Superpedestrian has gone bust - what's the future of e-scooting?

A fleet of Superpedestrian e-scooters parked up in Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote

E-scooting - a brief history..

Superpedestrian was borne out of an idea that urban transport was changing rapidly.  Various governments around the world, keen to get on the band wagon of eco/battery everything started banning cars from major conurbations, or at least making life very difficult for the fossil fuel generation.  In addition to which, people were looking for alternatives to their short commutes.  With limited appeal from buses (expensive, unreliable, and critically operating when they want, not when you want), e-scooters launched at just the right time to capture and answer the imaginations of so many people.

Superpedestrian itself was a spin off from an original idea developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and soon became active in 57 cities around the world.  

The idea was simple.  A user would sign up in a mobile app, then hire an escooter for short periods and for journeys typically of no more than 2 miles.  They would then park in a designated drop off zone, end their ride, and be billed a small amount of money.  The next user would then pick up that same e-scooter and do the same again for where they needed to be.  

The e-scooters themselves were built to be simple but rugged with mandatory lighting and a battery capable of covering 30 miles between charges.  The batteries could be swapped each night out in the field, meaning the bikes themselves never needed to be taken off the road, other than for period maintenance.  

A Superpedestrian e-scooter in Lanzarote

Where did it go wrong?

Like all great things that start out being popular, governments and do-gooders try to stop them.  As Superpedestrian grew in size, so did their critics.  Some of it was justified, some of it was just blatant killjoy'ing by people who thought that we should all have to put up with the misery of buses.

1) Regulation

You've all met that guy with the clipboard and whistle, wearing a wooly hat and introducing himself "I'm the guy from Health & Safety" - followed by his audience rolling their eyes thinking "not him again".  

Unfortunately, as is so often the way these days, whether it be vaping, gun ownership, even owning a car, there's always a Health & Safety man ready to put a stop to your fun.  E-scooters were not licensed, nor did they have to have insurance or indeed have a rider wear a crash helmet.  Our rancid H&S man went into spewing overdrive - he hated the idea of what was actually the basis of e-scooters - limited regulation, limited licensing by riders and the simplicity of being able to collect and drop off almost anywhere.  

Councils began introducing binding rules and thus began the creeping introduction of rules with the inevitable rise in costs for operators such as Superpedestrian

2) Margins

Say what you like about public transport, people expect to pay through the nose for using buses and trains.  But the same couldn't be said about e-scooting.  I certainly never expected to pay more than about 5 Euro for a short scoot around Puerto del Carmen in Lanzarote which meant during quieter times, I often saw ten or twelve of these £3000 bikes sat for whole days - that's a lot of capital tied up doing absolutely nothing

3) Operating Costs

Whilst the automated side of hiring the bikes required little human intervention by the operators, the actual operation was quite labour intensive.  Every day, every bike needed its battery changing.  But the other, much more significant problem and nature of the beast, was that bikes were rarely in the places were customers needed them to be the next day, for example.  So every day, Superpedestrian needed roaming teams with trucks to physically move them to places where they were more likely to be hired

In addition, and I certainly noticed this in 2023 as some of those e-scoooters were ageing, the condition of them was noticeably poor.  Broken lights, short ranges (a common symptom of well used batteries) and rough riding were all quite common, particularly in the Canary Islands where I typically used e-scooters

4) User Behaviour

The biggest challenge to Superpedestrian though came in the form of their customers, ironically.  The problem you see is that Superpedestrian, wanting to do the right thing by their customers and keeping things simple, either didn't have many user rules or those rules that did exist were rarely enforced.  I, unintentionally, noticed this when I broke a rule.  I scooted to Lanzarote airport, left the bike in an unapproved area for 30 minutes while I watched some planes and before I knew it, a man came along from Superpedestrian and just took the bike away.  I thought "that's it, I'm probably going to bet banned from using Superpedestrian".  But you know what?  Nothing.  Not even an email.  I was able to go get another bike straight away, to take me back to my hotel.

In more extreme cases, customers just dumped their e-scooter wherever they wanted and just walked away, penalty free.  

This type of behaviour is what the naysayers used to eventually have Superpedestrian completely banned from the streets of Puerto del Carmen, Lanzarote.  The company folded soon after.