New “atlas” launched to visualise micro mobility trends

11 December 2019

by Jonathan Andrews

A new dashboard that visualises the number of e-scooter and bike share operators in 626 cities has been launched to map the growth, trends and proliferation of micro mobility modes.

The New Urban Mobility alliance (NUMO) has developed the platform alongside partners, Populus, Grin and MaaS Latam.

“We thought it was important to know how extensive this phenomenon is, how and where these devices are being deployed, and which companies are behind their deployment,” Harriet Tregoning, Director of NUMO, told Cities Today.

At this stage the atlas only lists the operators involved in particular cities for mopeds, e-scooters and bike share programmes. The next iteration, due to be released in early 2020, will include a policy atlas, focusing on the operation requirements and established conditions of operation in those cities to compare regulations city by city.

Tregoning said the atlas would be useful for cities looking at deploying new mobility devices to see where uptake of them has been the fastest and most successful. She added it would also be beneficial for researchers, health providers and transit agencies and would be a source of information, particularly for cities “trying to establish their own regulations and understand options they might want to avoid, and ones to keep”.

Some trends already observed include how operators have changed business models since launching in cities in 2018. Initially, most wanted to be in as many cities as possible, yet are now gradually shifting to focus more on profit–as they launch IPOs–and have pulled out of several cities as a result.

Harriet Tregoning, Director of NUMO

“In some cases they have said cities are not dense enough to operate in the black as the operation costs are too high relative to revenue in these low density cities,” added Tregoning. “We expect that trend to continue.”

She believes that the new atlas will help develop a better understanding of what the characteristics of cities are, and where particular forms of micro mobility are going to be the most effective and operate most efficiently.

The platform is free and open to use and will include frequent data set updates to add new modes, operators and cities. As well as the policy database, future iterations would be able to include AVs and drones.

Although African cities are missing from the database, Tregoning is looking for new partners to share that information.

NUMO grew out of the Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities and is hosted by the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.

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