New Delhi Will Leapfrog New York in Mobility
Shared electric vehicles are a leapfrog technology that will change transportation, especially in the developing world, the way mobile phones changed communication.
I bought my first mobile phone in the year 2000 when I lived in New York City. Friends and family who had not yet bought one asked why I thought I needed one. We all had access to phones at home, at work, and at pay phones on the street. A mobile phone seemed like a luxury rather than the necessity it would later become.
Only a few years later, in places far from New York City, deployment of cellular phone towers and access to affordable handsets brought connectivity to billions of people who did not have easy access to a landline. These connections happened much more quickly and much more cheaply than would have been possible with landlines, to say nothing of the convenience of a personal phone number and the ability to use it anywhere. This was not a luxury. It transformed lives and markets and cultures and economies in India, Africa, and everywhere else where telephony access was insufficient.
Mobile telephony was a “leapfrog technology”. It allowed these regions of the world to adopt telecommunication without investing the billions of dollars and the decades that wealthier regions invested in landlines. They were able to quickly catch up to, and in certain ways leap ahead of, places built around legacy infrastructure. Mobile phone-based payment technologies now popular in East Africa and in China are in some ways superior to the credit cards still popular in the US.
The parallels with shared, electric mobility are clear: 20th century mass transit was built around lines and stations that took decades and billions of dollars to build, and like landlines, allowed only for connections between fixed locations.
Like mobile phones, shared electric vehicles can be used anywhere in the city, not just to go from station to station. Also like mobile phones, these vehicles are personal, to get you to just where you need to go. And because they don’t require their own tunnels or lanes or stops, they can be deployed immediately, improving access to transportation more quickly than any other mode available. Not requiring fixed infrastructure and having a distributed model also reduces the cost of the system by orders of magnitude. And finally, because the vehicles are individual-sized, they can run on batteries that can be exchanged on the spot rather than plugged into a charging station for hours.
While new mobility services are great for wealthy cities in the US, Europe and elsewhere, where they often serve as a first or last mile complement to existing mass transit, it is not these cities where the services are in the most demand. Wealthier cities usually have legacy transportation infrastructure that works okay, like subways, or have enough parking such that most people just drive themselves. The real demand for new mobility comes from cities where public transit, parking, traffic, and pollution make living in and getting around the city truly challenging.
Scoot’s first city in Latin American was Santiago, Chile. The uptake of the service was by far the fastest of any Scoot city. Santiago has a fine subway, but it can’t expand fast enough to meet growing demand. While in San Francisco we have been working with officials on a few thousand shared electric vehicles in a city with over 400,000 private, combustion cars, cities in Latin America are planning for tens of thousands of shared EVs in order to meet the needs these cities have for faster, more affordable, more sustainable mobility.
That’s when we knew we had a leapfrog technology on our hands.
So when our investor Mahindra, a global automotive and technology leader headquartered in India, asked us to come to New Delhi for conversations with government officials about shared electric mobility, we got excited. The officials of both the local and national government asked astute questions about everything from pricing to recharging to security and safety, but every meeting ended with essentially the same question: How many vehicles can you deploy?
San Francisco is home to about 850,000 people. Barcelona has a population about twice that. Santiago is three times the size of Barcelona, at about 5 million people.
The Delhi metropolitan area contains roughly 25 million people. India’s capital city is famous for many wonderful things, but lately it is also famous for air pollution. Those 25 million busy people take tens of millions of rides every day with Delhi’s chaotic, fossil-fueled bus system. Motorbikes, many of them powered by polluting two-stroke motors, are another popular mode of transport. Delhi’s several subway lines are able to carry only 3% of the trips within the city. Officials were recently forced to limit vehicles driving in the city to odd or even license plates on alternate days. They are investing in electric buses, and considering banning older vehicles from driving in the city at all, but these measures won’t bring change fast enough given the severity of the pollution and traffic problems. Delhi needs the kind of rapid change that only a leapfrog technology can bring.
To equal the service provided by Delhi’s metro, a fleet of shared, electric vehicles would need to provide millions of trips per day. This would require hundreds of thousands of vehicles, and that is exactly what 21st Century mass transit looks like: Electric scooters, bicycles, motobikes, autorickshaws, and cars, all available on-demand, going wherever, whenever they are needed. While this hard to imagine, it was also hard to imagine, back when I bought my first mobile phone, that in less than 20 years most people in the world would have one.
Today in China hundreds of millions of people will commute to work on some type of electric bike or scooter. The need there is acute and the shift to electric vehicles is already well underway. China’s cities rival India’s for density, growth rate, and air pollution, and like India, relatively few people own their own car, though that is changing fast. A few days of light electric vehicle sales in China can supply enough vehicles for a shared network that will equal Delhi’s metro in ridership. Moreover, such a network will carry people not just along the metro lines, but anywhere in the city, at any time of the day or night.
Making this leap to new mobility won’t just help Delhi’s transport system to catch up to the legacy systems of wealthier cities, it will actually make transportation in Delhi better than transportation in cities reliant on the fixed-route, scheduled mass transit of the 20th century, like New York, which is still trying to fix its subway.
This transformation in urban mobility isn’t just possible, it is happening. It began in 2012 in San Francisco when Scoot first allowed riders to unlock an electric motorbike with an app in their phone, ride it somewhere else, and leave it for the next rider to find and ride. It continues at an even faster pace in China, India, and other emerging markets.
Back in the year 2000, it wasn’t obvious to some of my friends why I needed a mobile phone, but it is obvious today that everyone needs cleaner air, quieter, safer, less congested streets, and the convenience of being able to go from anywhere to anywhere in the city quickly and cheaply.
Our job at Scoot is to bring that future to the present as soon as possible. If you are a city leader, a vehicle manufacturer, or anyone who expects to be involved in transportation ten years from now, it’s your job too, and we want to work with you.
