On Micromobility: an upbeat forecast for 2021.

We already talked about sustainable micromobility in an interview last August as a potential opportunity for business in the future. At the end of 2020, we think it is the right time to take up the topic again and take stock of its performance.

This year, in the Italian market of shared mobility, we witnessed an exponential growth of subscribers to services as car sharing or scooter sharing. Just think that, at a national level, there has been a 48% increase compared to 2019 for the former, while the latter registered a 45% increase. In all this, bike sharing also grew by +8% year-on-year. 

In terms of absolute number of active vehicles, bikes make up the majority of the sharing fleet, but the 554% increase in the number of electric scooters is a clear indication of the market development in that direction.

If we take into account that the mobility industry - also from an “anti-Covid19” perspective - has been at the forefront of institutional and political initiatives since 2019, with incentives to buy more eco-sustainable and easy-to-drive means of transport in urban areas, then we have to be optimistic.

All the data and the brand-new tech features in the mobility sector lead us to one only possible result: 2021 will be a great year for shared mobility. 

The recent pandemic represented a challenge initially quite complex for the sharing industry, especially for pooling among individual users, that is sharing one only vehicle - for instance, in an Uber ride or in a private car subscribed to services as the famous BlaBlaCar. 

However, the pandemic and its consequences on the market also brought deep changes, which we think will last long in time. If the industry grew in such relevant numbers in the midst of a health crisis, we can only imagine how much it still can grow once the emergency is over and bureaucratic and technical limitations are overcome. 

In particular, among the various market segments, the one with an extreme growth potential is that of urban micromobility. 

Micromobility is different from the other vehicle sharing services since - as the name goes - it involves smaller rides, easier to drive in urban areas and that cover shorter distances. 

Just 10 years ago, to buy some groceries we might’ve taken our cars. Today, we can rent a bike or an electric scooter just a few steps away from home and “give back” the vehicle once we’re done. This way, not only contributing to the reduction of traffic and pollution (environmental and acoustic), but also to our own wellbeing, exercising our muscles in a cleaner atmosphere. 

GreenVulcano Technologies has this exact mission in mind: to do everything we can to develop more efficient, more effective and more environmentally sustainable technologies. For this reason we cooperated with leader companies in the mobility and automotive industry such as Octo Telematics and PopMove, to research the best solutions to the many problems affecting our city lives. 

Today, the mobility industry has never been so disruptive, especially in Italy, where all the biggest cities provide these kinds of solutions, with an increasing rate of conversion.

GreenVulcano Technologies is, hence, fully integrated in the world of mobility and of the new available solutions. We must reduce the negative impacts of an outdated mobility, through the implementation of methods of urban mobility which occupy less space and pollute less - we’re talking both noxious gases and non-stop noise. 

Data at hand, we believe that 2021 will be a wonderful year for micromobility. Institutions have extended their micromobility experiments until 27 July 2022, supported by a market increasingly inclined to adopt this kind of solutions to move around cities. Moreover, we also see an increasing interest in starting new micromobility projects in all Italy.

We believe that micromobility is a rising market which hasn’t reached its peak yet and where the opportunity to experiment new solutions, products and services allows us to move forward towards a more sustainable and livable society and urbanization.

Mario Stefanutti

Mario Stefanutti is a CTO with more than 20 years of experience with complex IT infrastructures and systems. Experience gained on major companies like Telecom and Reply, where he’s covered roles from Solution Architect to Technical Project Leader.
At GreenVulcano he manages the R&D Lab in Rome and he’s responsible for the strategic definition of technical developments of all GreenVulcano products.