The perils of scootershare

The scooters are back! A company called Spin, a subsidiary of Ford Motor, is pitching new and improved scooters and hopes to convince Dallas to allow a fleet of them on the city’s streets.

In 2018 The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) dubbed Dallas “ground zero for a nascent national bike-share war”. Five start-ups had flooded its streets with 18,000 ride-share bicycles, the largest flotilla of bikes in the nation.

The bikes were dockless, meaning users could leave them where they liked. Per the WSJ: “They are sometimes left hanging in trees or are sunk in creeks and waterways.” In June 2018 the city council levied expensive permits and required bike-sharing companies to respond to 311 complaints. Most of the bike companies left town.

But the micromobility monster had not been slain; it was morphing. D magazine trumpeted its resurrection: “Despite some consternation about how the city might step in and regulate the bikeshares, the whole ordeal was resolved with one simple solution: the scooter. Almost overnight, scooters bumped bikeshare off the streets and the hand-wringing about bike tangles was over.”

It took about two years for scooters to run their course. With 12,000 littering the city in the same manner the bikes had, hundreds of emergency room visits and complaints of drunk scooting, Dallas authorities halted the city’s scooter programme in September 2020, citing public safety concerns. That said, Spin does seem to have solved some of the misuses. An alarm sounds if the scooters are ridden on a sidewalk, and users can be fined if they park a scooter in an unauthorised area.

But one final detail may serve to illustrate how wellconsidered this plan is. Spin’s launch event was held at a plaza near City Hall — just behind a sign that declared it a misdemeanour to operate skateboards, bicycles and other small wheeled vehicles in the area.