Promote safe use of clean scooters
San Francisco must embrace new transportation technologies that will help accelerate our city’s movement away from automobiles and fossil fuels. With San Francisco at risk of not meeting vital climate change goals, I’d expect the city’s political leaders to welcome new, clean transportation technologies. Instead, the City Attorney’s Office and a few supervisors are stoking hysteria around the recently launched dockless, shared electric scooters.
Transportation — specifically the automobile — is the leading and fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in California. While San Francisco has been a national leader in reducing greenhousegas emissions (28 percent since 1990), transportation makes up 46 percent of San Francisco’s emissions, according to 2015 statistics. Even worse, San Francisco’s transportationrelated greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing since 2012. San Francisco will not hit its climate change goal of reducing GHG emissions by 40 percent by 2025 without reducing the number trips made by cars.
Walk along Market Street, the Embarcadero or Polk Street and you’ll see dozens of scooter-users happily (yes, they are usually smiling) using this new technology to get around our city. One might think scooters are geared for recreational trips, but these zero-emission devices are replacing car trips and decreasing congestion on the overburdened Muni system. At $2 to $3 per ride, this efficient and fun transportation is affordable for residents of most income levels. For many trips within the congested parts of town, scooters are faster than an Uber!
Of course, scooters should not be operated on our sidewalks. But to make sure scooter users are safe on our streets, San Francisco must prioritize construction of protected lanes, where all users of active transit can ride safely, separated from pedestrians and motor vehicles. Where the city has created safe, protected bike lanes, scooter users are already comfortably co-mingling with bikers, skateboarders, and other active transit users.
Instead of cracking down on all things scooter, we should be encouraging San Franciscans to travel by scooter.
To the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and our supervisors:
We need you to create policies that encourage safe and courteous scooter use in our city. We need you to expand parking space for bikes and scooters — shared or otherwise. And we need you to accelerate your efforts to create safe, protected lanes for residents who are making the zero-emissions choice of traveling by bike, skateboard or scooter.
To Supervisor Aaron Peskin:
You are quick to pontificate with climate-change platitudes; however, you refuse to embrace the changes necessary for our city to reach our climate goals. You attack scooter riders on sidewalks, but your district has no protected bike lanes! To our next mayor: As a San Francisco voter, who breathes San Francisco air for the majority of my waking and sleeping hours, I welcome the replacement of car trips with those by zero-emission scooters; who has seen car congestion and car parking become major objections to adding new housing, I welcome new residents who won’t have to own cars because of new transportation solutions, such as scooter-sharing; who uses a bicycle as my primary mode of transportation, I welcome more friends to our protected bike lanes; and who believes climate change is a major threat to our planet, I welcome a mayor who can help us avoid this climate disaster.
To scooter-sharing companies:
Please put big stickers on your scooters that say “Do Not Ride Me On The Sidewalk.” Give the city and its citizens a channel to report bad behavior. And work with our city to create more active transit parking space and safe protected lanes. To scooter users : Thank you for making this zero-emissions transportation choice. Call your supervisor to insist on more protected lanes and join us at the next @PeopleProtected Bike Lane event. Together we will work to ensure that all San Franciscans have safe, affordable, lowcarbon ways to move around our city.