In congested Istanbul, electric scooters find a spiritual home

Istanbul is not naturally an ideal biking city. As hilly as San Francisco but with 17 times the population, Turkey’s largest metropolis is hard to navigate by human-powered pedal. Travelling by car can be an even greater struggle, with roads ranked the most congested in the world. 

Such transportation challenges have primed Istanbul to follow other cities across the world and embrace a different kind of vehicle: the electric scooter. The little vehicles can zip up hills faster than bicycles, emitting no carbon along the way in an urban area where air pollution-related health issues account for as much as 27% of the country’s overall medical costs. 

Since they first hit Istanbul’s streets in 2019, the number of e-scooters has grown to an estimated 36,000. Among the burgeoning micromobility companies in Turkey, none has had a greater impact than Marti Ileri Teknoloji AS, the first operator to launch in the country. It runs a fleet of more than 46,000 battery-powered scooters, mopeds and bikes in Istanbul and other Turkish cities, and its app has been downloaded 5.6 million times.

“If you put all these things together — traffic, expensive alternative transportation alternatives, lack of public transportation alternatives, air pollution, [lack of] taxi penetration — it’s very obvious why we have the demand that we do,” Oguz Alper Oktem, Marti’s co-founder and CEO, told Bloomberg CityLab at a micromobility conference in the Bay Area this September. “It’s a unique market, and we are the solution.”

Some cities in Europe have seen such a proliferation of e-scooters that local authorities are now figuring out how to regulate them. Paris reacted to a hit-and-run incident by threatening to ban them, before setting a speed limit. Stockholm has capped the number of the micro-vehicles allowed to operate in the Swedish capital. But in Istanbul, the early struggle was more about getting them on the roads than policing them. 

The industry has come a long way since Oktem first started raising capital for Marti, when he said potential tech investors “laughed in my face.” Oktem had been a successful COO of BluTV, Turkey’s streaming TV service, but still was only able to raise less than half a million dollars initially. The company ran out of that early funding quickly.

“I had to give up my apartment. The bank took back my car. I slept in the office for, like, a year,” he said. His sister and co-founder, Sena Oktem, ran a one-woman call centre while Oktem himself was out in the field charging scooters those first few months. 

Three and a half years later, Marti says it will have an implied enterprise value of $532m (R94.27bn) once it debuts on the New York Stock Exchange by merging with a special purpose acquisition company. Though it leads the country’s micromobility market — and was the subject of an antitrust investigation that was dropped last month — it’s not the only Turkish operator. Hop and BinBin, two other Turkish companies, have started building their own scooter fleets.

“The goal is to be an end-to-end transportation alternative,” said Oktem, who is 31. “When somebody gets out of their apartment, you want them to just take out the Marti app, look at it and be like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna go eight miles to that destination, let me take an e-bike. I'm gonna go six miles, let me take the e-moped. I'm gonna go a mile and a half to the grocery store, let me take a scooter.’” McKinsey estimated that Turkey’s mobility market, which includes private vehicles, taxis and public transportation, amounted to $55bn (roughly R977bn) to $65bn (roughly R1.15-trillion) in 2021.

Of that, shared micromobility accounted for just $20m (roughly R355.3bn) to $30m (roughly R532.9m). But the analysts projected that it could grow to an $8bn to $12bn market by 2030 if cities like Istanbul deterred people from using cars and followed through on planned investments in infrastructure, such as new bike paths. With an estimated 36,000 scooters, Istanbul’s fleet is larger than Berlin’s and Rome’s, which micromobility publication Zag Daily calculated as 30,000 and 14,000, respectively. 

Turkey is also addressing the question of how to accommodate e-scooters. Making space to park them on Istanbul’s densely packed city sidewalks has come with its own challenges, ones that are familiar to US and European cities like Stockholm. 

In response to complaints that the vehicles are impeding foot traffic, especially for people with disabilities, Istanbul launched a parking pilot that will provide 52 new scooter spaces in certain neighbourhoods, according to the Hurriyet Daily News. Safety is also a concern, wrote one local news station. Rules limiting the use of scooters to people over the age of 16, and barring more than one person from riding at once are not always followed.

Oktem, like many micromobility boosters, says the scooters aren’t the real problem. What’s worse is the way cars have dominated cities, with sidewalks left to be narrow afterthoughts. “People just have completely accepted the nuisance and the horribleness of cars,” he says. A third of all rides on Marti vehicles are taken to or from a public transit station. 

With pedestrian and rider-focused infrastructure improvements still in progress, Turkey’s uptake of shared mobility is in its early stages, Alexandre Gauquelin, a shared micromobility consultant, and Harry Maxwell, who heads marketing for micromobility data company Fluctuo, wrote in a blog post. But they argue that the more riders who hop on, the more the government will be pushed to design accordingly.

“It seems that, in Turkey’s case, micromobility usage is the chicken, and infrastructure the egg,” they wrote. “If the political will is in line with this usage rate, there is no doubt that shared mobility has a bright future.”

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