This Holiday Season, Cities Can Give the Gift of Scooters
Cities are setting unrealistic and counterproductive constraints on scooter companies.
With the recent bill to legalize electric scooters in New York City and the end of the year of the scooter approaching, it seems like a good opportunity to step back from the hype and fearmongering, and take stock of the current micro-mobility landscape.
E-Scooters Are Actually Great for Cities
For all the apocalyptic pronouncements around the scooter scourge, there is scant mention of how awesome scooters are. These are vehicles that take up a fraction of the space of a parked car; are easier to ride, less intimidating, and often cheaper than bicycles; among the fastest modes for trips under 2 miles; and run on electricity.
Given the suite of benefits, e-scooters and their micro-mobility ilk should be promoted as part of every city’s sustainable mobility plan. Yet, with scooters’ rapid rollouts into cities alongside a lingering resentment of ride-hailing — the previous VC-backed disruption to the mobility status quo — many cities are still grappling with whether to allow scooters at all.
Cities’ Analog Regulations Are Counterproductive
Without a better concept of regulating to achieve desired outcomes, cities have resorted to the types of regulations they know best: outright bans, fees per company or per vehicle, and caps on total fleet size. Regulations for US cities are summarized at left.
Many of the regulations are well-intentioned, citing community concerns, fiscal prudence, or a desire to not rush into things. However, this caution means that cities are unwittingly choosing winners and losers, to the detriment of access to new mobility options, and low-cost and sustainable solutions. These criticisms mirror those I’ve made previously on singling out specific modes and caps.
It’s worth spelling out the three key impacts of cities capping deployment and charging fees for market entry:
- Only providers supported by VCs’ deep pockets or corporate backing can prevail. Because of high baseline costs in maintenance and (re)distribution, small scooter deployments are often not sustainable operations. Additional permit fees further press small operators, as was seen in Spin’s departure from Seattle.
- High-margin pricing models win out. A Bird scooter ride costs $0.15/minute plus $1 to start, which translates to $5.50 for a half hour. An amazing deal for consumers (and cities!) compared to a ride in a taxi, but significantly more than bikeshare or public transit. That’s still the case if the $1 ride fee is waived as an equity concession.
- Deployments concentrate in areas that are already transit-rich. The highest-usage areas are also the most profitable, so limiting vehicle deployments with caps and fees mean that underserved areas remain that way. Conversely, larger deployments (and lower fees) lead to greater coverage areas, as demonstrated by Lyft’s proposed San Francisco scooter service areas below.
Cities Need the Next Regulatory Paradigm for Micro-Mobility
With the simplistic caps, fees, and bans hampering the growth of a much-needed alternative to cars, some cities have started experimenting with new types of regulations, yet these too have their issues.
Performance-based caps avoid the one-size-fits-all limitations of flat caps, but the thresholds arent’s grounded in notions of optimized deployment. Meanwhile, equity mandates — that is, requirements that a portion of scooters is deployed in disadvantaged neighborhoods — have potential, but when overall deployments are capped, these mandates reinforce the structural advantages of the largest and deepest-pocketed mobility companies. A new crop of startups, platforms, and products have sprung up to help cities visualize the various deployments, and enable some new types of regulations (while being compensated via the fees that they can help enforce).
In a recent, refreshing take on the subject, a trio of Stanford professors suggested (in an article I wish I’d written) that a better regulatory approach would be to time-limit pilots so that the new mobility companies could deploy as quickly and effectively as possible, and ultimately work with and on behalf of cities towards shared success. This merely kicks the can down the road for actually deciding what to regulate on, and there’s enough experience at this point for cities to take some intelligent stabs at these priorities now.
Check out the follow-up blog post where we discuss how cities should be thinking about scooter regulation, and how that ties to the future of mobility.
