Daniel lives in Jerusalem, and every day he watches scooters turn sidewalks into a kind of low-speed demolition derby. He sent us a long one, so let me read it properly. He writes — as cities become more crowded and harder to get around, especially here in Jerusalem, we're seeing more people turn to personal mobility solutions like scooters to get around. The problem, certainly here in Jerusalem, is that the infrastructure to actually use these vehicles safely is often, for most of the city, simply non-existent. We see two things happening as a result — scooter users using the road by necessity, where they have to put their body on the line between fast-moving, high-rate bus drivers and cars, or more commonly, monopolizing sidewalks where they weave in and out of pedestrians, honking their horns and turning the sidewalk into a semi-road. There have been quite a number of tragedies in Israel caused by collisions between these vehicles and pedestrians, resulting in periodic fine attempts, but these have not changed the day-to-day reality. It continues to be commonplace to see them on the sidewalk, and they seem to invariably assume they have right of way. He says he's remiss to be too critical, however, because he thinks that for many people they are virtually the only way to get around efficiently, and they are not cars, which are the biggest contributors to urban pollution. Then he asks three things — what does good infrastructure planning for these vehicles actually look like? What happens if virtually everyone in a city begins using them in place of buses and walking? And is the idea that micro transport is a viable path towards eliminating car use in city centres grounded in reality, or more of a pipe dream?
I want to sit with the numbers he's living inside before we go anywhere near the solutions. Israel's Ministry of Transport recorded over twelve hundred scooter-related pedestrian injuries in twenty twenty-three. That's not a vibe — that's three people a day getting hit by something moving fifteen to twenty-five kilometers an hour on a surface meant for walking speed. And Jerusalem specifically, in twenty twenty-four, issued three thousand scooter-related fines. Three thousand. Anyone who's walked down Jaffa Street at five in the afternoon knows that number is a rounding error against the actual violations.
Three thousand tickets in a city where you can't stand still on a sidewalk for thirty seconds without hearing one of those little electric horns behind you. The enforcement theater is almost impressive.
That's exactly what it is — theater. And it's not because the police are lazy. It's because you can't enforce your way out of an infrastructure problem. The scooters are on the sidewalk because there is nowhere else for them to be. That's the whole thing.
So today we're asking — what does good infrastructure for these things actually look like, and is the dream of replacing cars with scooters real or just tech-bro fantasy?
Let's start by understanding what we're actually dealing with here, because the word micromobility gets thrown around a lot, but the infrastructure reality is very different from the marketing.
The marketing shows a smiling person in a helmet gliding down a sunny, empty bike lane. The reality is a seventeen-year-old on a rental scooter doing twenty-three kilometers an hour through a crowd of tourists who are trying to figure out where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is.
And that gap between the image and the reality is almost entirely about one thing — what urban planners now call the missing middle. Cities have spent a century building infrastructure for two speed ranges. Walking speed, which is three to five kilometers an hour — that gets sidewalks. And vehicle speed, thirty to eighty kilometers an hour — that gets roads. But a scooter moving at fifteen to twenty-five kilometers an hour fits neither. It's too fast for the sidewalk, it's too slow and too vulnerable for the road. So by default, it ends up in the wrong place every single time.
The missing middle. So the infrastructure problem isn't that cities forgot to plan for scooters — it's that the entire street grid was designed around a binary that scooters violate just by existing.
Right. And the scale here is not small. McKinsey projected global e-scooter trips will hit ten billion annually by twenty twenty-seven. Ten billion trips. This is not a niche fad, and it's not going away. So the question becomes — what does infrastructure that actually serves this speed range look like?
So what does good infrastructure actually look like? Let's get into the specifics — because it's not just painting a line on the road.
The gold standard right now, and this is where anyone serious about this conversation starts, is what Paris did between twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-five. They rolled out fifty kilometers of segregated scooter and bike lanes — and I mean segregated, not a stripe of white paint between you and a bus. These are lanes with physical barriers. Curbs, bollards, planters. The kind of thing that stops a two-ton vehicle from drifting into your path.
Fifty kilometers of lanes you can't just drive over.
And the result was a forty percent reduction in scooter-related injuries. Forty percent. That's not incremental improvement — that's what happens when you stop pretending paint is protection.
Forty percent is the kind of number that makes you wonder why every city isn't doing it. What's the barrier?
Cost and space, mostly. But there's a deeper design problem. The OECD's International Transport Forum put out a report in twenty twenty-four that laid out what a proper protected micromobility network actually requires. It's three things. One, physical separation — we covered that. Two, intersection treatments — dedicated signal phases for scooters and bikes, advanced stop boxes so they're not in a car's blind spot at a red light. Three, speed management through geofencing — the scooter automatically caps at fifteen kilometers an hour in pedestrian zones, twenty-five on roads. You don't ask the rider to slow down. The scooter does it for them.
Geofencing that actually works. I've heard about this in theory — is anyone doing it in practice?
Paris again. And several other European cities. The rental companies — Lime, Bird, Dott — they can implement speed caps tied to GPS zones. The scooter knows it's in a pedestrian area and physically won't go above fifteen. It's not perfect — GPS drifts, there are edge cases — but it's functional now, not theoretical.
So the Paris model is separate the lane physically, redesign the intersections so scooters have their own phase, and cap the speed by zone. That's the template.
That's the template. Now let's talk about why Jerusalem is almost a worst-case scenario for implementing it. The city has narrow historic streets, some of them centuries old. Steep gradients — this is not Amsterdam, it's built on hills. High pedestrian density in the center. And very little curb-separated space to work with. Retrofitting a protected lane network into that is genuinely hard and expensive. It's not just a lack of political will, though that's part of it. The engineering constraints are real.
So you've got a city where the street width was decided in the Ottoman period, and you're trying to fit a twenty-first-century transport mode into it. Something has to give.
And what's giving right now is pedestrian safety. Those twelve hundred injuries annually across Israel — that's the cost of not solving the space problem. But here's the thing about infrastructure that most coverage misses. It's not enough to build one protected lane. A single segment that doesn't connect to a network is almost useless.
Right, because if the lane dumps you back into traffic or onto a sidewalk after three blocks, you were never really on a network — you were on a scenic detour.
There's a twenty twenty-five study from the Journal of Transport Geography that quantified this exactly. They found that micromobility adoption only takes off when more than sixty percent of common origin-destination pairs in a city are covered by connected infrastructure. Below that threshold, people default to sidewalks and roads because the network doesn't actually get them where they're going.
Sixty percent coverage before people change their behavior. That's a much higher bar than most cities are aiming for. Most cities build a couple of showcase lanes and call it a day.
And then they're surprised when scooter riders don't use them. The lane on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv is lovely, but if it doesn't connect to your office and your apartment, you're going to spend ninety percent of your trip on roads and sidewalks anyway. The network effect is everything.
So the failure mode isn't just that Jerusalem hasn't built enough lanes — it's that building a few lanes doesn't solve the problem. You need the whole web.
And that's why enforcement keeps failing. The three thousand tickets in twenty twenty-four — that's not a policing failure. It's a geometry failure. When the safe, legal option doesn't exist for most trips, you can write all the tickets you want and people will keep riding on the sidewalk because the alternative is getting hit by a bus on King George Street.
The geometry failure is the phrase. You can't fine your way out of a design problem.
No. And the thing is, the riders aren't wrong to feel trapped. Daniel's description of the dilemma is exactly right — road or sidewalk, both are dangerous for different reasons. The road is dangerous for the rider, the sidewalk is dangerous for pedestrians. Without a third option, you're just choosing who bears the risk.
There's another layer here that I think Daniel's prompt is pointing at without quite saying it. The social friction. The honking, the weaving, the assumption of right of way. That's not just infrastructure — that's norms. But norms follow infrastructure. When the physical environment tells you you don't belong anywhere, you start acting like you belong everywhere.
That's a really sharp observation. The entitlement on the sidewalk is partly a response to being unwelcome on the road. If the city gives you no place, you take a place. And pedestrians bear the cost.
Which brings us to the second question. Okay, so we know what good infrastructure looks like. But what happens if we actually build it and everyone starts using these things? Let's model that out.
So this is where we move from engineering to systemic effects. And the best data we have comes from a twenty twenty-four pilot in Barcelona. The city tracked what happened when scooter modal share — that's the percentage of all trips taken by scooter — hit twelve percent. Twelve percent of trips is not everyone, but it's enough to see the shape of the thing.
Twelve percent is substantial. What changed?
Four things moved at once, and they didn't all move in the same direction. Bus ridership dropped eight percent. People were taking scooters instead of buses for short trips. That eroded transit fare revenue, which is how cities fund bus service. At the same time, car trips dropped nine percent, and nitrogen dioxide levels fell fourteen percent. So cleaner air, fewer cars. But pedestrian injuries from scooters rose twenty-two percent.
So you trade eight percent of bus riders for nine percent fewer car trips, cleaner air, and a twenty-two percent spike in pedestrians getting hit. That's not a clean win. That's a bundle of tradeoffs.
It's a bundle of tradeoffs. And it exposes something that scooter advocates often gloss over. The mode shift isn't just car to scooter. It's bus to scooter, walking to scooter, and car to scooter — all happening at once, with different consequences for each.
The bus-to-scooter shift is the one that worries me. Transit depends on fare revenue. If short-hop riders defect to scooters, the bus system gets weaker, which pushes more people into cars, which is the opposite of what we want.
That's exactly the spiral. And it shows up in the broader research. There was a twenty twenty-five meta-analysis from UC Davis that looked at dozens of scooter trip studies across multiple countries. They found that only thirty-four percent of scooter trips replaced a car trip. Forty-eight percent replaced walking or transit. So the majority of scooter trips are not taking cars off the road — they're taking people off buses and off their own feet.
Thirty-four percent. That number should be on a billboard outside every city planning meeting that's considering scooter policy. The environmental case for scooters is real but it's about a third as strong as the marketing implies.
And that's the generous reading. If you're replacing a bus trip — which is already a shared, relatively efficient mode — with an individual scooter trip, the net environmental benefit shrinks further. The scooter is still better than a single-occupancy car, but the margin is smaller than people think.
So the car-replacement thesis — the idea that micromobility is a viable path to eliminating cars from city centers — is that grounded or a pipe dream?
It's partially grounded and heavily conditional. The UC Davis numbers tell us that scooters can replace some car trips. Thirty-four percent is not nothing. If you scaled that up across a city, you'd see real reductions in congestion and pollution. But you'd also see the Barcelona pattern — transit erosion, pedestrian safety burdens, and a whole new set of conflicts that cities aren't prepared for.
So it's not a pipe dream, but it's not a silver bullet either. It's a tool that works in specific conditions and creates new problems if you don't manage it.
And the conditions matter enormously. Let's bring this back to Jerusalem, because Daniel's question is grounded in a specific place. Jerusalem's geography — hills, narrow streets, high pedestrian density in the center — makes it a worst-case for naive micromobility adoption. Scooters struggle on steep gradients. The narrow streets leave no room for segregated lanes without taking space from something else. And the pedestrian density means the cost of sidewalk riding is higher than in a spread-out city.
If you just drop ten thousand rental scooters into Jerusalem with no infrastructure changes, you get exactly what Daniel's describing. Chaos.
Right. But the alternative — continued car dominance — is worse. Jerusalem's air quality in the center is terrible. The traffic is brutal. So the realistic path isn't scooter utopia or scooter ban. It's a tiered system.
Walk me through the tiers.
First tier — designated scooter corridors on streets wide enough to accommodate physical separation. Not every street, but the main arteries. Second tier — strict geofencing in pedestrian zones, especially the Old City and the city center, where scooters are capped at walking speed or routed around entirely. Third tier — integration with transit rather than competition. Scooters as first and last mile connectors to the light rail and bus rapid transit lines, not as replacements for them.
The scooter gets you from your apartment to the light rail station, and from the station to your office. It doesn't replace the train — it extends its reach.
That's the model that actually pencils out. And it requires integrated ticketing — one payment for scooter plus transit — and scooter parking at transit stations so they're not littered on the platform. Cities that are doing this well, like Helsinki and parts of Paris, treat micromobility as a feeder system for mass transit, not a competitor.
Which means the city has to plan it that way from the start. You can't just let private scooter companies dump vehicles on the street and hope it works out.
You absolutely cannot. And that's been the default approach in most cities — let the market figure it out, then react to the problems. The cities that are succeeding are the ones that set the rules first. Paris didn't wait for injuries to spike — they built the lanes and then expanded the scooter program. Barcelona's pilot was a controlled experiment with data collection built in from day one.
The reactive approach is what gave us three thousand tickets and twelve hundred injuries. The proactive approach gave Paris a forty percent injury reduction.
That's the through-line of this whole conversation. Infrastructure first, vehicles second. If you build the network, the scooters become a solution. If you don't, they're just a new category of hazard.
The picture is more complicated than either the boosters or the critics admit. Let's talk about what actually works — for cities and for individual riders.
For cities, the single highest-leverage intervention is building connected, physically separated micromobility networks. Not lanes — networks. And the RAND Corporation did a cost-benefit analysis in twenty twenty-four that put numbers behind this. Every dollar spent on protected micromobility infrastructure returns four to six dollars in societal benefits — reduced healthcare costs from fewer injuries, congestion savings, pollution reduction. But — and this is the crucial caveat — the return only materializes if the network crosses that sixty percent coverage threshold we talked about earlier.
The economics are compelling but they're all-or-nothing. A half-built network is a bad investment. A completed network pays for itself several times over.
It means the political challenge is front-loaded. You have to spend the money and endure the construction disruption before the benefits show up. Most city councils operate on election cycles that are shorter than the infrastructure payback period. That's the political economy problem at the heart of this.
Which is why we keep getting painted lanes instead of protected ones. A painted lane is cheap, fast, and reversible. It looks like action without actually being action.
The painted lane is the infrastructure equivalent of a press release. It signals concern without reducing risk.
For individual riders — what can someone who uses a scooter to get around actually do?
Two things that actually move the needle. One — use sidewalks only as a last resort. If you have to be on the sidewalk, dismount and walk the scooter. It's slower, it's annoying, but it's the difference between being a guest in pedestrian space and being a threat. Two — advocate for infrastructure. The scooter lobby, if you want to call it that, has more power than riders realize. Cities respond to visible, organized demand. Writing to council members asking for specific network plans — not just more bike lanes, but connected, protected corridors — that's more effective than most people think.
The individual rider can't build a lane, but they can make it politically costly not to build one.
There's a third thing, which is supporting geofencing requirements in rental scooter contracts. When the city negotiates with Lime or Bird or whoever, the contract should include mandatory speed caps in pedestrian zones. Riders can push for that as a condition of the service operating in their city. It's not anti-scooter — it's pro-safety, and it makes the whole mode more politically sustainable.
Because if the injuries keep climbing, the political response won't be better infrastructure — it'll be an outright ban. Paris actually did ban rental scooters briefly before building the lanes. That's the risk if the status quo holds.
The ban hammer is always lurking. And it's a blunt instrument that solves the pedestrian injury problem by eliminating the mode entirely, which doesn't help with congestion or pollution. The smarter path is to make scooters safe enough that bans become politically unnecessary.
The integrated ticketing point — scooter plus transit as one trip. Is anyone doing that well right now?
Helsinki is the closest. Their mobility-as-a-service app, Whim, lets you book a scooter, a bus, a train, and a bike all on one ticket. It's not perfect — the scooter integration is still clunky in places — but the model is there. The dream is you open one app, plan a trip that starts with a scooter to the station, continues on the light rail, and ends with a short walk, and you pay once. That's where we need to go.
That's the kind of thing that makes the car-replacement thesis more plausible. If the scooter is part of a seamless transit chain, it's not competing with the bus — it's extending the bus's reach into neighborhoods that are too spread out for walking.
That's the version of micromobility that actually reduces car dependency. Not scooters instead of everything else, but scooters as the connective tissue of a transit network.
Let me push on one thing, though. The Barcelona data showed bus ridership dropping eight percent even with infrastructure improvements. Doesn't that suggest that some level of transit erosion is inevitable, no matter how well you integrate?
It probably is inevitable for short trips. If you're going two kilometers, a scooter is often faster and more convenient than waiting for a bus. The question is whether you can offset that loss by using scooters to feed more riders into the system for longer trips. The net effect on transit ridership could be positive if the first-mile last-mile gains outweigh the short-trip losses. But we don't have enough data yet to say for sure.
The honest answer is we don't know if the integration model fully solves the transit erosion problem. We think it helps, but the Barcelona numbers suggest caution.
Caution is the right posture. Anyone who tells you they've got micromobility figured out is selling something. We're in the early stages of a mode shift that will take decades to play out, and the data we have is from pilots and early adopters. The mass-adoption scenario — thirty, forty, fifty percent modal share — is still mostly theoretical.
Which is why Daniel's third question is so hard to answer definitively. Is car-free city centers via micromobility a pipe dream? Today, with current infrastructure, mostly yes. With the Paris model fully built out and integrated transit, for certain types of trips in certain types of cities, it starts to look plausible. But it's not a switch you flip.
The cities where it's most plausible are dense, flat, and have wide streets that can accommodate reallocation of space. Think Paris, Barcelona, Berlin. The cities where it's hardest are hilly, historic, and space-constrained. Think Jerusalem, Lisbon, parts of Rome. Geography isn't destiny, but it sets the difficulty level.
Jerusalem gets the hard mode. Steep hills, narrow streets, ancient infrastructure, and a population that's not exactly known for its patience with transportation experiments.
But Jerusalem also has something going for it — the light rail is excellent, and the bus rapid transit is improving. If you can build scooter infrastructure that feeds those systems rather than competing with them, you've got the bones of a network. The challenge is the last kilometer in the city center, where the streets are narrowest and the pedestrian density is highest.
That last kilometer might just need to be walking. And that's okay. Not every trip needs a vehicle.
That's the part that gets lost in the tech enthusiasm. Sometimes the best micromobility solution is shoes.
Hilbert: If the network has to hit sixty percent coverage before it works, and most cities are at like five percent, are we basically saying this whole thing is a decade away from mattering?
That's... not wrong. The sixty percent threshold is a high bar, and most cities are nowhere near it. But the counterpoint is that the cities that started early — Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen — are already seeing real benefits. The gap between the leaders and the laggards is enormous, and it's growing. So it's not that micromobility doesn't matter for a decade — it's that your city either starts now or spends the next ten years with the sidewalk chaos Daniel described.
The cost curve is favorable. The RAND numbers show the investment pays for itself. The constraint isn't economics — it's political will and construction timelines. Thanks, Hilbert.
Where does this leave us? The next five years will determine whether micromobility becomes a permanent part of urban transport or a failed experiment that we look back on as a weird transitional phase. The answer depends less on the technology — the scooters work fine — and more on whether cities are willing to repurpose street space from cars.
That's the political fight underneath all of this. Every protected scooter lane is space that used to be for cars or parking. Someone loses something. The cities that succeed will be the ones that can weather that fight and build anyway.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you listen — it helps more people find the show. We'll be back soon.
