THE SOURCES OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES OF ELECTRIC SCOOTER SHARING SERVICES

In the past few years, there has been a sharp increase in the need for both conceptualizations and applied research on the current radical reformatting of urban mobility. Some of the emerging trends were unexpected and poorly predictable. And the formation of a new niche for rental services of electric scooters is perhaps the most vivid example. A whole new industry has emerged in the urban spaces of North America and Europe in a matter of months, demonstrating a tangible paradigm shift in the field of transport systems for reasons of both technological nature and cultural transformations.
The combination of the factors and trends that led to the changes that have already taken place is in itself of considerable interest. The non-standard logic of the economic efficiency for the sector of electric scooters sharing still causes a lot of controversy. Skeptics point to the possibility of unwarranted hopes for investors who have rushed into rapidly scalable venture projects. Optimists, on the other hand, insist that the fast-growing sector of electric scooter sharing is a natural new milestone for uberazation. The publication proposes a systematization of favorable conditions for the industry, especially in the context of current and promising technologies of industry 4.0, which, as argued, will allow the industry to survive, ensure operational and financial sustainability – and eventually gain a stable foothold within the updated configuration of multimodal urban transportation.
Moreover, there are already well-based hopes for a full-scale revolution of micro-mobility, as the development of small means of mobility in urban environments becomes both irresistible and irreversible. Especially significant improvements could be expected from platform solutions based on integration in applications of both individual offers of scooter sharing operators and multimodal packages. As in other forms of sharing economy, such technologies and tools like dynamic pricing, tariff optimization, reliability improvements, increasing autonomy of electrical engineering, integration, aggregation of user queries, neural networks, other techniques of Big Data uphold expectations that the competitive advantages of rental services of electric scooters will increase in the coming years.

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