THE SCOOTER WARS OF 2018
A street fight is spilling into something bigger
There’s one thing the aggrieved voices in this city’s Great Scooter War of 2018 can agree on: It’s not really about the scooters. ❚ In three short months, these electric-powered gizmos that promise freedom from urban gridlock have become symbols in a larger struggle over the way the technology boom here has made this region one of the nation’s wealthiest and least affordable.
That tension often stems directly from the way start-ups treat this city as their personal petri dish, leveraging its infrastructure and citizens to disrupt established businesses while making a mint in the process.
First came massive luxury buses often blocking city streets as they picked up workers heading to sprawling tech campuses. They were followed by legions of Uber and Lyft cars. Then came the scooters — rolled out in March, booted in June and due to return in July.
Scooter company leaders say they’re merely providing a quick and easy mode of transportation that doesn’t pollute the air and helps take cars off the streets.
But for every every happy hipster zipping past snarled traffic on an app-connected Lime, Bird or Spin scooter, there’s someone else who just sees an upwardly mobile tech worker responsible for changing the face of a once bohemian enclave where the median house price now
is $1.6 million.
“This is a political backlash against what is perceived to be, rightly or wrongly, a very arrogant Gilded Agestyle approach toward public space by tech companies,” says Jason Henderson, author of “Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.”
That’s why after that March rollout that initially seemed to delight, the rentable devices that generally charge $1 to unlock and 15 cents a minute of use quickly became a lightning rod.
The #scootersbehavingbadly hashtag trended, accompanied by photos of the offenders strewn about sidewalks like neglected toys.
After receiving swelling complaints to a hotline, city officials decided to pull all the scooters on June 4. Permits will be handed out any day to five companies with a maximum allowance of 500 scooters each.
A city’s soul at stake
While similar scooter skirmishes are raging across the nation, the schism here is particularly feisty as tech companies rile up city officials and citizens.
San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin calls scooters “symbolic of the tech arrogance we’ve been dealing with for years,” while housing activist Laura Clark of YIMBY Action declares “we’re fighting for the soul of our city, and that’s about housing, not scooters.”
The drama leaves many scooter company execs miffed. “We’re just trying to get people out of cars, there’s a CO2 crisis,” says David Estrada, chief legal officer for Bird.
Caen Contee, co-founder of Lime, says the aim is to help big cities deal with growing congestion.
Scooter executives stressed in interviews that they met with city officials here ahead of launch. Most were keen to start small, testing the concept in limited locations. But suddenly there was a rush to market when some companies decided to act first and negotiate later.
‘Last-mile’ solutions
If you think scooters might be going away, think again. Lime recently raised $250 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by Google Ventures. Bird raised $150 million in a round led by tech investors Sequoia Capital.
They’ve amassed these towering sums by pitching an eco-friendly solution to “last-mile problems,” which refer to short distances commuters face.
What San Francisco officials want is to have more of a handle on how they proliferate and operate.
But a whiplash reaction to scooters by lawmakers risks torpedoing what could be a viable solution for cities looking to lure employees with sensible commutes, says Matt Brezina, tech investor with a stake in Spin.
“Cities have to think about if they overregulate this. What do they want more of, more people on scooters or more people in cars?” he says. “They need to give technology a fighting chance against the car.”