Zag Daily’s latest snapshot of the UK e-scooter trials suggests that just over 18 million journeys have been taken by riders since the first operation in Middlesbrough launched back in July 2020.
Now just over 20,000 e-scooters carry out nearly 40,000 journeys a day across almost 50 towns and cities across England. Our latest estimate of 18.1 million journeys is up from 11 million in early November last year.
Voi remains dominant in the sector with just over 10 million journeys carried out on around 11,000 shared e-scooters across all its UK shared fleets. That is nearly 1,000 journeys on each e-scooter in total (allowing for a few replacements!) – great use of a shared resource. Voi also operates long-term hire in a number of locations.
In terms of the average numbers of journeys on each scooter a day, Norwich (Beryl), Nottingham (WIND/Superpedestrian) and Bournemouth (Beryl) come out at the top of the leaderboard, with an average of around six journeys carried out every day on each e-scooter. The averages will vary by season and are also affected by fleet size variations – Zag’s figure spans the whole life of the trials. On warm, sunny days and holidays we may see even better numbers.
Bristol (Voi) also manages to be both very large and very active. It sees up to five journeys per e-scooter a day on average, even with more than 2,000 e-scooters in its fleet.
In all these towns and cities then, shared e-scooters are an unqualified success story.
Looking across all the operators, and noting that in many cases Zag has had to model the use based on estimates and limited data:
- One operator, Voi, has had around 10 million journeys on its UK e-scooters.
- Four more operators (Lime, Neuron, Spin and WIND/Superpedestrian) have seen over a million journeys each.
- Next is Beryl which has comfortably seen more than half a million e-scooter journeys, while TIER is just below this mark. TIER now formally own Spin so, by this measure, TIER would also have well over a million journeys completed.
- Although Zag’s data is incomplete for the operators with smaller fleets in the UK, our modelling suggests that Dott, Zipp, Ginger and Zwings have each facilitated over 200,000 journeys so far.
Beryl and WIND/Superpedestrian lead the utilisation rates, followed by Neuron.
Zag emphasises utilisation rates as well as fleet size because we believe it is important that the public realm (our pavements, plazas and green spaces) is responsibly used by the private shared e-scooter operators. We do not want spaces saturated with vehicles that are rarely used (as is being seen in some parts of London and some other towns and cities with very low rates), but that shared e-scooters get genuinely shared by users throughout the day.
Thanks to Voi, Beryl, Spin, Lime, Neuron, Superpedestrian and TIER for supplying detailed data for some or all of their systems for this article. Bird and Dott were unable to supply journeys information. Ginger, Zwings and Zipp did not respond by press time.
