The future of transportation is already here — but even by the standards of new technology, it is very unevenly distributed.
Self-driving cars, a long-promised revolution, are still only available to a few hundred people in a handful of select sites around the world. Meanwhile, electric bikes and scooters are quickly becoming ubiquitous in dozens of cities.
It may seem churlish to set e-scooters, which resemble a child’s toy, alongside self-driving cars. But they are both trying to solve many of the same problems: providing alternatives to traditional cars in order to reduce congestion and emissions. They are just approaching them in different ways — and only one of them is using the traditional Silicon Valley playbook.