What We Are Reading
Rebecca Clements from the School of Architecture, Design, and Planning explores the contrasts between Japan and Australia when it comes to letting children travel safely around their neighborhoods on their own.
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I still remember I was sent out on similar errands to go and buy potatoes at a local shopping centre in Holland, around 1972. It entailed crossing some major roads. My parents, as most other parents, never thought it was an issue. Road rules were well explained and inculcated, and soon I was on a bicycle roaming around town as well, with my friends. This article provides some interesting policy thoughts and insights, including an offroad parking policy that was introduced in Japan in the 1960’s. “The road much less travelled in Japan” comes to mind.
The climate emergency is the biggest threat to civilization we have ever faced. But there is good news: we already have every tool we need to beat it. The challenge is not identifying the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.
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MRP™ is pleased to note that Micromobility is listed as one of the technology solutions to reduce the significant transport emissions globally.
More than half of human diseases caused by pathogens have been aggravated by hazards associated with climate change, a study finds.
Read MoreIn a previous article, we noted that almost 70 percent of respondents in our Mobility Ownership Consumer Survey, conducted by the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility in July 2021, stated they would use micromobility for their daily commute. Of these, 12 percent said that they would use e-kickscooters as their preferred vehicle type. Since commuting represents a large proportion of daily micromobility use, we decided to focus on such trips for e-kickscooters in this article and analyze the preferred ownership types.
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The sustainability credentials of shared e Scooters are much better than single ownership of an e Scooter. This is because sharing e Scooters aligns with the circular economy, compared to a linear ownership model of a vehicle. One hypothesis MRP™ proposes is that the current licensing caps on shared e Scooters globally reduces the efficiency of securing a shared vehicle for commuters. In the absence of greater numbers of shared e Scooters, those accustomed to the fun and ease of eScooter transport will be forced to purchase their own to get their daily fix of fun. This may account for the limited numbers of shared e Scooters compared to private ones, equally in limited studies in this domain. In the UK, for example, it is estimated that in the UK there were 380,000 private e Scooters compared to 20,000 shared e Scooters in the last year. In South Korea, it appears an estimated 200,000 Private Mobility vehicles were purchased in 2019.
Since the first shared e-kickscooter operations launched in 2019, Germany has been at the forefront of micromobility offerings in Europe. In 2021, the market’s six largest global operators maintained a fleet of nearly 120,000 e-kickscooters in the country during the peak summer season, making nearly 70 million trips that year despite the impact of the pandemic. This implies that, on average, almost 90 percent of Germans made one shared e-kickscooter trip in 2021.
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