State of the Industry: NABSA 2019

Last week, I attended the 6th annual conference of the North American Bike Share Association in Indianapolis. As a co-founder of the organization and an attendee of every conference to date (including the one before we even had a trade association!), I have witnessed some tremendous change.

Our first three years saw relative calm as more and more cities adopted station-based bike share and the public-private model that had dominated the industry to date. Then two years ago, private equity backed dockless bikes came… then went. Last year, Uber and Lyft dominated the conference fresh off of their respective acquisitions of Jump and Motivate, and NABSA moved to add scooters and other micromobility devices to their mission. This year was substantially more muted, as if we were all taking a collective breath after a calamitous storm.

Surely some of this subdued mood was influenced by the rocky IPOs and multi-billion dollar loses of Uber and Lyft. It was not lost on me that the day NABSA started, car2go announced they were leaving Chicago, Denver, Portland, and Austin (their North American headquarters!) just as Lime said that they were pulling the plug on their car share experiment in Seattle. In recent months, Jump has pulled e-bike service from Dallas, San Antonio, Atlanta, and San Diego and Lyft has struggled with quality control issues with their e-bike offerings.

The heady days of the last few years thinking that massive influxes of venture capital would transform urban transportation seem to be waning. It turns out that managing transportation is not as easy as just building an app, that the real world is more complicated and does not scale so easily. For the first time, I heard more than a few attendees comment that many companies in attendance would not be around next year and some wondered how long the big guys can hold out. There was a sense that maybe the old public-private model is not dead yet, since that model is the only one that will guarantee a city will have micromobility services when the dust settles.

Yet at the same time I am incredibly optimistic about the future. Scooters and electric bikes have shown us that there is a broad market for micromobility and a tremendous need from our cities to build safe places to ride them. Car share can make a profit, just not necessarily the size that venture capital can get excited about.

We are all coming to realize that micromobility, like literally every other form of transportation, will need a some degree of public support to be viable. We will need savvy public policy makers and industry leaders to ask the tough questions to ensure private sector solutions are sustainable. We also need to make sure that we do not lose well functioning public systems in the market chaos. At the same time, those public systems will need to adapt to the changing needs of the market to remain viable and in tune with their communities.

We will see what the 2020 NABSA conference looks like. The only guarantee is that it will not look like 2019.