Hajeri said that cargo bikes present an interesting opportunity for micromobility operations. Not only are they more sustainable, but they allow scooter companies to navigate large events like South by Southwest more nimbly. Many of these bikes have been employed to pick up scooters along Austin's Healthy Streets, designated shared-traffic routes launched as pilots during the pandemic.

But not everyone has warmed up to the new mobility options. Another indicator that tipped the city off to increases in ridership: Complaints are going up. "We were probably getting in the pandemic 15 to 20 to 25 [daily complaints], maybe spiked at 30 over the weekend," Al-Hajeri said. "Right now, we're getting anywhere between 100 to 170."