Fad or Future?

By Jake Blumgart

When Michael Keating cofounded the shared electric vehicle company Scoot Networks in 2011, he wanted to bring sharable electric mopeds to the streets of San Francisco as a bid to increase residents' non-car transportation options. But he decided to take a different path than the one paved by its transportation disruption forerunners Uber and Lyft: Keating immediately took his idea to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

"I got myself in front of the head of the transportation agency and said, 'Hey, I'm going to start this crazy business with electric motorbikes like Vespas,'" recalls Keating, now Scoot's CEO. "'I just want to let you know I'm going to follow all the rules, we are going to be very focused on safety, and I want to give you a heads-up.'"

As the company got off the ground, Keating met with numerous city officials to make sure they knew what was coming and that he was listening to their concerns. Scoot had no trouble with its 2012 launch with 50 shared Vespa-style electric motorbikes and enjoyed the full support of the mayor and the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Perhaps it's little surprise, then, that Scoot — which now has 1,000 electric motorbikes on the city's streets — is one of just two companies currently allowed to operate shared electric kick scooters in San Francisco as part of a regulatory trial program. The trial follows a citywide ban last June in response to a sudden, regulation-flaunting inundation of dockless electric vehicles from multiple players, including the biggest scooter companies, Lime and Bird.

Supporters of these companies argue that breaking a few regulations is worth the cost if it means another means of non-car transportation becomes a serious option. Transportation is the largest contributor to American carbon emissions, and scooter boosters say that these vehicles can be part of the solution. Scooters have the potential to dramatically change urban transportation by driving users away from cars — or even car sharing — and making public transportation more accessible by narrowing the window of time necessary to get to a station or stop.

But it remains to be seen whether Scoot and its compatriots will be allowed to scale to a level that could revolutionize urban transportation — or whether a revolution can be fostered within the confines of the law at all.

Scoot is one of two companies allowed to operate electric kick scooters in San Francisco's year-long pilot program. Skip, based in Washington, D.C., is the other scooter provider. Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Scoot CEO Michael Keating worked with officials to comply with San Francisco city rules. Photo Bloomberg via Scoot.

Playing by the rules

When ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft debuted, they bypassed regulatory regimes, city officialdom, and local taxi laws. As regulators contemplated what to do, the services became so popular that officials' hands were tied. They legalized ride sharing after the fact. But when, over the course of 2018, several large shared electric scooter companies followed the Uber model and flooded San Francisco and other cities across the U.S. with thousands of the dockless vehicles, backlash was swift and harsh.

While enthusiasts praised the new transportation option for its convenience, San Francisco's approach was the opposite of laissez-faire. In June 2018, the city temporarily banned the vehicles and forced interested transportation companies to apply for a limited pilot program that would require competition on the basis of safety, equity, and accessibility. It is meant to test whether dockless scooters can be brought in with a minimum of traffic disruptions and rider injuries, while also distributing its benefits beyond the white-collar professional class.

The city received applications from 12 companies and reviewed more than 800 pages of proposals. Notably, entities that had originally flouted the law — including Bird, Lime, and even Uber — were turned down, while Keating's Scoot and another small scooter-sharing company, Skip, were accepted.

While there weren't specific criteria for whether or not applicants had launched their services without permission, "our board did call on the director of transportation to use discretion in that regard and consider past history," says Paul Rose, media relations manager for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

Scoot and Skip stood out in other ways, too. Rose says there were three key areas the city focused on: community engagement, access for people with disabilities, and public safety. One of the principal complaints about scooters was riders' disregard for pedestrians or traffic laws, including rules that prohibit operating vehicles on sidewalks.

Skip also operates in Washington, D.C. There, the company's proposal included hiring "ambassadors" who could be deployed around the city to provide helmets and advise riders on safety. Skip vehicles also have a locking mechanism, addressing another common complaint about scooters being left willy-nilly on sidewalks and other public spaces.

For its part, Scoot plays compulsory instructional videos when users log into the application for the first time, offers free in-person training, and will send riders a helmet if they request one. (SFMTA also appreciated that Scoot uses swappable batteries instead of having workers drive around and pull the vehicles off the streets for recharging.)

Questions remain. How scalable or effective will those techniques be? Will people watch the instructional videos? Will the helmets and locks limit the convenience that makes the scooters so appealing? Can the ambassador model be scaled up citywide? Will these companies be able to afford to hire the sheer number of workers needed to staff a massive roll out of, say, 10,000 vehicles?

"With the industry as new as it is, there is no single solution to any problem," says Darren Weingard, government relations manager for Skip. "We are not going to suggest we have it all figured out, but we are going to work with policy makers to understand their goals, what they are trying to achieve, and try to craft solutions."

Scooters for all?

San Francisco city officials prioritized inclusion and equity when they initially asked for bids from scooter companies. Skip earned points for its promise to allocate 20 percent of its scooters to underserved neighborhoods, as well as an offer of a 50 percent discount for low-income users. But compelling evidence suggests that part of the answer to making shared vehicles equitable is the very action that prompted the ban in San Francisco to begin with: flooding the market with dockless scooters.

A recent study published in the Journal of Transport Geography looked at Seattle's dockless bikeshare program, which had 10,000 vehicles across the city at the end of 2017. Researchers found that the system proved much more equitable than the previous docked system, Pronto, which had concentrated its 500 bikes in neighborhoods that tended to be richer and whiter than the city as a whole.

"The low per-bike cost of the dockless system afforded a 10,000-bike system ... providing access throughout the city," the paper reads. "We did not detect significant disparities in racial/ethnic composition or risk of displacement between neighborhoods that had more or less access to shared bikes."

Although more bikes ended up in neighborhoods with higher education levels, the vehicles were still available, accessible, and convenient in every Seattle community.

"There was such a large amount of bikes that every neighborhood had some access," says Jana Hirsch, one of the study's authors and an assistant research professor with Drexel University's Urban Health Collaborative. "But data-wise we are pretty young [in terms of ridership numbers for bikes, e-bikes, and scooters]. And we don't have evidence on who rides the scooters."

Skip, Scoot, and other shared scooter companies certainly believe they can contribute to the city's goals of equity and inclusion but say bringing their vehicle fleets to a much larger scale is essential.

"The number of permitted electric scooters in [San Francisco's] program is so small that the vehicles are going to be spread very thinly," says Keating. "[The pilot] has laudable vehicle distribution requirements [to ensure] communities of concern are relatively well served. But the number of vehicles is so small that basically nowhere is being well served right now."

Skip encouraged its scooter riders to be good "ambassadors" during San Francisco's trial period. Their rules? Wear a helmet. Don't ride in city parks. And stay off of sidewalks. Skips must be ridden in bicycle or vehicle lanes. Photo courtesy Skip Scooters.

Numbers game

At the start of 2019, just 1,250 scooters were available on the streets of San Francisco as part of the pilot program. If the city determines everything went well, that number could go up to 2,500 this month, the pilot's six-month mark.

That still isn't very many scooters, some say. A similar pilot period in Santa Monica, California (pop. About 90,000), allows 2,000 scooters. San Francisco has a population closer to 900,000.

Industry advocates believe a massive increase in the number of scooters on the streets is necessary to bring both equity — just as the mass adoption of Lyft and Uber made it possible to get a ride in neighborhoods where taxis would never venture — as well as to reduce private car trips and overall miles driven. According to scooter boosters, the mass adoption of these vehicles could spark a transportation revolution, one that is badly needed in the face of climate change and the rising costs of transportation infrastructure.

"If you want a significant portion of San Francisco to get around the city using electric vehicles you need to get out of the hundreds or even single digit thousands of electric vehicles," says Keating. "You need to talk about tens of thousands of shared electric vehicles, at least, for it to make any kind of dent, for it to be widely available enough that every neighborhood in the city could be within a short walk of a shared electric vehicle."

Collecting data

There is currently no academic research to support Keating's argument akin to the study conducted by Hirsch and her colleagues on Seattle's dockless bike-share program.

Dockless in Seattle: Scooter advocates point to dockless bike systems as a model for increasing range and usage. Researchers found that Seattle's dockless bike-share program was much more geographically equitable than Pronto, the old docked system, which shut down in 2017. Still, the program faces challenges to make bike share a better tool in the most northern and southern neighborhoods of the city. Map courtesy Seattle Department of Transportation.

But a handful of forays are being produced by the scooter rollouts in cities across the country, most of it focused on public reaction. One came from Portland, Oregon, where following an outright ban, 2,000 scooters were permitted to operate for four months in the city of nearly 600,000 people. Users reported that rides replaced personal car trips 19 percent of the time and shared car rides 15 percent of the time. Six percent said they had gotten rid of their personal vehicles because of the scooter-sharing system (perhaps an odd choice, given the short-term nature of the pilot).

The research also showed that the scooters were viewed favorably by most residents (62 percent) but that approval rates were higher among people of color (74 percent) and people with incomes under $30,000 (66 percent). Respondents were more likely to identify as male than as female, however.

"The Portland data looks promising in terms of income, race, and ethnicity, maybe not in terms of gender," says Jennifer Dill, professor at the School of Urban Studies & Planning at Portland State University.

But Dill cautions against interpreting the results too broadly. "I think it'll be interesting once we get data from more cities because the usage of these things really seems to vary by city in terms of how people are using them."

Regina Clewlow, CEO and founder of the transportation data company Populus, provides similarly optimistic data for Washington, D.C. Her team found that the dockless scooters were far more available in low-income neighborhoods than the docked bicycles, if measured by "the average distance to the nearest vehicle for each location in the city." They also found that black D.C. residents were much more likely to ride the scooters (16 percent of respondents) than use the docked bike share system (six percent of respondents), although in both cases the percentage of white respondents was far higher.

Despite these findings, the equity results were not ideal. "At a high level, neither the Capital Bikeshare system nor the dockless vehicle program are evenly distributed or used in low-income neighborhoods of Washington, D.C.," the Populus report notes. Another new study, from the planning and data company Coord, similarly found that Washington's poorest neighborhood (Anacostia) is poorly served by all four scooter companies in the city. (Beyond that, Coord found that the four companies have very different patterns of service and use.)

Populus's other major report, from mid-2018, simply studied public perception of the e-scooter phenomena in 11 major cities. It found that the mode of transportation held greater appeal for lower-income groups, with only those earning under $50,000 reporting a 70 percent or more positive perception. Those earning over $200,000 had the lowest opinion, although 64 percent still reported a positive perception. A majority of residents of most cities surveyed also reported kind feelings toward scooters — with San Francisco being the major outlier, where only 52 percent felt good about them.

Clewlow says she expects new and stronger data to be available soon.

"It's still pretty nascent and there's not a lot of data publicly available," she says. "But I'm optimistic about the future because cities are requiring mobility companies to share data with them if they are going to use the public right-of-way."

Finding the right approach

But given the limited number of scooters introduced under many of the pilot programs so far, the vehicles haven't had an opportunity to become an integral aspect of the transportation equation. Indeed, the four-month Portland test program ended in November 2018. It took a couple months for an extension to be granted, and when a decision came down, the city just instituted another pilot program — this time for a year.

Some transportation experts believe that a conservative approach is warranted to limit inconvenience for the general public and that the claims of scooter companies are overblown.

Opponents say that no matter how many scooters are around, only a small segment of the population will use them. Therefore, the slow-walk strategy of cities like San Francisco and Portland is an understandable concession to the rest of the residents, who won't use them. And if scooters are just a niche product, the consequences of delay won't be devastating either.

"If you think where these companies are going to draw most of their users, they are mostly going to be people who are walking or biking," says Erick Guerra, assistant professor in city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. "They probably aren't drawing that many trips from single occupant, pay-where-you-park vehicles. It's not going to be groundbreaking, it's not going to transform equitable access, but for a small number of people it'll be convenient."

But for scooter enthusiasts, the question is whether cities will prioritize a form of transportation that is far healthier for dense urban environments than cars ever could be. Scoot's Keating can reel off stats to buttress his case: A private car takes up 10 times as much space as a scooter and six times as much space as an electric motor bike. There are 410,000 registered automobiles in San Francisco and 300,000 on-street parking spaces.

Cars already get so much room, so much infrastructure, so much deference. If we spare a little more room on the street for alternative forms of transportation, perhaps more people will opt to ditch driving or ride sharing, even if it's just for that last mile.

Jake Blumgart is a reporter at WHYY's PlanPhilly.