Rider traveling on INMOTION V10 electric Unicycle.

Four wheels, two wheels, even one wheel. That's how a growing number of people are rolling on the smallest sizes of personal transportation that come under the umbrella term of micromobility. The trend is sparking new products that range from scooters and unicicyles to kits that convert pedal-powered bicycles to electric two-wheelers.

At the same time it's triggering a dilemma for cities on how to tailor their infrastructures and traffic laws so these small, lower speed vehicles can safely and conveniently co-exist with both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

Nathan Wang, head of micromobility at Particle

“There's a perception, modeling, that these are a bit of a nuisance that certainly you know, can clutter up sideway sidewalks, and you get a loud, perhaps disproportionate constituency, that is that is outspoken against it,” observed Nathan Wang, head of micromobility at Particle, in an interview.

Particle is an integrated IoT platform that assists companies in building their online presence and has been especially active in the micromobility segment.

He points out the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic three years ago accelerated development and use of personal mobility options such as bicycles and electric scooters parked along busy streets available to rent or lease for taking short hops, say, from a bus stop to work.

The flaw in the concept, says Wang, is when cities severely restrict where these personal mobility devices can travel or park, noting, “I do think that, generally speaking, a lot of the restrictions are a little heavy handed. It's hard to deliver on the promise of free urban mobility, like the ease of access within your city, when you don't have the ability to park in destinations that you know, are actually where you're trying to go.”

Despite those challenges, innovative new modes of micromobility are arriving in the marketplace giving the public some novel choices for short-distance transportation.

INMOTION, based in Guangdong Province, China, produces both one and two-wheeled personal electric micromobility devices.

Noting 60% of all trips are five miles or less, in emailed answers to our questions, INMOTION CEO Bob Yan said his company decided an electric unicycle would provide people a way to get around in a fun way but more importantly, give them an alternative to making those short trips in cars that's “clean, accessible, city friendly and most importantely, it should make people happy.”

The Challenger model has a riding range of about 55-87 miles.

Admitting a unicycle isn't for everyone, INMOTION also produces four different electric scooters—the latest of which is the INMOTION Climber which sells for about $1,000. Equipped with dual motors, it's for people who live in hilly areas.

After a decade in the business, Yan observes that interest in personal electric vehicles is on the rise with his company experiencing 40% growth for each of the past three years.

Where in some quarters, electric scooters may be considered only recreational devices, or worse, toys, Yan believes personal electric vehicles can be both “useful tools” and fun.

Coming at personal mobility from a different direction, UK-based Swytch Bike offers an easy-to-install kit to convert virtually any conventional bicycle into one where the rider's pedal pushes are given an electric assist. The Swytch Kit is a low-cost alternative to more expensive e-bikes, according to Swytch Bike co-founder and CEO Oliver Montague.

The company is already on its second version of the kit with a smaller, but more powerful battery. It's small enough for a spare to fit in a rider's pocket. A larger size battery with more range is also available.

Oliver Montague, co-founder and CEO, Swytch Bike, which produces kit to convert conventional ... [+] bicycles to electric bikes.

“So whereas the ebike market has been growing 20 or 30% per year, we've been growing 300% per year,” said Montague in an interview. “We have more than 1.2 million people that have registered on our website with the interest to buy a Swytch Kit. We collect about 100,000 emails every one or two months of people coming to our website saying wow, that's a cool product and sign up.”

We were provided a kit to evaluate and it's remarkably both simple to install and surprisingly powerful.

Swytch Bike e-conversion kit installed on reporter's Trek FX 1 bike.

Installation required only swapping out the front wheel of this reporter's Trek FX 1 bike for the Swytch wheel that contained the electric motor in its hub. A pedal motion sensor was then snapped on and secured by cable ties, the battery holder was quickly attached to the handlbar and all the cables easily attached by snapping into their color-coded connectors. All in installation took about 10 minutes.

Once underway, after a couple of pedals the electric motor kicked in and the power was evident. A hill normally climbed at about 8-10 mph was easily scaled going twice the speed with less than half the effort.

While a Swytch Kit is nominally priced at about $1,000, that's not what most people pay. The company operates on a crowdfunding business model, with Montague explaining, “that kind of crowd preorder is that instead of selling the kits for $500 to Walmart, and then Walmart selling them to you for $1,000, our model is to find 5,000 customers at a time and sell everyone the same price that we would have offered Walmart.”

The next opportunity to pre-order a Swytch Kit is the first week of March but you have to sign up on a waitlist on the company's website for an invitation to order and be offered a 50% discount which would put the price at about $599. The current wait for delivery is about three months.

With the growing popularity of both electric-assisted bikes and personal micromobility in general, Montague sees the potential market for the Swytch Kit in the billions, declaring, “It's really just a matter of how many people with bikes can we convince they might like it to be electric. That potential target market is for, like, billions of people.”

So as communities learn to live with these small, but fun and functional mobility devices and companies continue to come up with new versions and choices, Particle's Nate Wang sees both the opportunity and wonder of what's ahead for society and his company.

“We hope to sort of start the shared mobility revolution. We're still very active there,” he enthused, “In scooters and mopeds and your bikes and all sorts of crazy forms, electric boats even so, wow, that's pretty exciting space.”