Beryl Micromobility Interview

We had the pleasure to sit down with Phil Ellis, Beryl CEO, and discuss micromobility for public good

Intro: Micromobility is a new industry which is likely to undergo a transformation similar to that of the mobile phone industry in the 1990s. We recently had the privilege of speaking with Philip Ellis, CEO of Beryl, one of the UK's largest dedicated micromobility company.

Beryl operates micromobility schemes and partners with towns and cities including Norwich, Hereford, Watford, Isle of Wight, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole to help them deliver their own micromobility schemes.

Their products and technology are sold to some of the large transport authorities in the UK for the systems that they run themselves, including Transport for West Midlands and Transport for Greater Manchester. We asked Phil about a range of issues facing the micromobility industry here in the UK.

Ed: How do you define micromobility? Phil: Micromobility is anything above walking and below public transport, human or electric powered.

Ed: In terms of priorities, we’ll start with the local authorities and councils you work with. Are you on the right end of their decision making?

Phil: Before e-scooters, bikeshare contracts required some public subsidy which gets into quite a long-term, slow process. However, if you fill out the whole mixed mode, you have a larger, addressable market. If you have an e-scooter-only scheme, you can deliver that without a subsidy from the local authority. And then you get into an interesting scenario; what are you excluding? If you have an e-scooter-only scheme, what's being left behind? There are demographics that are left behind from an age, gender and income perspective. It's important to have the mix of devices to put micromobility on a proper, public-good footing, and to play a strategic role in public transport. Ed: How could councils grant planning permissions to better serve the micromobility industry? For example, supermarkets and fuel stations have critical infrastructure in towns that could be put to use.

Phil: What seems really dangerous to me, for example, is government talking about planning requirements for all houses to be built with an electric charging port. That's just such a bad idea because it embeds electric vehicles; it doesn't do anything to get people out of cars and onto micromobility. There are lots of levers that local authorities could pull. I think you're right; micromobility systems have to operate from somewhere. They have to operate from a space that somebody controls. And it's really important in micromobility systems to get a good density of pick-up and drop-off locations. Ed: And that’s in the gift of councils… Phil: Yes, and I think that’s probably right that it is. You could run a micromobility service exclusively from private land, right? If you had a dense-enough network, perhaps with, as you say, all the fuel forecourts and all the supermarkets, perhaps university land. You could get a bunch of private landowners together and have sufficient-enough space to run a good micro mobility solution. I suppose that is possible. But that's a longer, more difficult thing to do…

Ed: Which is perhaps an interesting argument to be had for the future. I think local authorities have such an important role in the curation of a post-car, low-traffic environment. If that argument is cogent enough then councils and local authorities will really get to see the value of shared micromobility; improving their offering and increasing their support. We have to campaign for a low-traffic environment. And micromobility is the solution for a low-traffic world.

Phil: What you’re talking about there is quite a lot of joined up council work between a planning department, a regeneration department, a transport department etc.

The mobility hubs that people talk about, are often managed as transport projects. Local authorities will always have to ensure that operators are acting in the way that they think is beneficial to transport provision in that city or that town.

Ed: And that leads us onto the most obvious thing, which is that the current transport network, including the railway stations, has a really important part to play in this story and in the growth of this industry. If we can get current transport networks on board, then I think we it's going to really help the integration of micromobility solutions in town centres.

Phil: For micromobility to do well, public transport has to do well because it's about the mode shift away from the car. Ed: Ultimately the question we have to answer is how do we get to the low-traffic, post-car world?

Phil: There are examples of towns and cities where public transport is good and micromobility provision is good, but traffic is still an issue. Good, public transport is the carrot that could change behaviour. But we need a stick.

Ed: The stick is corporate responsibility; large corporates showing that they are reducing the traffic to their services. Micromobility is an excellent solution for the post-traffic world. We are barking up the wrong tree with electric vehicles; it's really traffic that we've got to get our heads around. In the most practical sense, I think you've already said it; getting more parking spaces, that's what you need from councils. What else?

Phil: Safe, segregated paths for vulnerable road users are the most important investments that any local authority or highways authority can make.

We saw it at the beginning of the pandemic, when the number of cyclists increased because people felt safer with fewer cars on the roads. If you build segregated cycle lanes, cyclists will come, you know, as long as it's a good quality, whether benefiting those who are on shared devices like ours or those who just own their bike.

It's always good news when customers feedback to say they've used our system and then they've bought their own bike, because that actually probably means that they're now travelling more often on sustainable modes. I still think of them as our customer because they maybe do that commute twice a day every day on a bike, but they'll find themselves in town, needing to pop somewhere and they'll use our bike. It just elevates the overall role of sustainable transport within the city. What more can councils do to improve their offering to companies like yours?

Phil: We’re quite happy with the examples of the schemes we run where we have long term contracts with a local authority; we have exclusivity with a local authority which gives us the ability to invest in the scheme, the quality of the service and build up the customer behaviours. We build up the customer base and can do so exclusively across bikes and e-bikes and e-scooters and cargo bikes. The riders are selecting the vehicle that's most appropriate for them; for that journey or that task or that errand or that commute, whatever it is that needs doing. Our contract in Norwich is a good example of that where we have dedicated space. We have long term contracts and we have exclusivity. The big, integrated transport providers like West Midlands and Greater Manchester have also taken a long-term view and invested in their own bike share system. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with things like e-scooters. Will they bring those into their direct control or are they going to let private operators continue to run alongside their public infrastructure? It feels to me that if we want all of micromobility to be a fundamental part of public transport infrastructure, which we do, then the transport authority should want to control it.

Ed: We need to apply pressure on those who actually bring traffic to conurbations. Supermarkets are large traffic drivers and they must have a responsibility in the same way that gambling companies and confectionery companies take responsibility for the damaging effects of their products. I think we're in the same position as Jamie Oliver with his sugar tax.

Phil: We’re a long way from the sugar tax in fact. There are actually incentives to drive, such as tax deductions for companies and benefits for employees.

Ed: We won't get there until the industry can coalesce around a powerful message. What do you think is going to happen in the industry over the next two to three years?

Phil:The future of the transport bill will be very important to what happens in the UK. That should make it clearer how this new class of e-scooter, of power transporter, can operate. Getting clarity on that is going to lead to massive change in the number of people riding around on micromobility devices. There are a lot of people who cycle, but there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, just prefer not to cycle, and a lot of those people might choose to scoot instead - or whatever the verb ends up being. I think that will change a lot of the commercial models. And then it needs to be implemented at the local level in a coherent way for shared transport. And that's what we're advocating for; fully joined up micromobility systems that are controlled by a local authority, by whatever contracting method, integrated into the planning department and the public transport department and the public transport system and everything that goes with it. And I think that will happen, actually.