It’s difficult to predict whether scooters are here to stay. But not for lack of trying by transportation journalists.
Scooters are still so new that the lack of research on their popularity makes their staying power a guessing game. As far back as July, Populus released a report finding that most people like dockless e-scooters – including women, who have a slightly more positive perception of them than men. But besides that report, there’s little academic research on why scooters have taken cities across the country by storm.
What can we learn about scooter popularity in the early days of city pilot projects?
The exploding popularity of scooters is reason enough to research them. Dockless bikeshare systems barely started to be viewed as legitimate transit options in the public’s perception when, all of a sudden, scooters arrived and, in many cities, completely replaced dockless bikes almost overnight.
In October, when Arlington, Va.’s scooter pilot began, there were 69,189 Bird and Lime scooter trips for 75,425 total miles traveled with Bird and Lime. Meanwhile, Capital Bikeshare – routinely and still considered a success, with lots more potential – had 26,532 total trips in Arlington in October.
Scooters might not have been so popular had they been introduced even a year or two earlier. Uber and Lyft and traditional bikeshare set the stage for people re-evaluating their transportation options instead of sleepwalking into their cars.
How many options are too many options?
For the past few years, new mobility options – like rideshares, microtransit, and countless other app-based options – dropped in many markets across the country at a rapid rate. It’s anyone’s guess which ones will be the winners in the business competition.
One potential reason why fixed-bikeshare systems like Capital Bikeshare have remained vital to cities’ transportation networks, despite the struggles CaBi has with rebalancing the systems and an influx of dockless bikeshare and e-scooters, is that there’s something nice about knowing where to get a bike and where to arrive. With dockless, there is even more of a need for people to have to constantly look at their phones to find them. That’s kind of personally annoying and also kind of annoying to anybody else who might be trying to interact with you while you’re in your own world staring down at your phone in the middle of the street.
Recently, it seemed that electric bikeshare company JUMP, acquired earlier this year by Uber, was the biggest threat to Capital Bikeshare (not scooters), but since CaBi is now offering its own e-bikes, it has a significantly better chance to remain highly competitive. In Washington, DC, there appears to be enough room for Capital Bikeshare, JUMP, and a couple of scooter companies. The same mix will probably hold for other similarly sized cities, with maybe just one bikeshare and one scooter share in smaller cities like Ann Arbor and Columbus.
The public learning curve is always a threat to the success of new things
Police have concerns about kids riding scooters, the fact that drivers can’t see scooters as well as they can see people on bikes, and what happens when people who have been drinking too much hop on them.
In Arlington, Va., where public complaints have been tracked throughout the early days of its scooter pilot, underage riding, sidewalk riding, and improper parking are popular recurring comments.
As with any new transportation option, there is a small but vocal group of people wary of the increasing prevalence of e-scooters. Early research shows that this isn’t really the case, and a period of adjustments and normalization has occurred with every transportation innovation throughout U.S. history, all the way from the time of the horse-drawn carriage.
“We had a burst of complaints in October and November when scooters first debuted in full, but it appears complaints are on the decrease,” said Greg Matlesky, a shared-mobility planner for Arlington County Commuter Services.
From a policy standpoint, cities – if they are doing anything at all – are rolling out pilots with a limited number of scooters available on the streets. Hitting the exact critical-mass point has been tricky so far. In Atlanta, however, stocking the right amount of scooters doesn’t seem to be an issue. There are tons of scooters everywhere and they appear to be largely available to people anytime they want to ride them.
The problem in Atlanta (and elsewhere) is whether you can solely rely upon them or not. It’s frustrating when you, for example, walk out of a restaurant after dinner as early as 9 p.m. and the scooters are still parked everywhere but they’ve been taken out of service for the night. It leaves you stranded, frustrated, and probably a little less likely to depend upon them as a true option. And then where does that lead you? Probably back to driving a car everywhere all the time. Cars, for all their negatives, rarely leave you with a sense of feeling like you’ve been stranded.
But some places are finally starting to adapt nicely and somewhat seamlessly to scooters. The afore-mentioned Arlington has constructed several corrals throughout the county where people can park scooters and dockless bikes so that the devices don’t overflow on sidewalks and so there is less illegal riding on sidewalks.
Are shared scooters priced for optimal success?
Another hurdle has to do with cost of scooter rental. Alex Moazed recently published an interesting take in Inc.:
Once scooter commutes are accepted as a dignified option for urban adults, what’s to stop commuters from buying their own scooters? In fact, it’s much more cost effective for regular scooter users to buy their own ride.
The average scooter commuter spends $6 per day ($3 each way). Premium foldable electric scooters cost around $300. That means that after just 50 business days, or 2.5 months, a renter would have been better off buying their own scooter – likely sooner when you factor in rides for errands and leisure.
Moazed thinks high fares will cause demand for shared scooters to drop over time. That presents a healthy challenge to scooter operators to start thinking of better incentives for customers to keep riding and possibly make the option an all-around better deal.
These luckily seem like distinct possibilities, now that wealthy companies are playing in this space. Uber owns JUMP e-bikes and Lyft owns Motivate – the company that operates many of the docked bikeshare systems across the country – creating major potential for lots more money to be invested into scooters and bikeshare. That should equate to a dramatic rise in the number of devices and stations.
Can scooters rides realistically replace car trips?
When people can be assured that bikes and scooters will be available for them anytime and anywhere, we could see substantial reductions in car trips, Further, we could realize cascading societal benefits associated with lower vehicle miles traveled, such as improved physical and mental health, personal savings and economy-wide benefits, reduced air pollution, efficiency and productivity, and even a basic connection to community.
The U.S. Department of Energy reported that nearly 60 percent of vehicle trips in 2017 were less than six miles, and most of those trips were even far shorter than that. Those little jumps and hops that everyone is making are right in the sweet spot to win bikeshare and scooter-share loyalists.
As the scooter data starts coming in over the next year or so, it will be fascinating to see how car use will be affected by scooters. For people who live, work, or play one or two miles from a reliable transit station, scooters and bikeshare become attractive first-mile/last-mile solutions that open a world of accessibility. That connection is a little too short to rationalize paying for an Uber or Lyft and it is likely too far for most people to walk. So, if transit agencies get smarter and more nimble about partnering with the likes of Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird, Capital Bikeshare, and JUMP, these options could play a huge role for getting people onto their trains and buses.
(It would be an incredible evolution if someone could figure out a model, perhaps something like shared electric cargo bikes, that would work for families that need to haul kids around to baseball practice and school and play dates. But that’s a topic for another time.)
Long-held perceptions need to change
A handful of doctors from around the country have been quoted in the news saying emergency-room visits are increasing because of scooter and bike crashes. Those anecdotal claims seem strikingly un-newsworthy, since the 40,000+ deaths in cars in 2017 didn’t seem to elicit much concern by doctors in the press.
According to Rick Jervis this month in USA Today:
In Austin, in October, riders took 275,300 trips on the scooters, covering 264,300 miles. In that same time period, the city reported only 14 scooter crashes with nine injuries and no fatalities. From Sept. 1 through Dec. 3, officials at University Health Services, an on-campus primary-care clinic for students counted 110 scooter-related injuries, including bruises, cuts, head injuries, sprained ankles and some fractures, said Dr. Melinda McMichael, the center’s interim director. “We weren’t seeing these kind of numbers with scooter accidents a year ago,” she said. “It’s concerning.”
The good news out of Austin, reported in that same USA Today article, is that scooters are leading to research connecting health to active transportation. The bad news is that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conducting research – investigating “the circumstances that lead to scooter crashes and how best to prevent them” – that is only a small piece of the puzzle.
What would be much more insightful would be an examination of whether scooters are having an impact on overall health, not crashes. Other states and cities in the southern U.S. get it. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are all considering scooters, not as a way to solve congestion like in big cities but rather to draw people to downtowns and make a dent in the obesity epidemic.
Transit will be the big winner if cities do scooters right
Scooters in Austin, which doesn’t have big-city-like transit options, have “added essentially a full-on, New York-level transit line … equivalent of high-capacity transit,” Jason JonMichael, Austin’s assistant transportation director, told USA Today.
JonMichael’s quote really hits the heart of the matter. As transit-ridership correlations are analyzed, scooters could go so far as to play a major role in boosting much-needed transit funding across the country.
Bikeshare can complement scooters and vice versa. But the key is that they all complement transit and incentivize people to replace their drive-alone trips with bikes, scooters, transit, and other viable options. One of the great things about all these new bike- and scooter-sharing options has been the willingness of the companies to share their data with cities. This is crucial at our current juncture of rethinking our broken, outdated infrastructure for one that will work for the next century.
Undertaking real-world applicable research is a major part of creating a transportation network that provides voluminous and cascading societal benefits.
For more of our top scooter articles, see:
Open data feeds could improve access to bikeshare and dockless scooters
Ignore the curmudgeons: New report finds scooters are actually popular
Why it’s easy to regulate scooters and hard to regulate Uber
Vast majority of scooters don’t block sidewalks, report finds
Electric shared scooters? Bring ’em on, says the southern U.S.
All infographics by Tasha Arreza, Mobility Lab’s (amazing) new research analyst. Photo by the Portland Bureau of Transportation.