Welcome back to Oversharing!
Last week while all the publicly traded gig-and-sharing firms were reporting their third-quarter results (Lyft, Rover, Fiverr, Wag, WeWork), I was on vacation in Italy, eating pasta, drinking spritzes, and wandering around truly incredible sites like the Vatican and Pompeii. I’ll get to a lot of those earnings this week now that I’m back from holiday, but first something fun: a dispatch on scooters.
Shared e-cooters were everywhere in Rome and Naples, the cities I visited. There were scooters on sidewalks, scooters on street corners, scooters at metro stations and bus stops, scooters tucked down cobbled alleys, and so many scooters parked by garbage. (There were, thankfully, no scooters in Pompeii.)
More than 14,000 e-scooters from seven operators have been deployed in Rome, but only 2% are reportedly used on a daily basis, largely by tourists and young people, often riding two aboard (please don’t do this). Local critics have voiced the usual complaints about scooters dumped on sidewalks, endangering pedestrians by ignoring traffic rules, and generally cluttering up the urban landscape.
There have also been more serious incidents. Seventeen deaths in Italy over the past two years have been linked to incidents involving e-scooters, according to consumer protection association Codacons. In June, a 28-year-old American tourist caused €25,000 worth of damage by chucking her e-scooter down the Spanish Steps, an 18th-centure marble monument that Rome had already banned people from so much as sitting on. She and her travel companion, who wheeled but at least didn’t hurl his scooter down the steps, were each fined €400 and banned from returning to the Unesco world heritage site.
The main scooter operators in Rome and Naples as far as I could tell—and this is purely anecdotal, I was on vacation after all—were Bird and homegrown competitor Helbiz. That said, part of the reason I came away with this impression could also have been that the scooters Bird and Helbiz are using in these cities look confoundingly similar. Both sport robin’s egg blue decal with their company names in all-caps, sans-serif white lettering. Why two competing firms would choose to use virtually the same color and font on an already highly commoditized product is a mystery to me, but I’m not a design expert. At any rate, if you don’t look closely, you can easily mix them up.
Over the summer, Rome moved to introduce new restrictions on e-scooter use, such as limiting ridership to adults with IDs, banning riding on the sidewalk or with more than one person on board, lowering speed limits, and setting new rules around parking. The rules are expected to take effect in January 2023, at which point Rome also plans to renew operating permits for just three companies and 9,000 scooters, a nearly 40% cut to fleet numbers. Bird, presumably in an effort to play nice and lock down one of those three operator slots, started limiting parking in the city center over the summer, and as you can see from my photos the Bird scooters I passed in Rome were parked pretty well compared to the helter-skelter of Helbiz. (Italy is one of the European countries where Bird so far plans to keep operating, after recently exiting Germany, Norway, and Sweden.)
Public transport in Rome and Naples is not as robust as New York or London, especially later at night, so I can see in theory why taking an e-scooter might appeal. That is, until you consider the practical elements of scooting around these cities, especially Naples. I’m talking steep hills, windy narrow roads, and lots of cobblestones.
In an early morning taxi to Napoli Centrale my last day in Naples, the cab driver hurtled through the tiny cobbled streets at such a clattering pace that as I bounced about in the back seat I felt like I was in a chase scene in the Bourne Identity. And that was in a CAR. I didn’t try any e-scooters in Italy so can only imagine what it’d be like rattling over those cobblestones on two much smaller wheels, so will leave you with a friend’s review of his e-scooter journey home one night in Rome: “I can’t feel my spine thanks to the cobblestones but otherwise quite safe.”