‍At Jawnt, we help organizations bring sustainable transportation to their employees. For many organizations, this means traditional pre-tax transit and parking commuter benefits but we’re seeing an increasing demand from organizations around newer forms of transportation like e-bikes and e-scooters. In this guest post, Jason from Unagi highlights how e-scooters complement traditional transit modes – rather than replace them – and ultimately increase participation in commuter benefits. 

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“I’d like to ride the subway, but the station is just too far from my house.” We hear this all the time when we ask folks how they get to work. Luckily, a growing class of vehicles–small personal scooters–can help change that.

Any stroll around an urban neighborhood reveals the popularity of electric scooters. You’ll see Bird and Lime scooters parked on every block, and grinning riders zipping their way to work, a baseball game, or a friend’s apartment. Look a little closer, and you’ll also notice a new class of super-light personal scooters floating beneath the latest Nikes, Birkenstocks, and high-heeled work shoes. People are embracing scooters as a new transport accessory. They take them wherever they go, and they’re just as much a part of their commute as backpacks and cell phones.

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People can walk about 0.6 miles in 10 minutes. This means that many folks live too far from transit and shuttle stops for them to be practical parts of their commute. Add a personal scooter to the mix, and this changes dramatically. In 10 minutes, a scooting commuter can travel 2.5 miles to their stop, fold their scooter up, and board the bus to work. That’s about a 25x increase in the area (and people) served by a single bus or shuttle stop! 

At Unagi, we specialize in providing employees with the lightest personal scooters. Unagi scooters weigh 40% less than a typical Bird or Lime public scooter–where a Lime scooter is 50 lbs, Unagi is just 29. When a survey of our riders revealed that multimodal commuting is the #1 way they use their Unagis, we wanted to learn more. So we dug deeper and found a simple insight: “the 10-minute rule." Generally, people choose shared transport when pickup spots are less than 10 minutes away from their home. For our riders, this means that a subway stop that felt out of reach before can become much more accessible.

While shared scooters are ubiquitous in some cities, we’ll always make the case for personal scooters. Personal scooters are consistently charged, in great working order, and are much less expensive than Bird scooters that cost $10 for a short ride to the pharmacy. Personal scooters fold-up so they’re easy to bring into a coffee shop or office workspace. Most importantly, for companies looking to reduce car commuting, personal scooters make public transit and corporate shuttles more attractive to use.  

If your company is looking for a fun, efficient, and popular way to shift employees to shared transport, then personal scooters might be the ride you’re looking for. You can keep administration low by finding a scooter partner that integrates with your existing commuter benefits platform, offers scalable monthly employee rentals, delivers nationwide, and provides unlimited maintenance to keep your people rolling. To learn more about Unagi’s program, visit Unagi/Enterprise or reach out to Jason@unagiscooters.com.     

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