When mobility leaders gathered in Barcelona this autumn for the Smart City Expo World Congress, city “resilience” was a theme that tied conversations together.
From climate change and natural disasters to data breaches and cyberattacks, cities are being urged to future-proof their mobility systems against disruption.
Brandon Schuh, Head of Specialty Insurance at Christensen Group, believes that resilience is not just about bouncing back after a crisis. It’s also about creating the financial and structural capacity to absorb everyday shocks, including who pays when things go wrong.
For shared micromobility, Schuh says that the sector’s ability to withstand shocks depends as much on how costs and liabilities are distributed as on how quickly scooters or bikes can return to service.
“The burden is currently placed squarely on the operator,” Schuh tells Zag Daily. “There’s really nothing else in transport that compares in terms of cost and risk.”
A fragile foundation
Today’s micromobility insurance landscape, Schuh explains, reveals a structural imbalance between public authorities and the private operators that deliver shared transport programmes.
Unlike taxis or other licensed modes, shared e-scooter and e-bike operators are usually required to carry high levels of liability insurance as part of their permits. Cities, he argues, often remain detached from the risk management side once contracts are awarded.
“Cities are involved at the tender stage, but after that the operations run privately,” he explains. “The city isn’t integrated or involved in day-to-day risk management.
That separation, often paired with rigid contractual obligations, leaves operators on the hook for issues beyond their control from potholes and poor road design to inadequate signage. As a result, even well-established companies face exposure levels that far exceed their financial capacity.
“They’re effectively holding the city harmless for what the city would normally be responsible for,” Schuh argues.
This imbalance, he warns, is undermining the resilience of the entire micromobility ecosystem. When firms collapse under the weight of insurance costs and liability exposure, the reliability of urban transport systems suffers too.
The high price of protection
Compulsory insurance is supposed to make systems safer but in micromobility it can have the opposite effect.
Schuh points to Santa Monica, where shared mobility operators must hold a minimum of US$5 million per occurrence and US$25 million aggregate liability coverage. In addition to these requirements being unconventional structures that are challenging to procure, the coverage limits can actually increase risk rather than reduce it.
“The higher the limit, the more incentive there is to pursue litigation. If you only buy $5 million, it’s unlikely you’ll see a full court press for funds beyond what’s insured. But if there’s $25 million available, plaintiffs will go after it.”
For operators, insurance has become one of the largest ongoing expenses. While some of that cost trickles down to riders through higher fares, there’s a limit to what users will pay. As costs rise, smaller operators exit the market and the larger ones consolidate, often cutting back on service areas to stay profitable.
The result is a twofold fragility: financially for companies and socially for cities. Where infrastructure is poor, often in lower-income or peripheral neighbourhoods, risk and insurance costs are higher. That discourages deployment and widens mobility gaps, leaving the very communities that most need affordable transport without service.
“If operators retreat from riskier districts,” Schuh warns, “cities risk deepening mobility divides precisely when resilience requires cohesion.”
Sharing risk, building resilience
To break this cycle, Schuh advocates for new forms of collaboration between cities, insurers and operators.
He is currently working on what he calls “risk protection groups”. These are collective insurance pools that allow smaller operators to buy coverage together through a shared entity.
“A risk protection group is effectively the formation of an entity with members who would be the individual companies that would like to participate. You buy together and you create the scale of a larger company, effectively buying in bulk.”
Such pooled systems could help level the playing field, allowing local or community-based operators to survive in a market dominated by global giants. For these schemes to succeed, Schuh says, they need strong participation and ideally support from state governments or industry associations. This is where cities can play a proactive role in building systemic resilience rather than outsourcing risk.
From private risk to public value
Ultimately, Schuh believes cities can’t afford to treat insurance as a private matter. The financial resilience of operators underpins the physical resilience of urban transport networks.
“I think it’s still fair to have the operator pay,” he says, “but there could be a grant system that assists. If we really want to make micromobility work, there should be some financial support.”
Public grant schemes or shared-risk frameworks could help offset some insurance costs, ensuring that cities don’t inadvertently price out the very services they rely on. True resilience, Schuh argues, comes from planning together rather than reacting after a crisis.
Without reform, cities risk perpetuating a cycle of boom and bust where operators expand rapidly, then collapse under unsustainable costs, leaving behind unused infrastructure, stranded riders and public scepticism.
As climate volatility increases, and as Schuh himself experienced when a hailstorm recently damaged his roof in the American Midwest, the question of who bears risk will only grow more urgent.
Resilience, he insists, is about shared accountability.
