Spurned Skip lays off 34 S.F. workers
Scooter company Skip is laying off 34 employees and permanently closing its San Francisco maintenance and repair facility because it failed to get a permit to operate in the city this year, the company said in a notice to the state released Friday. Most of the workers out of a job starting Dec. 14 are technicians at its Bayview facility on Evans Street.
Skip’s S.F. headquarters is operating and the company still runs scooters in Washington, D.C., spokeswoman Martha Shaughnessy said.
Skip got a city permit to operate dockless electric scooters from October 2018 to October 2019 in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s first pilot program, following a chaotic rollout of the twowheelers last year. In the second round of the pilot, Skip failed to win a permit.
Skip’s CEO Sanjay Dastoor
said Friday his company hired and paid a living wage to a team of fulltime employees, not gig workers, and invested in a commercial lease. He said he learned the news that the company didn’t get a permit from the media.
“The short notice, in addition to the investments we made to fulfill S.F. technical requirements, has presented an unforeseen financial burden on our business,” he said in a statement.
However, Transportation Agency spokesman Benjamin Barnett said the agency alerted all the permit applicants by email the morning before an afternoon press conference.
Skip got one of the lowest SFMTA safety ratings among the 11 companies that applied for permits in the second round. In June, the company pulled its 800scooter fleet from the streets as a precautionary measure after one caught fire in Washington. Shaughnessy said it was an “isolated incident” with “no evidence that it’s a systemic thing.”
Scoot, a company that also operated in the city over the past year, got a permit again, along with newcomers Spin, owned by Ford, Jump, owned by Uber, and Lime. All companies are based in San Francisco.
Politicians and pedestrians have criticized scooter riders and companies for violating the ban on sidewalk riding. This month, San Francisco passed a resolution to regulate the rollout of up to 2,500 scooters, curb illegal sidewalk riding, and urge the city to pursue a public alternative to private scooter rental companies.
SFMTA said its new program rolled out Oct. 15 will track compliance through a reporting database, and penalize unsafe riding behavior. Companies have their own plans. Lime held safety workshops. Jump is developing an inapp sidewalkriding detection feature. Spin makes users read rules before they can ride and added “no riding on sidewalk” stickers to scooters.