This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In 2018, something strange happened on sidewalks across America. In 65 cities, thousands of electric scooters appeared seemingly overnight, often with little or no advance notice to local governments.
Cease-and-desist orders flew. Even after cities imposed regulations, there seemed to be far more scooters than anyone could ever use. New research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin finds that the excess was no accident.
Scooter companies had deliberately baked it into their business models. The findings provide new ammunition for local governments seeking to keep the numbers down. McCombs professors Ashish Agarwal and Kumar Muthuraman and associate professor Ioannis Stamatopoulos—all of the Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management—examined ridership and scooter deployment data from nine U.S. cities and more detailed data from Kansas City, Missouri.
Leading the research team was McCombs doctoral student Hale Erkan, now at Arizona State University. Their paper, "Competition for Customer Attention Is Creating Oversupply Pockets in US Micromobility," is published in Operations Research. They conclude that micromobility companies such as Lime and Bird, providing nearly identical services, intentionally oversupplied scooters between 2018 and 2021.
The key evidence was daily scooter utilization rates. For local policymakers, the average target utilization was 7.7%. But the actual rate for the nine cities turned out to be 3.6%, which meant on average 96.4% of scooters were sitting idle.
"Scooters operate in the public right of way, and they can put almost infinitely many scooters on sidewalks," Erkan says. "Sometimes, there used to be hundreds of scooters on the same street corner." Why did companies invest in so many unused scooters? The chief reason, the researchers say, is that during their early years, they weren't trying to turn a profit.
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