In early March, Lyft announced that it is offering free scooter rides to essential workers in New York because of the COVID pandemic. Those scooters you’ve been seeing everywhere since 2018 are part of a new intersection between tech and transportation called micromobility.
Tech might be a new player in this field, but “micromobility” has actually existed for hundreds of years. The pain point electric scooters address is the same one that Einstein Newton relieved biking to the patent office.
Longboards and bicycles are low-tech solutions to this same pain point. The following are a few of the tech industry’s proposed solutions to the “last-mile problem,” which is what the industry calls the demand for an alternative to walking to and from the last few miles to a destination:
