Popular e-scooters seem destined for state streets
NEW HAVEN — In some cities, they’ve landed like a flock of birds, ready to ride.
And the electrically powered, stand-up scooters, known as escooters, are tremendously popular wherever they’ve appeared, competing with bicycles for easy, environmentally friendly twowheeled transportation.
St. Paul, Minn., found out one day last July.
“Last summer, we had a surprise landing of Bird (scooter company) in St. Paul that was not expected, and we did not have an ordinance that specifically authorized these scooters,” said Lisa Hiebert, spokeswoman for the Public Works Department in Minnesota’s capital city.
Bird was asked to take its scooters away, but St. Paul created a pilot program in August and now has contracted with Bird, Lime and Spin to provide dockless rental scooters for city residents.
E-scooters may be an inevitable arrival on Connecticut’s streets, if not this year then soon. A bill regulating e-scooters, H.B. 7141, was unanimously approved by the General Assembly’s Transportation Committee and passed the state House on April 23, 143-1. It’s uncertain whether it will be taken up by the state Senate this year, according to President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven.
“It depends on when we caucus it, whether it’s important to our Senate chair” of the Transportation Committee or “if it’s a bill that the House leadership asks us to take up,” Looney said.
The bill essentially regulates e-scooters like bicycles, defining them as two- or three-wheeled vehicles weighing no more than 75 pounds, with a standing rider and powered by electric motor or human power and traveling no faster than 20 mph. It allows them to be ridden in the roadway and not on the sidewalk. Helmets would be required for those under 16 years old. Municipal ordinances may regulate them, as well.
In New Haven, “our No. 1 concern is what we’ve seen in other communities via the news and the press is a potential violation of the right of way, so we’re trying to be more thoughtful … and proactive, learning from cities like Long Beach, D.C., Cambridge,” said Doug Hausladen, director of the city Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking.
He recently spoke at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Long Beach, Calif., on a panel with that city’s mobility officer, Michelle Mowery. He said he learned “everything” about bringing e-scooters into the city, “from rules and regulations to design and use.”
“What I’m concerned about is when they’re standing, when they’re stationary, when they’re left,” Hausladen said, because of the potential to impede or injure pedestrians or “somebody in a wheelchair trying to get up on a sidewalk.”
“We’re trying to be proactive if and when the state normalizes these things; we’re trying to respond,” he said. The city might allow scooters in the greenmarked bicycle lanes, “turning bike lanes into slow-speed lanes,” he said.
Lynn Haig, Bridgeport’s director of planning, said in an email, “Bird did a pilot with the University of Bridgeport last year, and it was very successful. We’ve been approached by a few companies to bring both e-scooters and e-bikes citywide and would like to bring them in. First we need to develop general operating procedures, and are doing so as we speak. We are also reviewing the City Ordinances to ensure they will accommodate these services. We want to have adequate controls in place before we encourage any entity to operate in Bridgeport.”
Haig said the Connecticut Metropolitan Council of Governments , the six-town Greater Bridgeport planning agency, discussed regional bike-sharing and included Norwalk in the discussions.
“Through research and further discussion it was determined that the most effective action right now for each town would be to have proper regulations and procedures in place,” she wrote. “To that end MetroCOG provided general templates. Bridgeport is using these templates as a base to develop our general operating procedures.”
In St. Paul, “They need to follow basically the rule of the road like a bike would,” Hiebert said. “They can’t be ridden on sidewalks and they can be ridden in bike lanes.”
Reuben Collins, transportation engineer for St. Paul’s Public Works Department and manager of the scooter program, said escooters had been defined in state law but that the city hadn’t passed any ordinances when the Birds appeared. There too, “Concerns were mainly about a for-profit company that is using the public right of way,” he said. “They were asked to leave. They never really did leave, to be candid. … Within a two-week time period, our City Council established a pilot program.”
With the pilot complete, St. Paul will allow four companies to deploy 500 scooters each this year. So far, Lime and Spin have signed contracts, Collins said. The companies pay the city $100 per scooter per year, plus a 25-cent fee “for any trip that starts or ends within a city park,” Collins said. That fee was established because the Parks Department had concerns about scooters getting in the way of mowers and other equipment, he said.
When New Haven rolled out its bike-rental program 16 months ago, it set them up in specific locations, so people would know where to go to find them (a smartphone app lets the user know how many are available and where).
“We didn’t want it to be like the Lime system of Hartford, where you could have bikes anywhere,” Hausladen said. “We wanted to put them in certain places.”
Hartford has since discontinued its bike-sharing program.
The e-scooter companies use a dockless system, so that riders can leave them at their destination. But Hausladen said he hasn’t decided how to regulate e-scooters and won’t until they’re legalized in Connecticut.
Mowery said Long Beach’s solution has been to create marked drop zones, where the vendors must leave the scooters each morning. “They pick everything up at night because they all have to be charged at night … and when they put them back out they have to put them in the drop zones,” she said. “It’s not perfect but it works pretty well.”
She said the city asked the vendors to create an incentive for riders to bring the scooters to the drop zones but none did, so the City Council will likely mandate it in its ordinance. “We think financial incentives are probably the way to go,” Mowery said. It costs $1 to unlock the scooter and 15 cents per minute to ride. “Maybe a free unlock or a nickel” off the per-minute charge would help, she said.
“It’s absolutely been a success for the vendors. We are continuing to work out some of the bugs,” Mowery said. She said a survey was conducted and the city found scooter riders are “using them to replace driving trips, ride-hailing trips — Lyft and Uber — walking trips, biking and public transit.”
That was both good and bad news to Mowery. “For us the city has a big focus on health … so we’re really focused on keeping people active and moving,” she said. “From my perspective, it’s a good thing to have them walking and biking more rather than riding a scooter.”
She said there have been some claims “for collisions and things like that. They have been … infinitesimally small based on the number of trips overall, which are in the hundreds of thousands at this point,” she said. But the city requires the scooter companies to take on the liability.
Collins in St. Paul said e-scooters have proved to be safe. “I haven’t had any reports of crashes of any sort,” he said. “The story I frequently hear is a solo scooter crash,” such as hitting a pothole.
Hausladen predicted e-scooters will “go from novelty to necessity” for urban travelers who don’t want to own cars.
“Some of these companies proclaim to have a mission,” he said. “We certainly have a mission of providing access and mobility solutions to all people.”
Scott Mullen, director of expansion in the Northeast for San Francisco-based Lime, said the company prefers dockless scooters, which can be left anywhere within the right of way (usually the area between the sidewalk and the street). Otherwise, he said, “It’s like the bus if you’re not near the bus stop.” Lime operates in more than 100 cities on five continents.
“We’re having conversations with New Haven, thinking about launching. It’s important that we have shared goals,” Mullen said. For some cities, reducing traffic congestion is the main goal; for others, it’s reducing greenhouse emissions.