What Are the Benefits of Micromobility?

Social Benefits

An often overlooked but fundamental benefit of micromobility is social equity. Put simply, our method of transport to school, work, childcare, shopping and all of the other journeys we need to do every week is literally a means to an end.

The less time, effort and money that we need to spend to solve this problem the better! At face value, cars can travel faster than micromobility vehicles. But in reality, they’re already slower door to door in many inner city environments when you factor in traffic congestion and the time is taken to find a carpark at your destination.

But when you start looking at the full financial costs, not just the obvious ones such as purchase, finance costs, fuel, repairs, registration, depreciation and insurance, but add in traffic fines, parking fees, the added costs that every house and store that has to provide parking is passing on to their consumers and so on, the total cost is staggering.

These costs are the same whether you’re earning $40,000 or $140,000 per year in wages. So the proportion of your income that goes to owning and maintaining a car is much greater if you’re on a lower wage.

There comes a point where people simply can’t afford to run a car. In car-centric cities (ie every city in Australia…) this leads to restricted job opportunities due to reduced mobility, so creating a vicious spiral.

By comparison, micromobility solutions are much cheaper to buy and run. So they’re far more affordable for someone on low wages or even on a pension or other social security payments.

Quite apart from the economic social inequity issues, cars also impose a huge barrier of social isolation. Cars have changed streets from social gathering places, which they were for thousands of years until the early 20^th century, into ‘traffic sewers’.

It’s hard to interact with other people on the street when you’re in a steel cocoon, hidden behind tinted windows. But people riding bikes, scooters and other micromobility devices can easily make eye contact and converse with pedestrians, shop keepers and others on the street.

Notwithstanding occasional space conflicts with pedestrians, they’re also travelling at ‘human scale’ speed, which greatly lowers their risk of causing death or serious injury to others. This makes them less threatening.

Health benefits

Quite apart from the covid pandemic, western society was already in a slow motion health train wreck. In large part due to our poor diets and lack of exercise, life expectancies are actually leveling off and even declining due to the diseases of affluence, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and obesity.

These are all long term chronic diseases that are expensive to treat, crippling our health budgets. Micromobility, particularly e-bikes and other devices that require some human powered input, are a great form a low-intensity exercise that can be incorporated into everyday routines. No need to pay for gym memberships and set aside specific time.

In addition to personal health benefits, more micromobility in a city and less motor vehicle traffic equals improved air quality and lower noise pollution.

Both of these are blights upon our cities that have proven negative impacts upon our health. Not just the more obvious physical impacts but also upon mental stress levels.

Then there’s the most dramatic health benefit of all – road toll reduction.

Motor vehicles are deadly. By contrast, micromobility in itself is much safer. The main risk is being hit by a motor vehicle, which is one reason why building separated infrastructure and reducing speed limits is so important.

According to the World Health Organisation, worldwide, one person is killed every 25 seconds in a motor vehicle accident. That’s an annual road toll of about 1.35 million people. Within the USA 42,060 people were killed in traffic deaths in 2020, an increase on the previous year, even through there were 13% fewer miles driven due to covid restrictions. Australia has seen about 1,200 deaths and 32,000 serious injuries per year in recent years.

The vast majority of these deaths and injuries need not occur and every percentage shift in our transport mode share towards micromobility solutions will help to reduce this carnage due to micromobility vehicles travelling at slower, safer speeds and having much lower mass, meaning that in the event of a crash, impact forces are far lower and far less likely to cause death or serious injury.

Conclusion

When you look at any one of these major benefits: reduced car usage, reduced congestion, reduced emissions, social and health benefits, there are clearly huge advantages in shifting our society to using more micromobility for transport.

Add them all together and the advantages are compelling.