These days all the buzz is on Micro mobility, those escooter and bike-sharing companies have taken the world by storm. For example, in Europe, most countries already have at least 2 different operators in big cities. Major capitals of the world are thus facing the change first and the next step is to advance to other cities.

Sifted recently made a story about the hotspots of ridesharing and escooters in Europe and talked about how the regulations have come a long way. It was a similar story when a big disruptor entered our cities for the first time – those were the automobiles.

The expectation is that micro-mobility especially scooters will go through the same path of adaptation that cars had back in the day. First getting a buzz and appearing on our roads but because of nonexistent regulations, there are accidents. It was actually the accidents caused by cars that led to the building of zebra crossings and controlled pedestrian traffic. 

Before any regulations, people could just walk to the other side of the road anywhere. Can you even imagine that anymore? There were people pushings carts, hawkers selling their food and the most dangerous things you could face were horse-driven caravans that didn’t really go so fast and had a build-in horse-powered intelligence and autopilot!

The general public started to object to cars at first which lead the auto industry to push on radical changes to the traffic rules which lead to the cities we have today.

Perhaps and hopefully we will see similar development with micro-mobility because we and the planet absolutely need a greener way of transport that they provide. Many countries have already taken steps in regulating the speed of the escooters and enforcing age limits on the riders. For example, in Finland, the speed of escooters was lowered from 25 to 15 km/h. 

It’s interesting to consider what kind of rules we will have finally as many of the rules are built around the cheapish version of escooters that the ride-sharing companies usually utilize. As many of the escooter hobbyists know you can ride escooters comfortably even at 100 km/h as long as they are properly built for it.