Scooters aren't a fad; they're a proof of concept. You do not arrive at elegant urban mobility without 'weird' experiments along the way. Mobility will be multi-modal, and it's companies like Bird, Lime, and Spin that are laying the railroad.
All to often, there is a belief that companies and pioneers arrive at a brilliant, world-changing idea, but that simply isn't true — ideas don't exist in their own right. Pioneers increment, and the smallest increments are sometimes the largest source of valuation creation.
Uber didn't invent ride-share, the taxi service, the car, or the roads they drive on. Uber incremented upon the whistle, and the wave of the hand — and in that, they uncovered new territory.
Societies are not engulfed by new discovery; not in a lifetime, nor a century. Like when we connect territory — connected territory — two places did not become one without the individual rail. Nor did the belief of migration versus settling.
Society needs behavioral construction, just as much as we need physical public works. With scooters, we are seeing increment; the increment of technology, and the increment of societal behavior.
For us to arrive into a new era of urban mobility, we need chaos — we need microprocessors with wheels thrown into the bay, we need armies of college kids rampaging the streets for quick charge-up cash, and we need noob scooterers flying down the sidewalk.
Scooters aren't the dope 2018-level transit we anticipated, but they are chaos that uncovers new territory, and widens the behavioral field of view. The way we use — expect to use — them will change. The technology will change. But so will the possible.
Out of the Segway came a technology, and a meme — one that became culturally and behaviorally unified with the help of some YouTube vloggers. An increment in itself, has incremented behavior, and is incrementally becoming another leg from A to B.
What the LPs and VCs see in scooters is a gravitational increment approaching, one where the Chinese supply chain has aligned with westernization of the QR code, and automobile comfort has catalyzed an underinvestment in urban rail. They see behaviors soon aligning with utility.
Whatever comes out of the Scooter Era won't be "the next Uber" or "a better MTA", it will be a technological increment that catalyzes more, and behavioral acceptance that more will come. Let the scooter uncover the territory we've forgotten.
