Why are Cities Choosing LINK?

LINK, Superpedestrian’s new shared fleet scooter, has burst onto the micromobility scene, attracting some of the industry’s brightest minds and winning over cities with a model grounded in urban planning and sustainability. What’s behind LINK’s rapid rise?

Since May 2020, Superpedestrian has won the privilege to operate LINK — our new, groundbreaking shared fleet e-scooter — in a total of eight cities worldwide, including Rome and Seattle. With its beefy frame, large wheels and wide footboard, the LINK certainly looks and feels different from other e-scooters. One recent rider put it best, saying: “Other scooters feel like a flimsy flip-flop. LINK feels like a sturdy work boot.” Indeed, the LINK was designed to be robust and ensure riders can safely and comfortably get between destinations.

But that’s not the only difference; Superpedestrian’s origin story is unique in the micromobility industry. The company was conceived and launched by a team of MIT urbanists with extensive experience designing multimodal transport solutions for cities. These unique origins continue to inform every product and decision.

Our Origins: A Transportation Robotics Company Focused on Cities First

Superpedestrian’s journey began in 2004, when our CEO Assaf Biderman co-founded the Senseable City Lab in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an internationally-renowned lab at the forefront of the smart cities movement. Assaf and his team worked directly with global city leaders to problem solve and plan for digital innovation in cities. One challenge they foresaw (and continue to study) is ever-expanding urban populations; the team reasoned that cities would need many more, smaller, cleaner transport options in order to thrive. Today, we call this micromobility.

Superpedestrian (LINK’s parent company) was spun out of the MIT Lab in 2013 with the mission of developing the world’s most reliable and advanced lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs). Then and now, our team comprises people who study and care passionately about cities and want to make them even better.

Our Technology: The Patented Vehicle Intelligence System

When Superpedestrian began designing better LEVs, the first challenge was closing the information gap. Most e-bikes and other small electrified modes do not provide information to users about their mechanical status, making it difficult to know for certain when a vehicle is safe to ride. Superpedestrian’s first endeavor was to engineer a system to manage micro-vehicle performance. This effort culminated in our patented Vehicle Intelligence System (VIS), a collection of sensors, firmware, and onboard diagnostic technology that monitors the mechanical and electrical status of an entire vehicle in real time, and autonomously resolves a majority of potential issues.

VIS found its first home in the Copenhagen Wheel, an e-bike entirely contained in a rear bicycle wheel, which went on sale in 2016. Around the same time, the shared e-scooter boom began. As our founder Assaf recognized early on, small electric vehicles could be a real urban mobility solution — and scooters seemed to be among the form factors that people liked most.

Our Innovations: The Smart + Safe Shared Scooter

Superpedestrian wanted to bring our transformative micromobility technology to scooters to make them safe for riders and respectful to cities. So, instead of hastily launching a shared service as many others did, we instead set out in 2018 to engineer a completely new scooter from the wheels up. With the VIS system as the heart of the vehicle, our team focused the next two years on designing and validating every component of the LINK scooter.

The combination of VIS plus Superpedestrian’s mechanical engineering expertise means that the LINK scooter has unprecedented capabilities, and can address many of the problems early e-scooter models faced. LINK solves industry pain-points of short vehicle lifespans, lack of durability for shared use, poor economic sustainability for operators, poor city compliance, and mechanical and electronic failures that put riders at risk.

The finished Superpedestrian scooter — LINK — is the culmination of over 7 years of development and is unlike any other model on the market. It can travel upwards of 55 miles on a single charge, is extremely durable, contains on-board mapping technology, was designed for rider stability, self-reports safety issues, and requires less intensive maintenance thanks to VIS’ ability to spot and remedy performance issues. Our e-scooter is vastly more compliant with city rules around parking and no-ride zones because our on-board maps enable geofencing enforcement in under one second — up to up to 30 times faster than other operators.

Our Plan: Bring Reliable Operations and Transparency to the Micromobility Industry

Today, LINK operates scooter sharing in Knoxville, TN; Columbus, OH; Salt Lake City and Provo, UT; Fort Pierce, FL; Manhattan, KS; and Rome, Italy. We will be launching in Seattle, WA in the coming weeks, and have plans to expand to at least a dozen more markets in the U.S. and Europe by Spring 2021.

In each case, we’ve launched only with city permission. We always start with a small fleet and increase size to keep pace with demand. We distribute, charge, and maintain our fleets entirely in-house, with a staff of full and part-time W-2 employees rather than ‘gig’ labor. We strive to offer the best possible service, quickly remedy any issues, and form productive, long-term partnerships with each and every city.

We have high expectations for the performance of our e-scooter, and the compliance of our operations. We also plan to bring more transparency to the industry, sharing our experience around what works and what doesn’t as we fight to make micromobility an integral part of the transport system. Follow along as we strive to move mountains (of cars).