Drive electric scooters and say goodbye to traffic

Through applications, users in different cities can find new transportation alternatives

The mobility in the big cities of the world is increasingly complicated by the high volume of cars, motorcycles and other means of transport. The situation in Latin American cities is complex, due to the large concentration of people who have cities like Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires or Bogota.

Leer en español: Conduce scooters eléctricos y dile adiós al tráfico

That is why the new mobility alternatives have been very well received in the Latin American countries. Uber and Cabify, for example, have made new forms of transport available to their users that were previously not available. However, these options are still at the mercy of traffic, the volume of pedestrians on the roads continues to increase and they do not contribute much to different models.

A new way to avoid traffic

In response to these difficulties, startups that seek to offer mobility alternatives to their users that are effective and that, at the same time, alleviate traffic in the big cities, have recently appeared in the panorama. The tool to mobilize now are the shared electric scooters.

The idea of these startups is to provide users with easy-to-use means of transport that do not require a large infrastructure for their development. In fact, scooters are a personal transport that can carry out short trips with great efficiency. In addition, the business model of the different startups that move through Latin America is quite similar.

Grin, for example, is a Mexican startup that for $ 15 Mexican pesos allows people to make a short trip in Mexico City. The process is simple: the application is downloaded, a means of payment is recorded and that's it. It is not very different from the models to which we are already accustomed as users of different applications.

However, it has some limitations. On the one hand, its zone of influence is very short within the city. On the other hand, the availability of scooters is still low, as they have been able to check different users who have shared their experiences of the application.

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New competitors can arrive

This is not an isolated model, despite what might seem at first. Each time there are more people interested in applying and expanding the offer of these new applications so that more people have the possibility of using electric scooters.

Cabify, the big transportation company, recently announced that it has partnered with startup Movo to offer a service of shared electric scooters in Spain and several cities in Latin America. The idea of Cabify is to diversify the transportation options so that the users can choose how to transport themselves in their places of residence in a comfortable, safe and efficient way.

To the Movo-Cabify alliance and Grin join other bets of the same style, such as Lime, Bird or Ride, which are offering these services. We will have to wait, then, for these alternatives to be definitively established in the different Latin American countries.

This in order to determine, in this way, if electric scooters are a real option or if they are simply an ingenious option for trips that do not involve a long journey. In any case, technology continues to define more and more the way in which we move in our cities.

LatinAmerican Post | Jorge Ovalle

Translated from "Los scooters eléctricos son la nueva forma de moverse en las ciudades"

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