The Gift of Scooters Part II — What Are Cities Actually Trying to Regulate?
There’s Only One Good Reason to Charge for Scooters
In Part I, I discussed how Cities’ current simplistic methods of regulating scooters — specifically bans, caps, and fees — run counter to their stated mobility and sustainability goals. So if those blunt instruments are not the way forward, how can cities do better?
We’re wading into what seems to be a torrent of suggestions for how to “best” regulate around scooters & micromobility. From transportation officials, new mobility management platforms, newspaper editorial boards, city council members, sustainability advocates, and venture capitalists, all offer different perspectives and solutions for thinking about this new mobility paradigm, some more valuable than others.
What Are We Regulating For?
In simple terms, regulations are intended to mitigate the negative impacts and encourage the positive elements of a market segment, hopefully maximizing the latter and minimizing the former. In Part I I detailed many of the benefits of scooters, so let’s list out some of the public criticisms. Concerns are that scooters are:
- Blocking sidewalks
- Riding on sidewalks and other places they shouldn’t be
- Cluttering our public spaces
- Not available to all
- Operating on streets not designed for them
- Dangerous for riders
- Appearing in cities without warning
- Another thing for drivers to worry about
- Not how real city residents are supposed to get around
There’s nastier and funnier pushback. While many observers are well-intentioned, much of the “concern” is coming from a place of seeing scooters as somehow illegitimate, and scooter riders as not deserving of the same rights to urban space. This isn’t the time to relitigate the recent trends of reallocating street space to people instead of cars. To these types of complaints, I respond with the image at left.
Much of the concerns are being addressed: enforcement efforts, educational outreach, and in-app nudges are leading to better norms, with 98% of scooters being well-parked. And new scooter models have increased durability so that fewer end up sleeping with the fishes.
Cities Need Car(-sized) Money
If these are in fact cities’ concerns, it’s hard to draw a direct line between them and the fee structures they’ve set up so far. Perhaps instead they’re designed to extract maximal VC money as was promised with Bird’s now defunct infrastructure pledge. Turns out it’s counterproductive to frame scooter companies as so flush with cash that cities need not deploy any of their own resources.
Turns out there just aren’t enough scooters to make a dent in city budgets. After initial enthusiasm, Kansas City found that proposed scooter fees could fund only one and a half affordable housing apartments. Given the overhead required to implement these fees or similar, it makes little sense to view scooters as a viable funding source.
As alluded to in the previous image, cities should instead look to the least efficient users of their roads: cars. Cars, in fact, ought to be welcoming scooters and paying for their traffic-shrinking benefits. The current double standard of charging scooter fees and not car fees is absurd:
The Guiding Principles for Regulation
As Stephen Goldsmith lays out, producing the best possible regulatory regime requires that cities prioritize the right goals. It’s clear that flat fees, caps, and bans run counter to many of those goals, but then what are the ways to regulate scooters in alignment with city goals?
The goal for regulating scooters (and any mode) should be to maximize (micro)mobility for the largest number of people, without reducing equity, increasing emissions, or other externality.
Achieving this can be boiled down to measures that maximize scooter:
- availability
- reliability
- safety
- accessibility
And minimize:
- price
- conditions that impede other modes (e.g. blocking sidewalks)
- cluttering/disuse
- vehicle footprint
Policies to achieve these goals could be: setting daily per-scooter utilization minimums, charging for scooters not in use, or requiring lower prices for a percentage of rides. The specific KPIs that cities define matters less than the active identification and communication of clear goals that mobility companies must compete under.
Directing Mobility Companies to Best Serve Cities’ Needs
The technology industry’s mantras of moving fast, iterating, and pivoting have not jibed well with cities’ lengthy public processes and policy reviews, and scooters are no different. Unlike the multi-year development cycles of cars and larger vehicles, scooter companies are able to come up with new versions every six months, more akin to a smartphone.
And like with a smartphone, new scooter features are being marketed incessantly. From sidewalk-sensing cameras, bigger batteries, more rugged assembly, to high-accuracy GPS, the 2019 scooter is a different animal than what first appeared on the streets of Santa Monica.
Figuring out the best way to deploy scooters will not be a one-off or one-size-fits-all process. Cities should see this still early phase as an opportunity to partner with scooter companies to achieve their mobility goals, rather than a nuisance to be reined in.
San Jose has taken a leading step by demanding scooter companies implement a virtual, geofenced boundary for reduced speeds in the city’s most active pedestrian areas. Already, companies like Lime (above) have demonstrated geofencing as a tool to reduce scooter/pedestrian conflicts. While not every city can draw on tech-savvy staff as San Jose or Santa Monica, they should follow those cities’ lead of interrogating the potential for technologies to address their concerns.
The area that cities have been most active in is in demanding standardized, open platforms & data that give cities the necessary insights to manage micromobilty while enabling providers to operate on equal footing. I’d be remiss in not mentioning the amazing work being led by the City of Los Angeles for the Mobility Data Specification, while also pointing out that the consensus around MDS is in stark contrast to all other aspects of regulating micromobility.
Bikes, Scooters, or Whatever’s Next
The micromobility industry has decisively moved from bikes to scooters, first with Spin, and more recently Lime. One might see these decisions as optimal and inevitable outcomes of invisible market forces, but cities should pause to acknowledge their own thumbs on the scale. It is ironic that Spin, before pulling out of Seattle due to unworkable fees, initially tried to differentiate itself as the partner to government (note, this post previously mentioned bikes).
The demise of low-cost dockless bikeshare — with disproportionate ridership in communities traditionally underserved — is a mobility loss for cities. That bikeshare can thrive in the thrifty and enclosed context of universities is an indictment both of city policy and of hostile infrastructure.
Supportive infrastructure and policies are challenges cities will have to figure out soon as we’re only in the early stages of the micromobility revolution. Like cars and bicycles, which took many years to move from hobbyist workrooms to the mass market, two-wheeled scooters are merely one variant of the micromobility segment. Cheap batteries and motors paired with GPS mean that multiple types of vehicles are possible, though scooters are the cheapest. It’s unclear what the future default micromobility “platform” will be, whether it has a seat, is enclosed, has 2, 3, or 4 wheels, hovers, or drives autonomously.
From cities’ vantage point, it shouldn’t matter which micromobility version(s) wins out, only how those modes intersect with their stated goals. Under the current regulatory paradigm — which includes making distinctions based on trivialities such as the specific mechanism for bicycle acceleration, or arbitrarily limiting speed—cities are setting themselves up for future battles with whatever form factor comes next.
The One Reason to Charge for Scooters
The consensus view for the future of mobility is one where cities use increasingly sophisticated tools to assess, regulate, and price based. These tools are needed to enable the compelling visions of dynamically reconfigurable streets, integrated wireless charging for all vehicles, or real-time optimization of every square foot of asphalt.
With ClearRoad and other companies giving governments the tools to manage ever more connected and shared vehicles, cities can no longer sit on the sidelines and position themselves as “victims” of accelerating technological change. Scooters are instead a test run for containing and molding disruptions down the road. And it’s only in this vein that cities should consider charging scooters: as a gateway drug to charging other types of vehicles for their usage and impact.
