The micromobility obituaries that ran through 2024 and 2025 got one thing right and one thing wrong. Right: the venture-scale scooter companies were never going to earn back their capital at the unit economics they promised investors. Wrong: this proves that Americans do not want to make short trips on small vehicles. The evidence for the second claim is a lot thinner than the first.

In the cities where scooter and e-bike ridership held up after the venture crash — Minneapolis, Washington, Salt Lake — the common factor is not price, brand, or operator. It is that the trip is legal and physically possible along the entire route. A protected lane, or at least a road narrow enough and slow enough that the rider is not adjacent to a forty-mile-per-hour arterial, converts a scary trip into an ordinary one. Nothing about the vehicle changes.

The zoning-and-street-design story is boring but decisive. American cities separated their residential and commercial parcels far enough apart that the last mile is a mile, not a quarter of one. They then paved the connective tissue as arterial road optimized for fifty-mile-per-hour car travel. A scooter or e-bike is a rational vehicle for a half-mile trip on a street where the fastest car is going twenty. It is an unreasonable one on a stroad where the fastest car is going fifty.

The corrective is not a better scooter. It is a slower street. Every city that has made short-trip cycling durable has done it by narrowing the roadway, dropping speed limits with physical enforcement rather than signage, and building a network of low-stress routes that lets a rider get from origin to destination without a single scary block. This is expensive if measured in political capital. It is essentially free if measured in construction dollars, because most of the interventions are paint, planters, and traffic-signal timing.

The last mile was never a last-mile problem. It was a street-design problem the whole time, and the vehicles were only a symptom of what the streets would allow. The cities that figure this out will inherit the second wave of micromobility. The cities that keep waiting for a better scooter will keep watching parked ones rust beside their arterials.