New modes of transport: Understanding emerging mobility dynamics

Urban roads were not always designed for the vehicles that use them today. E-bikes and e-scooters have moved from niche to mainstream in a matter of years. In London alone, over 12 million e-bike trips were recorded between 2019 and 2023 (Steer Lime Report, 2023), and e-scooter rental schemes across UK trial cities were generating over 100,000 trips per week as of 2023 (Department for Transport). The question is no longer whether these modes are here to stay. It’s how their presence is reshaping the dynamics of shared road space.

The rapid rise of new modes of transport

The shift has been fast and structurally significant. UK e-bike sales are projected to reach 165,000 units in 2025, a 13% increase on 2024, with the total market value expected to hit £375 million (Bicycle Association, 2025). Meanwhile, 1 in 4 UK adults has already considered purchasing an e-bike (Electric Bike Alliance). E-scooter trial schemes are now active across 24 areas of England (Department for Transport), with the UK e-scooter sharing market ranking as the fifth largest in the world (Statista, 2023).

These are not marginal additions to the transport system. They represent a structural diversification of road users, arriving at a pace that infrastructure planning has not always anticipated. The result is a more complex shared environment, where the rules of cohabitation are still being written.

New interactions in shared environments

The introduction of new modes doesn’t simply add volume to existing flows. It changes the nature of those flows.
E-bikes travel at speeds of up to 15.5 mph under motor assistance (Gov.UK), placing them in a speed range that can exceed pedestrian movement by a factor of five and conflict with conventional cyclists in shared lanes. E-scooters follow a similar pattern, with 60% of users riding them for commuting purposes (DfT, 2022) on corridors that were not designed to accommodate this level of mixed-mode traffic.

These speed differentials generate new forms of interaction that are more complex and less predictable than traditional vehicle flows. Trajectories intersect. Anticipation windows shrink. In constrained urban spaces, the margin for error narrows for every user present.
This is not a question of the number of users on the road. It is a question of how they interact with each other.

Reading these transformations through mobility data

These new dynamics are not always captured by traditional road safety indicators. They are visible primarily in real usage patterns: actual speeds practised, density of flows by mode, and zones of recurring interaction between user types.

Mobility data makes it possible to identify the corridors where speed becomes heterogeneous across user types, the stretches where interactions between modes multiply during peak hours, and the environments where behaviours become less stable and less predictable.

This reading does not replace infrastructure investment. It directs it. Rather than applying uniform solutions across an entire network, it becomes possible to identify precisely where the shared environment has reached a threshold that requires intervention and where it has not.

Anticipating how usage will evolve

New modes of transport are not a transitional phenomenon. The UK government’s Transport Decarbonisation Plan has set a target of 10% of all urban journeys to be made by e-bike by 2030 (Department for Transport, 2025), requiring approximately 1.5 million active e-bikes on UK roads.

Between 2020 and 2024, an average of two cyclists died and 78 were seriously injured per week on British roads (DfT, 2024). As e-bike usage grows and e-scooter regulation evolves, the risk dynamics of shared infrastructure will continue to shift.

The challenge for mobility stakeholders is not to observe these transformations after the fact. It is to understand, in advance, how they are reconfiguring the use of public space and where they are creating risk concentrations that existing data has not yet captured.

At MICHELIN Mobility Intelligence, we help mobility stakeholders analyse the real impact of emerging modes on their networks, using mobility data to identify where new dynamics are forming and how they can be managed proactively.

Want to better understand the impact of new mobility modes on your road network? Contact our teams to find out how our solutions can support you.

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