Shared micromobility is going places: one electric bike or scooter at a time! In our last publication on the topic—“Micromobility’s 15,000-mile checkup”—we examined the industry’s investment landscape, its economics, and potential global and regional market sizes for shared e-scooters, e-bikes, and e-mopeds. In this article, we provide an overview of micromobility’s progress today and offer a detailed look into our micromobility “supermodel.” Then, we dive deeper, studying Munich’s embryonic market for e-scooters at the 100-day mark, and consider potential shared-micromobility developments covering additional mobility options, including shared e-bikes and mopeds.
Micromobility advances on multiple fronts
Shared-micromobility regulatory development remains fragmented globally, regionally, and even on a city level; some cities, such as London, remain highly restrictive, while others, such as Portland, Oregon, are not. Cities must make the trade-off between potentially cannibalizing car-based mobility and providing first- or last-mile solutions in combination with public transit, on the one hand, and the safety issues and pollution caused by damaged or otherwise unsafe micromobility vehicles, on the other.
Despite such uncertainty, shared micromobility is coming to several of Europe’s cities where restrictions do not prohibit its use. What’s more, some providers, such as Bird, claim to have significant positive unit economics even today. For these locally focused reasons, we chose to investigate shared micromobility’s development at a city level.
To that end, we developed a shared-micromobility city-development supermodel. Starting from the mobility-mode split, which focuses on passenger kilometers traveled and trip distribution, we forecast mobility development through 2030. We considered the theoretical cannibalization potential of micromobility in three different scenarios focused on private-car usage, shared mobility, public transport, biking, and walking.
We investigated more than ten mobility use cases as to their fit with micromobility applications and corrected the theoretical cannibalization potential. Then, we estimated the customer adoption of micromobility options per use case and applied it to the theoretical kilometer cannibalization. The model includes additional correction factors, such as age fit, urbanization, and suitable weather conditions, to end up with the practical addressable kilometers. Finally, we used the results to estimate the shared-micromobility market size and vehicle parc by considering region-specific utilization estimates and pricings.
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SOURCE: McKinsey & Company
