Scooter Media Brief: The Dawn of the Age of Scooters

Electric scooter rentals will never be new again.

2 minute read

December 31, 2018, 5:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


E-Scooters

Stav krikst / Shutterstock

2018 is the year the world will remember as the dawn of the electric scooter.

Sure, some companies electric scooter rental companies launched in 2017, but as we've documented already, urbanism media didn't really start noticing until several months into 2018. News feeds pages were overwhelmed enough by summer that we started to gather electric scooter news into more of a compendium format, lest we have to change the name of the site to Scooterizen.

We weren't the only ones to take drastic measures. Smart Cities Dive also started collecting the news into a map to make some geographic sense of the constantly breaking news. Now CityLab has declared 2018 the "Year of the Scooter" (in addition to a few other things as well).

In 2019, electric scooter rentals will no longer be the only new thing under the sun. Will they be out of fashion entirely, reduced to a footnote in the history of urban mobility? Or will scooters continue scooting into the future?

Also, will we figure out how to post one scooter article at a time?

Those stories aren't for 2018. Here are the last pile that were:

National News

National Commentary

Local News


James Brasuell

James Brasuell, AICP is the former editorial director of Planetizen and is now a senior public affairs specialist at the Southern California Association of Governments. James managed all editorial content and direction for Planetizen from 2014 to 2023, and was promoted from manging editor to editorial director in 2021. After a first career as a class five white water river guide in Trinity County in Northern California, James started his career in Los Angeles as a volunteer at a risk reduction center in Skid Row.

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