You probably remember it if you have lived in a Spanish city in the last ten years. Overnight, your city was filled with electric scooters and shared bikes. Everywhere. Everywhere. Some well parked, others that made you feel like a 3,000 meter steeplechase athlete.
As the last decade nears its end, Spain joined the wave of shared micromobility. Our streets were filled with operators who put on the streets, under the pay-per-use formula, electric scooters, bicycles and cars that promised to revolutionize the way we move.
The formula coincided with another movement: low emission zones.
At the end of 2018, Madrid launched Madrid Central. With this project he intended to reduce the volume of cars on the street in its central almond. In 2019, Barcelona began to apply similar measures in a much larger area, in this case it extended to the entire metropolitan area of the city.
The general feeling is that we were facing a model that had come to stay. The message was that the volume of cars in city centers had to be reduced and that young people, increasingly less interested in their own car, would combine public transport with scooters and electric bicycles for shared use.
A new, more efficient door-to-door mobility.
Today, almost nothing remains of that.
The new and shared mobility that disappeared
To understand what happened with that movement, Andrés Camacho Donezar, Professor of Business Strategy and business models, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, and Carmen Valor Martínez, teacher and researcher at the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences (ICADE), Department of Marketing, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, have carried out a study in which the evolution of 10 operators that were or are part of micromobility services in our country has been studied.
The conclusions have presented them in The Conversation which explains the problems that these companies had to face and how what seemed like a perfect business, with clear benefits for citizens, ended up being diluted over the years.
The study indicates that shared micromobility has three obvious benefits: it is affordable for the vast majority of citizens, it is good for society as a whole because it facilitates access to mobility for all types of incomes and, in addition, it is environmentally beneficial since it should reduce traffic and polluting emissions.
These promises laid a rug for all types of companies put their vehicles on the street. The most paradigmatic case was that of Madrid, which had up to 18 companies fighting for users and a regulation that allowed having on the street up to 10,000 electric scooters. After various regulatory attempts and closing the concession to three companies, in 2024 it ended up banning them completely.
The process was similar to that of Barcelona, Saragossa either Sevilleto give a few examples. In all these cities, the private companies They tried to do business by attracting new users, the neighbors were divided between those who enjoyed them and those who suffered from them. Until, finally, the City Councils ended up banning them.
The reasons have almost always been the same. The study details the problems that operators have had to make the service profitable. From an expansive phase to cover the maximum possible territory, we have moved on to atomization, closing the circle. Vandalism, high collection costs and repairs they began to complicate the business from a purely commercial point of view.
To this we must add the neighborhood complaints that led to greater pressure from the City Councils towards the companies. Already in 2018, articles began to proliferate that echoed a problem: the streets were invaded by shared electric scooters. Due to a lack of civility and clearly insufficient control by companies, pedestrians began to encounter new obstacles.
After many complaints, also in European cities with Paris in the leadthe City Councils began to put their restrictions. In Madrid, for example, it happened from “door to door” to virtual stations. Users could only pick up or park an electric scooter in limited and geolocated spaces. It was a mortal wound for a service that promised to save the last mile.
To this we must add that these same town councils saw another business opportunity: controlling micromobility services themselves. And in most of the large Spanish cities public bicycle sharing services have been launched. With limited spaces to collect and release bicycles and a maintenance service that is not pressured by extraordinarily narrow profit margins.
The result is that these shared electric scooter companies, the few that remain, have mostly pivoted to offer themselves as a solution to tour operators that offer rides or tourist visits using this means of transport or supply vehicles to the town councils themselves, like Lime in Getafe (Madrid).
With mandatory restrictions (geolocation systems, limited parking spaces…) and some citizens who have rejected the use of electric scooters, shared mobility with these vehicles It has been impossible to make profitable. And public bikes have killed the possibility of the business pivoting to this vehicle.
The result is a micromobility service that seemed perfect on paper but failed in practice.
Photo | Jonas Jacobsson
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