Technical Insight
Navigating the Micromobility Charging Landscape Simon Fellin Teleport Mobility
arrive to the train station at rush hour and there are not slots available where you want to go.
Strengths Parking Setting up a charging rack implicitly means that you are also helping solve the parking situation for scooters and bikes. Research from Oslo shows that when parking racks are available there are many less scooters poorly parked. Hub Setting up a parking rack gives customers a fixed location where they can go and expect to find vehicles. Security Having the vehicle locked into the charging rack reduces the risk of theft. No Logistics When users park the vehicles in charging racks there is no need for an operational team to carry out that task.
A TIER Scooter & Powerbox (Source: Tier press release)
A
hot topic these days is charging infrastructure. The german micromobility operator Tier recently landed a â‚Ź250M investment from Softbank to establish its energy network. Why is infrastructure so important anyway? Charging infrastructure is seen as a key component in driving per charge costs down from the HIGH single digit $ and â‚Ź numbers we have seen in the last years (Which made up almost half of the mobility operators cost base) down to LOW single-digit numbers (2-3 $/â‚Ź per recharge) that will make micro-mobility operations financially sustainable. The legacy operating model of micromobility operators comes with a big environmental impact. Gig-workers and logistics teams have been driving combustion engine vans filled with discharged and broken vehicles back and forth to warehouses for charging and repairs. Cities and their inhabitants have also grown weary of scooters thrown on the 22 | Telematics Wire | December 2020
pavement. Often, the rider has run out of battery and simply abandoned the vehicle on the sidewalk or cycling path, leaving behind a useless piece of metal for others to trip over. This article goes through the upsides and downsides and opportunities of the two leading solutions in the market.
Charging Stations Several companies have been working on addressing both the issues of free-floating micro-mobility by moving back towards docked mobility, modeled after the many well-tested docked bike and ebike sharing schemes that have been emerging in cities, mainly over the past 10 years. This operational model requires users to start and end their rides at designated locations in a city where parking racks are set up, which may work great when infrastructure is well built out and there are stations at every block, but may also cause disappointment and stress when vehicles are not available or when you
Weaknesses
Docked, not dockless Docking stations go against the basic free-floating paradigm that has made scooters popular, having true doorto-door transportation. Sure, entirely docked bike systems work, but they are usually heavily subsidized by the city, because the stations are expensive to establish and it is not as convenient for the end-users. Curbside locations The operators will want the charging stations to be on central curbside locations which can be difficult and/or expensive to access in order to scale the network. Space Limitation The number of vehicles possible to charge in one location is limited by the parking space available, over-capacity of parking and charging spaces is required in order for the system to operate smoothly.
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