Maybe “Micromobility” Is The Wrong Word
I’ve cycled 3,700 miles across the US this summer. What’s “micro” about that?
A few years ago, the high tech industry analyst Horace Dediu coined the phrase “Micromobility”.
He was looking for a way to talk about the increasing use of vehicles that are — as I’d put it — “smaller than a car”. That includes everything from bicycles to e-bikes, scooters and e-scooters, or even those electrified skateboards and unicycles you see zipping around. (These e-options, back when Dediu coined the term, were getting popular via services offering them on a per-use basis — like Bird — but in recent years I’ve seen many more of them privately owned.)
I really liked the phrase “micromobility”! I thought it was useful to have a name for this category — this category of things we ride that use far fewer raw materials (and emit far less greenhouse gases) than personally-owned cars and trucks. Because I’ve been doing a lot more writing in the last few years about energy and transportation, “micromobility” helped me frame some of these new options, and figure out questions about them.
How far could their capabilities be stretched? How much could they actually be used, en masse, to reduce the emissions and raw-material usage of our daily transportation? Having a mental…
