.Do Electric Rental Scooters Go Too Far?

Joape Pela isn’t your average lanky tech bro. Sure, the 30-year-old East Palo Alto native lives in downtown San Jose and works as a payment analyst at local startup Finxera. But the former University of Utah football player’s 6-foot-3, 320-pound stature made him wary of one trend quickly gaining traction with his startup brethren: electric scooters.

“I was surprised. They have some jump,” Pela says of the devices that started to appear on San Jose streets this past February. “It felt pretty good, having the wind blow through my hair and all that.”

The rental scooters represent the latest trend in a sharing economy that’s changing the world of transportation.

The city of Santa Cruz’s bike share system has seen more than 5,100 trips since the program’s unofficial launch on May 7. The pedal-assist electric Jump bikes allow riders to find, reserve and pay for them, all through an app on their phones. The bikes are $1 for the first 15 minutes and 7 cents for every minute after that, although $30 monthly plans are also available.

Over the hill, meanwhile, cities like San Jose have zipped full-throttle into the next frontier.

And Pela is one of many San Jose residents, commuters and business owners navigating the sudden emergence of hundreds of scooters available through two deep-pocketed app providers. San Mateo startup Lime has raised $132 million to offer on-demand shared bikes and scooters in San Jose and more than 50 other cities nationwide. Bird, a startup based in Santa Monica, is backed by $115 million and focused solely on e-scooters.

New riders can set up an account in minutes by downloading the free app, uploading a credit card and agreeing to terms of service that include parking out of the public right-of-way and wearing a helmet. Bird also requires users to scan a valid driver’s license. From there, users who pay a flat $1 fee, plus 15 cents per minute, can use the app’s map feature to find an available scooter and take a picture of a QR code to unlock the device.

The scooters, controlled by a simple hand throttle and brake, can reach a speed of 15 mph and hold a charge that lasts up to 18 miles. In San Jose, which lacks quick transit options, the scooters alternately attract praise from loyal users, ire for clogging public sidewalks, skepticism about safety, and criticism as a perceived harbinger of gentrification—controversies that also surround sharing economy services such as Uber, Lyft and other programs.

Claire Fliesler, a Santa Cruz transportation planner, says that Surf City has no plans to pursue a scooter system at this point—as leaders have their hands full trying to make bike share as robust as possible—but she adds that local officials have been following the issues as they unfold in other cities.

THROTTLE BEHAVIOUR

The trick with scooters: They’re just obscure enough to make them tough to regulate.

“There was no coordinated strategy for introducing the scooters to the street,” says Colin Heyne, a spokesman for the San Jose Department of Transportation. “Not surprisingly, we didn’t have a policy around e-scooters.”

Concerns the city has heard mostly include illegally riding scooters down sidewalks, users discarding scooters on lawns at the end of the ride and riders not wearing helmets. As a result, scooters have emerged as the latest uniquely 21st century question of where a company’s responsibility ends and a city’s or consumer’s begins.

“Riders are required to obey the law, but enforcement is difficult for us,” says Sam Dreiman, Lime’s director of strategic development for California. “In some ways, it’s an even bigger question of how much we can enforce or should enforce.”

If companies try to dodge enforcement responsibility, though, it’s not clear whether the city is ready to step in.

Both San Jose and the state are hashing out first-ever attempts at regulations designed specifically for e-scooters, but San Jose’s aren’t due until September.

GRAY AREA

Take a trip to Diridon Station during rush hour, and it’s clear that commuters in Silicon Valley are already seeking alternatives to the region’s decades-old mass transit systems. From foldable bikes and electric skateboards to the occasional pair of inline skates or old-fashioned Razor scooters, long commutes and already-overflowing BART and Caltrain cars have pushed the non-car-dependent to get creative.

In some ways, Silicon Valley is late to the party that planning wonks refer to as “multimodal urban mobility,” where future transportation systems stand to encompass more options than 20th-century cars, trains and buses.

Fast-growing cities in China, for example, have already spent the better part of the last decade trying to figure out how electric scooters of varying sizes can coexist with electric bicycles and other car alternatives. Automakers like Hyundai and Toyota have unveiled their own high-tech scooter prototypes in recent years, and Lyft in late May signaled an interest in rolling out e-scooters in San Francisco.

“It’s just very costly to use cars to make short trips, especially in cities,” says Ratna Amin, transportation policy director for Bay Area urban planning think tank SPUR. The rise of scooters and other smaller-scale alternatives, she says, “require us to now think differently about our streets.”

For the past several months, scooters have been a touchy subject in San Francisco, where a temporary ban on them went into effect on Monday, June 4, as the City by the Bay gets a permitting program in order.

E-scooters’ more recent arrival in San Jose has been marked by a wide range of reactions.

“Bros are racing app rental electric scooters outside my apartment,” San Jose Sharks digital media coordinator Ann Frazier wrote on Twitter. “This is now normal everyday life in downtown.”

Dueling opinions between people who either love or love to make fun of the service surfaced almost as fast as the scooters themselves.

In San Jose, Lime scooters were the first to appear, in late winter, Heyne says.

Soon after came Bird, which opted for same-day deployment instead of advance conversations with the cities.

“That was shorter notice,” Heyne says. “As in, we got a call that they were going to be dropped off on our streets.”

Kenneth Baer, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant for Bird, declined to detail the company’s approach to entering San Jose or other new cities. “Obviously, we have a deliberative process,” he says. “I’m not going to get into the details.”

Despite the unconventional rollout, demand has ramped up quickly for the scooters, sometimes making it difficult to find an available device near hubs like Diridon Station.

In the meantime, though, business operators like Cafe Stritch’s Maxwell Borkenhagen say the largely unregulated devices can cause problems day to day.

SCOOTER COPS

Spending months crafting detailed policies just for e-scooters might seem a bit excessive. At stake, though, are much bigger questions about who’s responsible for the less-desirable side effects of the sharing economy. As venture capital-backed startups seek rapid growth with minimal costs, that tension can come to a head in multiple ways.

First and foremost, Lime contends, e-scooter companies are providing cities with a publicly accessible transportation option at no direct cost to the city. All they ask is that municipalities pay for necessary taxpayer-funded elements, like bike lanes and road maintenance.

“We provide the subsidy-free mobility,” Lime spokeswoman Emma Green says. “Cities provide the infrastructure.”

But what happens if riders violate the company’s terms of service, or laws governing riding on sidewalks, parking scooters in the right of way or not wearing a helmet?

State lawmakers are just now writing policies to govern bike lane usage for scooters. In San Jose, using traffic cops to police such low-level nuisances isn’t practical, Heyne says.

“We are woefully understaffed for traffic enforcement,” Heyne says, noting one recent tally counted just a half dozen citywide traffic cops.

Companies, too, are eager to avoid costly, on-the-ground scooter patrols.

“That’s a big one, trying to hold people accountable for how they park,” Dreiman says. He noted that Lime now requires users to submit a photo of how they park their scooter in order for the trip to officially end and billing to stop. The company is also considering using riders to police each other, submitting photos of other riders’ parking fails, or offering yet-undefined “incentives” for good behavior, he says.

Still, safety is another moving target. In San Francisco, a Twitter account registered to Facebook product manager Dan Grover in mid-May posted a screenshot from the Lime app alongside an X-ray showing a broken wrist.

“Took a spill as they don’t handle uneven pavement well,” Grover tweeted. “Aside from broken bones, UX was good.”

Though Lime keeps records of user-reported injuries, not all get reported. Green says the company carries business insurance mandated by each city it operates in. Lime has also started a helmet distribution center in San Francisco or done occasional helmet giveaways. Bird has sent some 22,000 helmets to users who request them, Baer says.

In San Jose, Heyne says helmets and other safety rules will likely be included in the city’s September policy recommendations.

“It’s like bring your own seat belts if you’re renting a car,” Heyne says. Still, he added, injuries are also difficult for the city to track: “Nobody calls the DOT if they get into a scooter crash.”