Hail the micro-mobility revolution
As an investor, whether you’re investing in established industries or cutting-edge tech, one of the first questions you ask yourself is: “What do we have to believe for this to be a success?”
You have to believe there’ll be sufficient demand for a product; that the leadership team has the drive to go the distance; that, if needed, they will be able to raise new capital to fuel growth; that the unit economics add up.
You also have to believe in things that are beyond the startup’s control — that society will embrace greener solutions, for example, or that markets will remain stable and a pandemic isn’t going to lock down our cities and shake our beliefs about everything we thought we knew to their core.
Startups that succeed typically meet such expectations, while a select few exceed them in ways you simply can’t predict — ways that have a far-reaching impact beyond the financial, and that come into sharp focus when a crisis, like the one we’re facing now, hits.
Without hyperbole or aggrandisement, micro-mobility is such an investment.
Last Saturday it became legal to use a rented e-scooter on UK roads, two years after most of the rest of continental Europe. Within weeks we could see companies, including our portfolio company Voi, providing a great new service for people who want to avoid taking a car or getting on public transport to get from A to B.
The term micro-mobility, which once referred largely to e-scooters and shared bike schemes, now describes the many ways in which new technology is revolutionising how we journey across cities. Its impact comes not just from a practical point of view (the environmental and convenience benefits of micro mobility are largely recognised) but in myriad more nuanced ways that coronavirus has brought to the fore.
When you have an entire industry with social responsibility at its heart, the desire to support communities and cities doesn’t stop at transport. Micro-mobility’s predisposition to keep society moving forward — physically, economically and emotionally — came starkly into view when our e-scooter investment Voi paused operations as Covid-19 took hold. Voi put the wider societal need over the needs of its bottom line. It shifted its attention to delivering prescriptions and helped businesses offer deliveries for the first time. It made sure these often family-run pillars of the local community maintained vital cash flows while Voi’s own cash flows were uncertain.
And it wasn’t alone. As key workers faced the daunting prospect of venturing onto public transport, Citymapper’s live timetables helped them get to grips with reduced and disrupted services, while revealing where and when to board to avoid crowds. NHS staff were given free rides on shared bikes, and the popularity of e-bikes — from a range of firms, including another of our recent investments, VanMoof — soared.
It’s no surprise, then, that as cities, countries and economies attempt to return to a sense of normality (or at least reach a “new normal”), local and national authorities are looking to keep this momentum for positive change going.
As peak travel times are replaced by fluid patterns of behaviour, micro mobility offers the vehicle for this momentum — not only for commuters looking to get to work, but for transport networks faced with the headache of building timetables to meet unpredictable demand.
As factories are rebooted, roads swell and our air starts to thicken again, micro mobility offers a counteraction, a way to travel more sustainably, cheaply and easily without adding to pollution levels.
As people who have lost jobs during the crisis seek other employment, possibly having to travel further afield, micro mobility lends a hand, democratising access to more opportunities, at a cheaper rate.
And as social distancing makes packed buses, trains and trams a potential health hazard, micro mobility will enable those who can avoid these crowds to complete journeys more conveniently, while freeing up room on public transport for those who can’t.
While micro mobility is far from the silver bullet to fix our congested, polluted cities, it’s a significant starting point.
It took a leap of faith in recent years to believe that the world’s over-reliance on the internal combustion engine would disintegrate. Covid-19 rocked all of our usual assumptions, those we could control and those we could not, but it has also created a huge opportunity.
This is a once in a life-time opportunity to use micro mobility to shape cities for the future, to create cities fit for living.
Main image credit: Getty