Electric scooters are being introduced to a handful of cities. It’s starting out like bikeshare did way back in 2010. It begins, people who are freaked out by new technology complain, and then it just gets normalized.
Shared scooters have certainly stirred up early emotions, with San Francisco already telling operators to cease-and-desist.
“It would be very nice if the tech bros could come in and ask in a collaborative fashion for permission rather than after-the-fact forgiveness,” said a San Francisco supervisor, Aaron Peskin.
Meanwhile, places like D.C. continue to give them a trial run, for various benefits.
Mobility Lab’s Paul Mackie notes in the article: “I think scooters are a gateway drug to walking and decreasing the stunning rates of obesity in this country.”
Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, three states with cities considering the scooters, are among the most obese states in the country, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the reception to scooters has been much warmer in the South, where some mid-sized cities are in talks to bring them in.
“I work in some of the most obese, hot, behind the cultural shift, and behind the bike culture shift, communities,” said Lindsey Gray West, who helped start the Birmingham, Alabama, bikeshare program and now runs Bantam Strategy Group, a bikeshare consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that works almost exclusively with Southern cities.
But scooters have been an easy sell, she said. “Just in the last two weeks probably I’ve had multiple city councilmen, multiple mayors over the age of 70, all at least 50 and older, that have come back and said, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done.’”
Gray West said scooters are a good fit for the South much for the same reason she advocated to have electric-assist bikes in Birmingham: It’s hot, it’s hilly, and people don’t want to show up for business meetings drenched in sweat.
Already, scooters have arrived in sweltering Miami, and Mobile, Alabama, has committed to bringing in dockless bikes and scooters. LimeBike is planning to come to New Orleans, a city official there confirmed. And talks are underway in New Orleans, Huntsville and Birmingham in Alabama, as well as Long Beach and Gulfport, Mississippi, and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Bird and LimeBike had just launched in Austin, but both companies pulled their scooters off the streets this weekend after the city passed an emergency ordinance Friday.
Unlike cities such as Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, these towns aren’t turning to scooters to solve a congestion problem but rather to draw people in and revitalize their downtown.
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