According to Andrew Fox, who runs Charge, an e-scooter charging company, the focus moving forward is on infrastructure—at least, it should be if scooter companies want to see their businesses succeed. Charge creates docking/charging stations for e-scooters and e-bikes and works with cities and property managers to install them; Fox describes the service as an agnostic complement to the rides. “What I see as the future of a smart city is we need to have the infrastructure to support micro-mobility,” he says. “So we are building out that worldwide network to support the ambitions of micro-mobility.”
Local governments, says Fox, need to figure out how to better incorporate e-scooters, but they need to do so without compromising the integrity of their cities. Fox points out that the earliest days of e-scooters were totally focused on volume; entrepreneurs needed to prove the value of the market to users and investors, and the way to do that was by high ride numbers—and not necessarily by proving how much the product actually benefited a given community. “In the process of trying to grow so quickly, all the equity, all the money, went into growing rides,” Fox says. “I think the vast majority of the cities haven’t gotten it right yet because the infrastructure is not in place.”
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