Disposable infrastructures: ‘Micromobility’ platforms and the political economy of transport disruption in Austin, Texas

Abstract

The rapid rise of digital platform-based transportation services over the past decade has begun to transform urban mobility. Fleets of dockless bicycles and scooters – or ‘micromobility’– represent the newest horizon of investment, particularly in the United States. Micromobility platforms launch rapidly, with minimal public planning or funding and no fixed infrastructure, using inexpensive, GPS-connected vehicles stored in public space. These platforms represent a deepening of the neoliberalisation of transport, in which infrastructural properties emerge biopolitically from the dynamics of private platforms. This article examines public debates over the regulation of micromobility platforms in Austin, Texas, in early 2018. Drawing on interviews with city officials and bikesharing professionals, observation of public meetings and GIS analysis of usage data, we argue that conflicts we observed over new micromobility platforms – specifically ‘clutter’, equity in geographic coverage and data privacy – obscured the deeper political economy of platformisation and the austerity that limited the effectiveness of the existing public station-based bikeshare system. In Austin, the search for ‘innovative’ micromobility transportation at no public cost resulted in the further erosion of the underfunded public system. We argue that despite their flexible, low-carbon image, existing micromobility platforms in the United States largely exploit rather than address inadequacies of urban transport.