Watch: What is Micromobility's Path to Profit?

Last month's webinar is now available on YouTube

Hello subscribers, and happy new year!

A couple people wrote to me asking how to watch the panel on micromobility’s path to profit that I moderated last month, so I thought I’d send the link out here:

Thanks to everyone who sent in questions ahead of the webinar as well as to those who tuned in and commented live. I had asked each of the panelists to come prepared to talk about unit economics and operations in a ‘typical’ city to try to get away from the generalities and equivocating that often happens in these sorts of discussions. The good stuff about utilization specifics begins around the 20-minute mark.

My favorite bit starts a few minutes after that, when we discuss why the ‘bar to clear’ in e-scooter utilization is 2-3 rides per day, which really doesn’t seem like that much if you assume that the typical ride is maybe 15-30 minutes long, and so at 2-3 rides per day each scooter is only being used for around an hour. The operators on the call agreed that the main limiting factor was fleet size/density, so I asked everyone to put a number on their ideal fleet size/density to achieve higher utilization in the sample city of Washington D.C. This turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question! People really didn’t want to put a number on it!

Of course, it is a fairly complex question. Utilization and the fleet density required to achieve it will vary with any number of factors, including weather, seasonality, time of day, commuting patterns, and so on. But I would argue that if you’re operating a shared micromobility business, it is also THE crucial question, and one that you should be prepared to answer or at least to think through in the way a college student interviewing for a consulting job would be prepared to estimate how many ping-pong balls could fit on a Boeing 777. I would be curious to hear from anyone here who has worked through some of the math around density and utilization for various micromobility modes, and I look forward to exploring it further in future issues of Oversharing.