It is worth beginning with a note that I am terribly risk averse, and therefore … not a ton of fun. When Ford micromobility subsidiary Spin first launched a fleet of electric scooters in my hometown of Pittsburgh last summer, my immediate instinct was very old-man-yells-at-cloud.
Youths took over the streets and sidewalks, racing around downtown and the North Shore on the orange scooters. In the hillier parts of the city — in case you don’t know anything about Pittsburgh, that’s most of the city — they were a stationary menace, abandoned on sidewalks, under bridges and in the middle of alleys.
I wrote off the Spin scooters as an inevitable consequence of city living and vowed to avoid the cursed conveyances. Around the same time, two things happened: I started editing a lot of Rebecca Bellan’s contributions to TechCrunch, and I began dating a guy who swears scooters are fun.
Founders of micromobility startups made plenty of good argu …
