Philip Rose

Personal vehicle subscriptions, where you pay a monthly fee for exclusive use of a vehicle, are the best consumer product in micromobility and will play a big part in its future growth. Shared operators like Lime and Voi are best placed to offer subscriptions to complement their shared services, and can offer a uniquely good subscription product.

Subscriptions (and ownership generally) are often positioned in competition with shared micromobility, as in a recent survey of micromobility ownership preferences.

But this isn’t a choice anyone has to make. Yes, people want to own their vehicle for commuting as opposed to finding a shared vehicle twice (or more) a day. That isn’t surprising, because almost nobody really uses shared vehicles like that.

Shared vehicles are used for leisure or to save time, more often at the weekend and most people only use them occasionally¹. They’re not cheap, but they’re great for spontaneity, for the trip you didn’t know you’d be taking. That’s because there’s often a vehicle nearby, charged and ready, and you don’t have to take care of it. Charging, security and maintenance are all left to the operator.

But shared vehicles are a poor fit for predictable, daily trips like commutes, for two reasons: high and unclear pricing, and the need to find a new vehicle each time.

For regular use over weeks and months, shared vehicles are expensive. For a daily three-mile commute, you’ll usually pay over $200, typically double or more the cost of a monthly transport pass in the same city.

The costs of commuting using shared services in Washington D.C. (methodology)

Service	Public transport 🚇	Capital Bikeshare (Lyft) 🚲	Revel 🛵	Lime 🛴🚲	Skip by Helbiz 🛴	Lyft 🛴	Spin 🛴
Trip pricing	n/a	$1 to start, then $0.15/min (non-member) Free to start, then $0.10/min (member)	$1 to start, then $0.39/min	$1 to start, then $0.35/min	$1 to start, then $0.39/min	$1 to start, then $0.39/min	$1 to start, then $0.41/min
Monthly commute cost	$81	$148 (non-member) $79.80 (member)	$289.60	$292	$320.80	$320.80	$335.20

The high cost is not immediately obvious: “$1 to unlock, then $0.39/min + tax” doesn’t tell you that a trip might be $7 (who knows how long their trip will take?) or that a month of commuting comes to $320.

(It’s worth noting that shared operators offer monthly passes that cover unlimited rides up to a certain number of minutes in cities where it’s required or serves them well to do so. This is better for commuters, yet still begs the question of whether you’ll exceed the time limit.)

Monthly passes don’t change the fact that there’s not necessarily a shared scooter nearby when you need it. There’s probably one somewhere close, but it’ll involve a walk of an unknown amount of time in an unknown direction (and maybe some hunting!) to find it. That’s an awful tradeoff to make, day after day, when people are tired, busy and trying to meet what’s expected of them.

A vehicle subscription solves both the pricing and reliability challenges. The monthly price is clear and the vehicle is for your use exclusively, so you know exactly where it is - where you left it. For commuting, this is leaps and bounds better than the expense and uncertainty of shared vehicles.

Conversely, your own vehicle isn’t great for spontaneity. It’s only available when and where you remember to bring it, and even the most portable scooters are a hassle to carry when you don’t plan to use them. There’s clearly still a role for shared vehicles even after you subscribe, and research suggests ² that owning a micromobility vehicle actually makes people more likely to use shared vehicles.

Shared operators can excel at subscriptions

When I’m talking about subscription vehicles from a shared operator, it’s important to clarify that I’m talking about the same vehicles that are used in shared fleets (maybe with colour or branding changes), offered in the same cities where companies operate shared fleets. While designed for a different purpose, they can still be uniquely good subscription vehicles.

Securing your vehicle outdoors is a major concern; theft is a universal problem and micromobility vehicles are desirable targets.

Shared operators bring years of expertise in locks, alarms, tracking and recovering vehicles and shared vehicles are heavier and so harder to steal. But the best security feature is hiding in plain sight: your subscription vehicle looks like the other hundreds or thousands of shared vehicles around the city, so why steal this one?

A personal anecdote to illustrate this: I subscribed to Bird’s now-defunct Personal Rental program for a year in 2019 and commuted for seven miles a day, to-and-from a train station in San Francisco. I locked the scooter (which still retails for $1,000) with just a flimsy cable in a dark underpass for hours every day after I boarded the train, until I returned in the evening.

That scooter was never touched, even on the few occasions when I left it overnight. Not coincidentally, there were usually several shared scooters left in the same area every morning as people hurried to the train. (This doesn’t prove that shared vehicles are more secure, but I can well believe that looking like a shared vehicle means they’ll be stolen far less often.)

Repairs will also be easier with shared vehicles, given that operators have already scaled and optimised maintenance workflows across large fleets that are used more intensively, meaning faster repairs and instant replacement with a fresh vehicle.

With operations on the ground in cities already, shared operators are in the position to offer services that subscription-only companies will struggle to scale up to match. Need your bike moved to a different location, or the battery swapped during the day? Operators are doing these things with vehicles in the shared fleet all day and would be able to charge subscription customers more for the added convenience of doing them with personal vehicles too.

Discounts for subscribers would push people to use the operator’s shared service ahead of (otherwise undifferentiated) competitors, and you can imagine integrations with features like Lime’s Group Ride allowing subscription customers to introduce friends to the fun of micromobility with shared vehicles.

There could be unexpected upsides to some shared vehicle design choices for subscribers. Many shared models now use swappable batteries and these could provide new flexibility for storage and charging in some living arrangements. If you live on the third floor, it’s a hassle to lug a scooter (not to mention a bike) upstairs, but carrying just the battery feels easy.

But, there are clear downsides of shared designs as well. Vehicles are too heavy to carry, won’t fold and don’t include storage, making it harder to run errands. Shared operators could change future designs with these things in mind, but that increases tension with design choices to withstand the rigour of shared use.

Subscriptions diversify a shared business

Offering subscriptions allows a shared operator to segment their customer base into casual riders and commuters, providing the best product and price for both groups without making changes to their shared service, which can continue to serve the uses it does well.

The shared fleet is a natural advantage operators have to introduce potential subscription customers to the experience of using their vehicles. Taking a test ride is as easy as finding the nearest vehicle on the street, which other subscription operators have no way to match.

Some cities are more profitable for shared services than others, but in many cities a cap restricts how many vehicles the operator can deploy. Subscription vehicles, as they’re effectively each customer’s private vehicle, are not subject to the cap, providing operators a way to serve more customers and increase profit in their best markets where caps may stifle demand.

Subscription customers represent higher-margins for shared operators because operations costs per-vehicle will be lower, as subscription customers will likely use vehicles less and take better care of them, like a vehicle they truly own.

They also diversify the business in a way that doesn’t depend on the vagaries of winning and retaining city permits. And, compared to selling vehicles directly (as Bird does), subscriptions are a better fit for shared operators existing business model. Recurring revenue is predictable, helps forecast vehicle production and operational capacity and, most importantly, deepens the customer relationship and creates loyalty in a way shared operators are already trying to do.

Subscriptions divide focus

Although the tasks operations employees will perform - picking up the vehicle, repairing it, charging it, dropping it off again - are fundamentally the same as with shared vehicles, supporting subscription vehicles will add operational complexity.

Running a subscription service will cause tension in vehicle design: when considering a new model, should an operator optimise for shared use (weight, stability, battery life) or subscription customers (portability, storage, top speed)?

An operator successfully serving subscription customers at scale could choose to develop separate hardware for subscriptions and shared fleets, but using the same vehicles brings a lot of advantages: economy of scale, standardised operations and flexibility in how vehicles are allocated.

The latter is especially valuable: vehicles may generate more revenue per day as part of a shared fleet than they can as a subscription vehicle used by only one customer. A good problem to have, and the operator can allocate vehicles where they’ll generate the most revenue, and open up subscription capacity only where they have available vehicles and it isn’t as profitable to deploy them for shared use.

Another concern is that subscription vehicles may be subject to intensive use, especially by people like delivery workers using them professionally.

If a vehicle in a shared fleet in a high ridership city sees five or so trips per day, a subscription customer commuting to work (two trips) isn’t likely to cause problems in terms of vehicle and battery wear and maintenance, but a delivery worker making twenty or more trips on the vehicle might.

If you provide people with a good enough product to use to do their job, this probably will happen. Shared operators have a couple of options: either restrict usage of subscription vehicles (for example: only allowing 50 or 100 miles a week of travel), or lean into the use case and design a product that delivery workers would want to pay more for. Zoomo employs both tactics, limiting weekly mileage on cheaper (“commuter”) plans and providing spare battery rental on more expensive plans targeted at delivery workers. Shared operators could also offer priority maintenance, faster vehicle replacement and cargo attachments in higher-priced subscription plans to create a great delivery worker service for the right price.

A brief history of shared operator subscriptions

Bird launched Personal Rentals in April 2019 in San Francisco and Barcelona, where Bird had recently operated shared vehicles but lost (or was never awarded) operating permits and then ceased shared operations. Personal Rentals may have been a result of quick thinking of how to utilise the shared fleets sitting in warehouses, but it was an excellent service (particularly at the $25/month price point!) that I personally used until it was discontinued in March 2020. It’s hard to imagine that was unrelated to the onset of COVID-19, as most shared operators shut down all operations around that time.

Wheels took the opposite approach, launching subscriptions later the same month, and their increased emphasis on subscriptions over time suggests that the service has been a success.

Spin launched a subscription service in two English towns in 2021³ but the programme hasn’t expanded, while recent reductions in staff may mean it’s less likely that it does in future.

There’s no clear pattern here, with subscription offerings seemingly victims of circumstance. That might point to the dangers of splitting focus between shared fleets and subscriptions, and operators retreating to their core shared businesses when times get tough, but it’s hard to know from the outside.

It would be a shame if no shared operators launch subscriptions again. It’s an excellent consumer product that complements shared fleets and allows operators to effectively target daily transportation and commuting use cases for the first time. Using the same vehicles as shared fleets makes it a cheap(er) experiment, one that I hope more operators run in 2022.

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Appendix: commuting cost methodology

I compared the cost of an urban three-ish mile commute in Washington D.C., twice a day for twenty working days in a month. I chose three miles as a distance over which you could realistically use any micromobility mode to travel, and Washington D.C. as the English-speaking city with (I believe) the most different shared modes in operation. (Operators using English language and requiring a US driving licence makes it easier for me to compare live prices in their apps.)

For public transport, I used WMATA’s Monthly Unlimited Pass Calculator to get the price of a pass between Georgia Ave-Petworth and Gallery Pl-Chinatown stations. I compared micromobility to the subway instead of to buses because I wanted to compare to the most expensive public transport option, so to not distort the point of how expensive micromobility is.

It was hard to compare bikeshare fairly. I included both member and non-member pricing - membership is similar to a public transport pass (but yearly, not monthly) but a much bigger commitment than using dockless micromobility. I pro-rated the annual membership cost and included it. I did not include $2 fees for parking away from a dock, so again a better comparison to public transport than dockless micromobility.

I used each micromobility operator’s app to check prices in Washington D.C., although I seemingly couldn’t check Bird’s pricing without being in D.C. myself. For e-bike and scooter commutes, I used the Google Maps cycling directions estimate (18 minutes each way) and for e-mopeds I used the car directions estimate, since the roads used aren’t especially fast. All prices were accurate on January 15th, 2022. I didn’t include Helbiz Unlimited, which (at $39.99/month) is a terrific deal, as I’m unsure how long it’ll remain at that price point, but I’m happy to be wrong on that score.

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Notes