The Thought

The other day I was driving from work to a coffee shop about 20 minutes away by car. While maybe about 10 minutes into the drive, I began noticing all the houses along the winding roads of the suburbs, seeing a gas station or shopping center pop up every few miles inbetween. I began wondering how a place like this – a sprawling subrurban city connected to other similar cities by a network of roads – could be different if it were designed to support slower modes of transit like bikes, walking, or scooters. I’ve seen how micromobility options have opened up opportunities for commuting and recreation, creating a new community culture like seen at the Atlanta Betline, a now bustling pedestrian transit corridor. How could transit options like rental e-scooters and bikes change people’s daily routines in the suburbs? Would they meet up with friends more often or commute to work on two wheels rather than four? Could it produce a greater sense of connection amongst the people and the city? Let’s venture into the world of micromobility in the suburbs!

How Micromobility Works

First off, what even is micromobility? From my own experience, it was a hoarde of green electric scooters and bikes swarming the campus and the students fighting back by placing them in all kinds of awful places. Drowned in the lake, lost in the forest, and left confused atop of the dining commons or library. Yeah . . . the launch of Lime Scooters at Georgia Southern Uniuversity didn’t start off too hot, but we got the hang of it eventually. Students could simply find a scooter nearby, claim it in the app, and rush off across campus to be in time for their exam. I personally didn’t have to use the service when I was a student back in 2020 as I already biked and eventually skateboarded around campus, but I understood the appeal and they were widely adopted by students both for rushing off to class and a bit of leisure time on the weekends. (I learned recently though that Lime has since left the campus until the city of Statesboro forms proper regulations for use of “Personal Mobility Devices” like electric scooters. You can find out more from this local news story here.)

Micromobility in my experience could be defined as a human-scale mode of transit that is well integrated within the city or community it serves. This definition was birthed for me when I visited Chicago in the summer of 2024. Being one of the most well thought-out cities in the world, Chicago made navigating its bustling streets a breeze without a car by either walking or finding e-scooters and e-bikes located in special spots around the city. We had rented a car for our trip due to staying about an hour away from the city, but we tried to avoid driving around too much due to the high parking premiums we discovered we had to pay to keep the city as pretty as it was. We almost found it sacrilege to speed past every monumental skycraper the architects of Chicago so carefully laid out across the city for us to gaze upon walking alongside the Chicago River. Micromobility for sure may relate to the types of vehicles theemseleves that help us explore our cities, but without proper integration/adoption, these modes of transit could become victims to raging college students after failing their last exam. Micromobility is as much a culture of designing places that promote human-scaled mobility, as it is a method of human powered or electric powered transit that can in most cases be lifted by a person.

Is Micromobility Challenging to Adopt?

So micromobility can be great in cities like Chicago with its grid network of wide sidewalks and also works pretty well at a smaller scale like on college campuses, but what can make adopting micromibility challenging in a city? I think we’ve begun to reveal that answer, but let’s explore an example closer to home for me.

On my flight back from Chicago, I was greeted by the familiar tree topped hills spread across of what I once thought to be the bustling city of Atlanta. It was still a busy place, full of hustlers, but most of them were busy sitting in traffic before they could meet up to make a deal. While metro Atlanta is relatively a dense urban area, it is surrounded by sprawal, that has grown over years of Atlanta’s transition from a train transit hub, to a network of interstate highways all connected to the 285 loop that surrounds the city connecting it to its satelite city suburbs.

Within the center of Atlanta’s I-285 loop, travel by car is still the dominant mode of transit, but there are a few places where walkability and bikability are increasing. One place in particular being the Atlanta Beltline, a rail-to-trail project that connects the city of Atlanta as a pedestrian transit cooridor that encircles the city much like I-285 for cars. My personal trips to the Beltline via Ponce City Market (PCM) or Fourth Ward Park showed me just how spectecular it could be to travel at a more human space and still have all you need within reach. Along the Beltline, you’re a 15 minute walk or less away fom a grocery from PCM, 10 minutes from a quick bite to eat, and a scooter ride away from Piedmont Park. Conversely, a trip that would normally take no more than 15 minutes by car, grows to an hour due to the mass number of individuals travelling by car to get where their going in the city.

Micromobility works great along projects like the Atlanta Beltline due to it being designed for people moving at the speed of e-bike or e-scooter and not Atlanta Hellcat (iykyk). What I understood about Atlanta conversely to Chicago was that it was desiged with cars being the priority rather than pedestrians. Micromobility works best when there is community and government support to design the places they live with more human-scaled mobility in mind. We’ll for sure comeback to how Atlanta may be on the verge of an amazing reenvisioning of its city fabric, but let’s get back to the question of micromobility in the suburbs. Would it work?

What Could Micromobility Look Like in the Suburbs?

What are the few things that you need in the suburbs for micromobility to work?

To get micromobility right in the suburbs, I’m thinking we need a few key things:

• Pedestrian cooridors protected from cars
• Beautiful places to walk by and to
• Awareness of other options besides cars to get around, adopting a new culture

In some of the examples I shared, what made micromobility work in those places to some degree was that things were purpose built for human-scaled transit. Georgia Southern University, a beautiful campus to walk through, already made it easy for students to get around without a car if they chose to and this was especially an easy choice if you lived on campus in the dorms. The culture was already there, it just needed to be adapted for the influx of transit options that a student didn’t need to own on their own to access. Projects like the Atlanta Beltline demonstrate the benefits of designing projects built strictly for people to navigate their city, creating new transit routes built for pedestrians that were foreign to such a car dominant culture but is now feeling like the new norm that the people of Atlanta expect to see in the future from their city.

Unfortunately, most suburbs don’t have the luxury of unused train tracks to pave over and even if they did, it may not lead to anywhere special. They don’t have the benefit of being designed as much as possible with the people in mind first as Chicago’s residents did so desperately, especially after their city was burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. For transit options like micromobility to be succesful in the suburbs, a new culture most be cultivated as the city creates new developments that are designed people first and cars second. The way of life in the suburbs has been designed with the car in mind, but as car traffic grows with the city or consumer interests change due to rising car prices, new ways of getting around will be desired. Cities may have to look at their current road infrastructure and consider how things could be improved given their current circumstances. We could start asking questions like:

• Could multimodal transit work if the places where people want to be are too far away from each other?
• Could I catch a bus from one satelitte suburb to one of several shopping centers around town that has now been made more walkable or bikable?
• Could rental micromobility services be available in the most busy shopping areas or economies such that I could expect to easily get to where I need to be after hopping off the bus?
• What financial incentives could we give to residents for walking or riding instead of driving?
• What ways could we make our city more beautiful to walk or bike through? More street art or road decoration?
• How many lives could we save if there were fewer cars on the road and could we gain community support for road changes if they understood this?
• What forces within the community could we gain the support of to help transform the culture for the better?

These are just a few of the many questions we could begin asking to start transforming our suburbs into places where kids might bike school again rather than take the bus or be driven by busy parents. Thinking about these things and putting them to action will help our cities grow in ways we didn’t expect. New economies are built around supporting new cultures of biking and being a pedestrian. New connections arise from people seeing each other face to face more often on the streets, moving from stranger to at least acquaintance. In future blog posts, I hope to come back with more stories that explore how some suburbs have already moved to make their transit systems more human-paced. I have a feeling micromobility will be a part of the answer, so we’ll be sure to venture further there as well.

Until next time, venture on! ⚡🚲🚶🏽‍♂️🏘️

Exploring Further

Here are some sources that I passively remembered while writing this blog post on micromobility and how it might work in the suburbs. I hope you find them as interesting and insightful as I did when I first came across them.

• [What is Micromonility?

  Nic Laporte’s YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_NqBbvx7eY)

• [City on the Verge: Atlanta and the Fight for America’s Urban Future

  Book by Mark Pendergrast](https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/City-on-the-Verge-Atlanta-and-the-Fight-for-Americas-Urban-Future-by-Pendergrast-Mark/9780465054732)

• [Where We Want to Live

  Book by Ryan Gravel](https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Where-We-Want-to-Live-by-Ryan-Gravel/9781250078254)