Ten Years In: What Changed Since Bird's First Scooter Hit L.A. Streets
Dear Friends and Partners of CoMotion,
Ten years ago, we had a hunch. Not a business plan, not a fully formed strategy, but a hunch that the world of urban mobility was about to change in ways none of us could entirely predict, and that it needed a place to come together and make sense of itself.
That hunch became CoMotion.
Our first edition, in 2017, also turned out to be Year One of the Mobility Revolution. In September of that year, a tiny Santa Monica start-up Bird placed a handful of electric scooters on West L.A. streets. Uber was starting to make urbanites think twice about taking their own cars to get around the city — and raising political questions about who owns the street. In all of 2017, Tesla sold a little over 100,000 cars, about what a GM or Toyota then moved in a slow week. And Los Angeles, our home city, had just committed to the most ambitious public transit expansion in American history: $120 billion to reimagine how a car-dependent metropolis moves.
CoMotion was where this extraordinary ferment came together.
Entrepreneurs, city leaders, investors, transit authorities, automotive executives, technology pioneers — all in one room, arguing, building, connecting, dreaming. We created a space that didn’t exist before: a genuinely global, genuinely cross-sector platform for the future of movement. It was where public met private, an acknowledgment that urban mobility takes place on the public right of way.
In the decade since, much of what seemed visionary in 2017 has become reality. Electric vehicles are now mainstream, yet charging infrastructure is still struggling to keep pace.
Autonomous vehicles (Google’s Self-Driving Car Project had just become an independent Alphabet company named Waymo in 2017) now remain both closer and further than headlines suggest. Micromobility has transformed cities around the globe and frustrated regulators in equal measure. The energy transition has accelerated dramatically and brought new urgency to the question of how mobility and clean power must evolve together.
Through all of it, CoMotion has been a constant: a place to cut through the noise, encounter the people shaping what comes next, and forge the partnerships that turn ideas into reality. We are proud of what we have built and more energized than ever about what lies ahead.
Our special 10th edition of CoMotion LA, November 18 & 19, featuring the OMF Summit, won’t be a celebration of the past, but a marker that we are in an exhilarating new phase of the Mobility Revolution. The challenges of sustainable mobility — decarbonizing transportation, making cities livable, connecting communities that have been left behind, managing the geopolitics of a rapidly shifting industrial landscape — are, if anything, much more urgent and more complex than they were when we started.
So is the need for a platform like CoMotion: convening the right people, asking the right questions, and creating the conditions for breakthroughs.
To everyone who has been part of this journey (as a speaker, a sponsor, a partner, an attendee, a colleague), thank you. You are CoMotion. And the best is still ahead.
Be part of what comes next. And connect with me on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
See you in LA in November! Register here.
