We are in the middle of a big change.
Transportation, it’s going to be very different
from what we know now.
When you build it, they will come.
When you build the bike lanes, micromobility will come.
It will be revolutionary.
And I think Israel
is in the front of the revolution.
Tel Aviv is very, very friendly for micromobility
which means the bicycle and e-bike and the e-scooter.
It's a very flat city,
so it's very easy to bike here.
Already we have 170,000 biking a day.
And from that 35,000 are the shared scooter
and the rest is private.
High tech transportation
is changing the face of Tel Aviv, quite literally.
The city is lined with bike lanes, electric scooter spaces
and people walking all around.
But it hasn't always been like this.
When I started in transportation, we decided to make a vision
how we look at it for the next 20 years.
And the first thing was to make a strategic plan
about sustainable transportation.
How we look at that.
Traffic congestion is the 2nd largest cause
of worsening emissions in Israel.
And Tel Aviv itself ranks as the
16th most congested city in the world.
Which is why reducing pollutants
and creating transportation alternatives
has become a focal point in the city’s strategy.
All the city is rebuilding
so it will be suitable in the last mile
for public transportation and micromobility.
We made a map where we want the micromobility to be.
Where do we want them to move?
We rebuilt about 160 kilometers
of bike lanes.
So micromobility and cars
can be mixed together in the same street.
We make more places for walkability.
So there is street that we decide that there is no entry for car
and it's open for more businesses to open their chairs and tables.
It's more comfortable and more clean air
and less noisy.
They used to say that the best ideas
come in the shower.
So for me, the best ideas come
when I ride in the boardwalk
from my house to Jaffa.
To me, there is no reason why
in large, congested cities, people should use cars.
Bird has literally transformed the city.
In the past 4 years, we had over 10 million rides,
over 550,000 unique users.
If you walk around the city, you see how many bike lanes
have been created since we started to operate.
In terms of the demographics, everybody uses them.
I'm riding scooters. I'm riding bikes.
I'm riding motorcycles.
I ride just about everything that moves.
The biggest concern is obviously safety.
In the past 4 years, we've gone through an education process.
Tel Aviv has had some of the earliest
and strongest scooter regulations,
like licenses being contingent on
mandatory helmet use and operators being 18 or older.
But they still cause accidents.
It's raised a lot of questions on what's needed
to keep people safe.
We have to regulate the speed to maintain safety.
More people wear helmets, ride in the right places,
and we need more enforcement.
That's very important in cities like Tel Aviv
that have many people walking,
many cars driving.
Israelis, by their nature, are early adopters
and they're innovators.
There's a reason why Israel is called startup nation.
So when they see a solution to a problem,
they go for it.
This idea of a startup nation is pretty prevalent
in Tel Aviv and it goes beyond transportation.
The city has been attracting high tech workers for years.
Over the past decade, the number of startups
has reached 3,000.
And the number of multinational research
and development centers
has tripled to 115.
Tel Aviv attracts the very young people,
people that work in high tech.
We are a startup city and those are the community
that like to bike.
The vision of the city of Tel Aviv is remarkable.
By 2025, the goal
is to have over 25% of rides
in Tel Aviv being by micromobility.
That is unparalleled to any other place in the world.
Whenever I see many e-scooters and bike riders,
I say, well those were supposed to be
car drivers and they gave up the car
and they moved to the alternative.