CALGARY⁠ — At last month’s Calgary Stampede, it was impossible to ignore the hordes of partygoers in western wear gliding around the city’s downtown on rented e-scooters like levitating urban cowboys. 

While e-scooters have had a bumpy ride in other Canadian markets, Calgary is one of several Albertan cities that have been early and eager adopters of the technology. 

“Alberta has been by far and away the most-forward thinking province in the whole country when it’s come to micro-mobility and sustainable transportation,” said Stewart Lyons, CEO of Bird Canada. 

E-scooter startups like Lyons’s now hope their success in the province can serve as a model for wider Canadian expansion, as larger urban centres begin warming to micro-mobility programs—that is, offering fleets of scooters and bikes for cheap, short-distance transportation. McKinsey & Company expects the combined U.S., European and Chinese micro-mobility markets will reach US$500 billion in 2030.

Still, the rapid adoption of e-scooters hasn’t been without snags. Streets in some cities became littered with abandoned e-scooters, prompting public backlash. Many were vandalized or mischievously thrown from bridges. In 2019, a county sheriff’s office dive team retrieved more than 50 scooters from the bottom of Portland’s Willamette River. Montreal banned Bird Canada and another e-scooter rental company, Lime, from operating in the city following a raft of “nuisances” like improperly parked scooters; Toronto’s city council opted out of Ontario’s e-scooter pilot program. 

Not so for cities in Alberta. Bird Canada estimates that 80 per cent of its 3,500 scooters are deployed in Albertan municipalities, including 750 in Calgary, its biggest market. Neuron Mobility, Calgary’s other provider, says over half of the more than two million kilometres its users have travelled in Canada were logged in the city. 

The players attribute the warmer welcome they received in Alberta to its more laissez-faire political attitudes, which differ from more heavily regulated jurisdictions. 

“It’s just very slow in Quebec,” Lyons said. “The problem is that it also attracts a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of regulatory involvement that’s probably unnecessary.” 

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek said she initially had concerns about whether riders might interfere with pedestrians with accessibility issues, or do “ridiculous things” like toss them in rivers, but ultimately decided that the vast majority would follow the rules. 

“It’s my belief that Calgarians are generally a pretty responsible bunch and they understand that if you do bad things, your opportunities become very limited,” she said.

Gondek, who used the e-scooters for occasional short trips while campaigning for mayor last year, said the scooters give commuters a cheap and low-emissions option, which can help solve the so-called “last-mile” problem in transportation, or the final leg of a journey between a public-transit stop and the rider’s destination. 

Companies have sought to address e-scooter clutter concerns with software improvements, including geo-fencing capabilities that stop them from travelling into restricted areas (riders who drift away from designated zones are immediately slowed to a crawl). Bird recently adopted Google’s ARCore Geospatial API, a mapping program that uses 3D scanning and augmented reality to track scooters “with pinpoint accuracy” to prevent riders from parking improperly. 

Lyons said software capability will increasingly define the competition between e-scooter providers and distinguish industry leaders, particularly as the hardware becomes more uniform between companies. 

“I think you’ll see, three years from now, everyone having pretty much the same scooters, or at least they’ll all look the same,” he said. “Then it’s really about the services, the app, the platform, the safety features, all that kind of stuff, which is all software-driven.” 

Neuron, which develops its software in-house, uses GPS and geolocation to monitor and gather its fleet of scooters. Other startups have entered the fray to resolve issues around where scooters get parked. San Carlos, Calif.-based Swiftmile has landed contracts with cities to establish dedicated corrals to park e-scooters and e-bikes, which it says will address concerns about congested walkways. 

Investors, for their part, have begun to join the frenzy. Miami-based Bird, which operates in more than 400 cities, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange last November as part of a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal valuing the company at US$2.3 billion. (Bird Canada is a separate private company with exclusive rights to Bird technology.) Rival company Lime, which counts Uber and Fidelity Investments among its backers, plans to go public this year after raising US$523-million in 2021.

Whether micro-mobility companies can generate the returns sought by investors remains to be seen. Bird Canada’s publicly traded U.S. parent has never reported positive earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), and posted a $36.8-million shortfall in the first quarter of 2022. Still, that trend has gradually improved since 2019. Bird’s quarterly revenue has more than doubled compared to three years ago, and EBITDA has increased from its lowest point, a US$78-million loss in the first quarter of 2020.

Neither Bird Canada nor Neuron would provide The Logic with financial results, though Lyons said Bird Canada is profitable. 

‘To improve their bottom lines, companies have been working in recent years toward building more robust scooters that can withstand punishment and remain in the company’s fleet. Startups had initially used lighter frames that would fall apart within months, increasing churn rate and raising operating costs. 

In 2017, Bird used outsourced scooters that would survive around eight months, compared to an average of about four years for its in-house-built scooters today. Neuron’s latest “commercial-grade” N3 model scooter can last as long as five years, said Ankush Karwal, head of Neuron Mobility’s Canadian market. 

“So that straight off is a big difference from what the industry used to be two years ago or from some of the other operators of today,” he said. 

Neuron, a Singapore-based company, entered Canada in 2021 and is now in six Canadian cities including Ottawa, Red Deer, Vernon, Lethbridge and Airdrie. Karwal said he is “bullish” on the potential to expand in the country as municipalities adopt micro-mobility plans. Ridership habits have also changed in recent years, he said, where scooters are increasingly becoming a viable commuting option for people working in urban centres, rather than just a bar-hopping tool at Stampede. 

“People initially started looking at e-scooters as maybe just for a joy ride. But we’ve seen that transform,” Karwal said. 

“I’ve actually seen people in Calgary wearing a suit and a tie and going for a meeting because it’s so much quicker to get onto an e-scooter than get stuck in traffic.”