This map from the ScooterMap app has a cap (apologies to Dr. Seuss) of 1000 scooters at a time, but Figure 1 shows the 1000 it decided to show me when I zoomed in on downtown L.A. and environs.

Okay, sure, so they're a plaything for tourists and a handful of millennial urbanite hipsters? Not so fast. Check out Figure 2, the map from a much more residential part of the city with few tourist attractions. These things are everywhere. In a not-insubstantial part of Los Angeles, you can probably find one within a few blocks of your home. And, anecdotally, I see a wide range of people using them, across a spectrum of race, social class, and apparent purpose.

Metro Bike Share has ubiquitous coverage in a couple regions, with a big hole in between, but expect that to change over time too. And they've recently rolled out electric-assist bikes, which may increase their appeal to a broader swath of the population for a broader range of trips. I tried one: it doesn't feel like you're riding a motorized vehicle. The motor is near-silent and just gives you a modest boost as you pedal, making you feel like a normal cyclist who hasn't skipped leg day at the gym in a long time.

The problems that everybody freaked out about when the scooter boom first took off seem to be resolving themselves. Cities can now designate no-parking and no-riding areas, and at least with some providers, the apps themselves enforce the rules. You can't end your ride until you deposit your scooter somewhere legal, and if you take a scooter into a no-ride zone (as I discovered the hard way near Venice Beach), your GPS lets it know and it and simply slows to a halt on its own. For the most part, scooter parking is also beginning to exhibit signs of emergent order, as informal parking zones establish themselves, and riders take their cues from those around them and (mostly) line scooters up neatly against the curb instead of splayed across the sidewalk.

Walkability on Steroids

L.A. is already more walkable than you'd think for a city dominated by suburban-style neighborhoods of single-family houses. Walkscore ranks Los Angeles in the top 20% among 141 North American and Australian cities. The key: relatively high density, a well-connected street grid, and many small businesses serving neighborhood needs.

What bikes and scooters on-demand do is put walkability on steroids. They combining the freedom of walking—just step out your door and go, and arrive right at the door of your destination—with a speed that's somewhat closer to that of driving and lets you reach much more.

I'm staying downtown, so I've been scooting around for days. I can get places in 5 to 10 minutes that would take 25 on foot. I'm rarely the only scooter rider on a given block at a given time, and it's no wonder: 60,000 people now live in downtown L.A. alone, the equivalent of a whole medium-size city. Meeting up with a friend? Quick grocery run? Live at one edge of downtown and work at the other—a distance that might not always make for a comfortable walk? You now have one more option than you used to.

The Real Secret Sauce: Combining Micro + Macro Mobility

The real game-changer, though, it seems to me, is the combination of micromobility (scooters, bikes, et al.) and good old-fashioned public transit. Especially once you get outside downtown, or other compact enclaves like Santa Monica.

The L.A. metro has a few rail/subway lines (and some solid bus rapid transit in the San Fernando Valley), but the Expo Line is the one I used on this particular trip. It runs from downtown, through a swath of the city's western neighborhoods, out to the ocean at Santa Monica. It costs $1.75 to ride. And it runs every 12 minutes throughout the day on weekdays, and never more than every 20. I've been to plenty of denser, more "urban" U.S. cities that boast commuter rail that covers a similar distance—a 15 to 20 mile stretch—but can't remotely compete with that on price or frequency.

The LA metro doesn't have very comprehensive coverage; many areas are far from rail service. And I'm told the bus system can be slow and unwieldy. This is where all of these two-wheeled "micromobility" options are transformative. There's been a big line-up of a couple dozen scooters and bikes at just about every rail station I've seen.

Ordinarily, we think of the walkshed of a transit station as 10 or 15 minutes: if you have to walk any longer than that to get to a station, you're unlikely to find transit useful as a regular means of getting around. These two-wheeled, medium-speed options, if they're predictably available on demand at both ends of that trip, are a game-changer, because they triple or quadruple the number of people who are within 10-15 minutes of useful transit.

In most of Los Angeles between downtown and the beach (an area with about 2 million inhabitants, comparable to the entire metropolitan area of Nashville, Cleveland, Kansas City, or Austin), here's what living without a daily need for a car might look like in the near future. You walk out your front door, find a bike or scooter within a few blocks, take it to a train or express-bus stop within a couple miles, and ride that train or express bus to anywhere it goes. Does this serve every trip, person, or need? No. But it serves a lot of them. And it's just the beginning of what has so far been a rapidly accelerating trend.

The Way Forward

The thing that L.A. can do, and that a place like metro Atlanta with its pod-like, disconnected subdivisions will struggle to do, is this: L.A. can evolve incrementally out of its car habit. It’s already on that path.

Los Angeles is too densely populated for driving to be fast and painless anymore. Billion-dollar efforts to fight freeway congestion by widening have failed miserably, run aground on the rocks of induced demand. L.A. will never, ever, build its way out of car congestion.