In Portland, scooter startups played nice. City hall noticed
Municipalities are trying to get in front of firms using their streets as test grounds
The e-scooter boom began in Santa Monica, Calif., about 16 months ago. Electric scooters, owned by startups looking to mimic the success of ride-hailing companies like Uber, appeared around town. The idea was simple: Use a smartphone app to rent a scooter and then leave it at the end of the ride for the next person.
Soon, people in cities from San Francisco to Paris were complaining that the scooters were all over sidewalks — usually without the approval of local officials.
In Portland, Ore., city officials worried that they would soon get their own flock of uninvited scooters. So they estab- lished a four-month pilot program in July with a limit on scooters and a requirement that companies share detailed data about trips and injuries with city officials.
That data, released Tuesday by the city’s Bureau of Transportation, offers the most detailed analysis of the impact of e-scooters on a city. Scooters often replaced short car trips in Portland, offering some support for one of the biggest selling points the companies have made to communities: They can help reduce congestion and pollution.
And significantly, the scooters did not lead to as many injuries as some had feared.
But it is not yet clear if scooter companies can comply with different cities’ tight and varying limits, and still run profitable local operations. The programs often cap the number of scooters and dictate which neighbourhoods they ought to be in.
“That is not letting the market determine how many scooters should be anywhere,” said Gabriel Scheer, Lime’s director of strategic development. “How do you unfetter us in a way that allows us to meet demand?”
Still, Portland officials are using the pilot program to make a big point with startups: It is better to ask permission and work with local regulators than risk being run out of a community.
That has not always been the case among startups trying to get a piece of the so-called sharing economy. Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft and the short-term rental company Airbnb have usually jumped into new markets before local regulators have had time to understand their businesses.
For the scooter startups, not asking for permission has had consequences. After Lime and Bird began to operate without permission in San Francisco, the city instituted a permit system — but issued permits to only Skip and another smaller competitor, Scoot, effectively locking Lime and Bird out of the city. Some cities have simply impounded the scooters.
Other cities are establishing permit programs to limit the impact of unexpected scooter invasions. Washington, for example, said in November that companies could deploy no more than 600 scooters each.
Bird, Lime and Skip received permits to operate in Portland. They handed over a wealth of data about scooter rides, giving city regulators access to information about where each trip started, the route it followed, where it ended and what time of day it occurred.
Scooter startups didn’t always comply with restrictions, according to the report. The scooters often exceeded the speed limit of 24 km/h that the city had imposed, and none of the startups completely fulfilled their obligations to deploy scooters in East Portland.
When the Portland pilot effort ended in November, all of the e-scooters were cleared off the streets. The city is planning a second, yearlong pilot program.