Scooters roll into legal trouble
Aself-righteous trial lawyer and smug scooter company surely deserve each other. But if forced to take sides in their clash over vehicle safety, let’s root for the scooter company, shall we?
It’s not that electric scooters are perfectly safe, but rather that they are self-evidently not perfectly safe. Balancing yourself on a narrow footboard atop two small wheels as a motor propels you along uneven sidewalks and streets — even at 15 miles per hour — obviously entails risk, and especially for riders with no protective gear (who wants to lug a helmet around?).
I’m all for lawyers helping to protect consumers from unseen or unappreciated peril but scooters couldn’t disguise their vulnerability if they wanted to.
I say that as someone who has zipped around the University of Denver neighborhood a couple of times on a scooter and can appreciate their usefulness for certain types of short trips. Lots of other folks obviously consider scooters a reasonable option, too. Otherwise the business wouldn’t be flourishing. So why shouldn’t rational adults assume a modest risk if that’s their choice?
The answer, of course, is that this sort of live-and-let-live attitude is intolerable in some quarters. California attorney Catherine Lerer told a Denver Post reporter last month, for example, that scooter companies are deploying “a super dangerous vehicle.” She’s filed a lawsuit in that state for nine plaintiffs claiming scooters endanger the “health, safety and welfare of riders, pedestrians and the general public.”
She also hinted, The Post explained, “that legal action may soon come from Colorado lawyers.” No doubt.
Unfortunately, in countering this legal broadside, the scooter company Bird resorted to a statement suffused with environmental and urbanist pieties.
“Class action attorneys with a real interest in improving transportation safety should be focused on reducing the 40,000 deaths caused by cars every year in the U.S.,” Bird said. “At Bird, safety is our very top priority, and it drives our mission to get cars off the road to make cities safer and more livable. The climate crisis and our car addiction demand a transportation mode shift to cleaner, affordable vehicles. Shared e-scooters are already replacing millions of short car trips and the pollution that comes with them, and we at Bird will continue to work with cities to help them redesign their transportation networks so that they are safer and cleaner.”
In other words, Bird is determined to change the subject by directing our attention to auto safety. The company wants us
to forget that if autos and trucks drove only 15 mph those 40,000 fatalities would drop like a stone (while the economy ground to a halt). It wants us to pretend that the modest number of miles traveled by scooters can be meaningfully compared to the more than 3 trillion miles Americans drive every year.
In short, its statement is frivolous and sophomoric.
Scooters are more vulnerable than most vehicles to potholes and bumps, and perhaps less visible to motorists than bicycles. After a scooter rider was killed in September in an accident in Washington, D.C., Angie Schmitt of Streetsblog USA calculated “the death rate on shared e-scooters is now six times worse than the death rate for bike share systems.” That’s the sort of conclusion Bird officials should be refuting, if they can.
Denver’s dockless e-scooter program faces issues well beyond the possibility of a lawsuit. The city has granted five companies permits to operate during a one-year pilot program but the law in Colorado (not everywhere else) designates scooters as “toy vehicles” that must be driven on sidewalks. That’s unfortunate. Pedestrians shouldn’t have to watch their backs for upcoming scooters before changing direction or pausing. Scooters may be slow by motorized standards, but at open throttle they’re way too fast for some sidewalks — or at least those with constant pedestrian traffic. Collisions are inevitable.
The safest place for scooters is the city’s growing network of bike lanes, many of which are grossly underused. Denver Public Works spokeswoman Heather Burke told me the city is “looking at different ways to categorize (scooters) from toy vehicles to seeing if we’ll need to propose an ordinance change to allow electric scooters to operate in the bike lanes . . . Ambitiously, we’d like to propose changes by spring 2019. In the meantime, we ask users to watch their speeds and always yield to pedestrians on the sidewalk.” Yes, always.
Denver officials clearly hope scooters will boost ridership on mass transit by helping commuters get to and from transit stops. And maybe they will, although I doubt their impact will ever be significant outside a narrow band of young, agile riders in neighborhoods near downtown. Meanwhile, dockless e-bicycles such as the red Jump bikes from Uber, which provide greater stability and speed than scooters, may turn out to be a more attractive option for those who face manageable commutes.
Whether even electric bikes will be enough to help Denver reach its goal of having 8 percent of commuters on bicycles by 2030 (compared to 2.2 percent today, according to Dave Burdick of Denverite) is another matter. Color me skeptical. Among other obstacles, Denver is subject to a phenomenon known as winter, with frigid morning and evening temperatures and early sunsets.
But whatever the number of commuters who wish to exploit dockless bikes and scooters, the vehicles themselves are a modestly useful addition to transportation options. If they can survive the coming clash in the courtroom.