Bracing for Impact
City government responses to the electric scooter explosion range from cautionary to ‘come right in.’
By Trevor Bach, Contributor Oct. 2, 2018, at 8:30 a.m.
Cities Respond to the Electric Scooter Invasion
April 23, 2018 | Washington, D.C. | Scooters can travel about 20 miles on a charge, and their power levels are remotely monitored by the company that operates them.
(Brett Ziegler for USN&WR)
In San Francisco, the electric scooter war escalated quickly. In late March, after hundreds of Bird, Lime and Spin scooters suddenly clogged the city's streets, local officials were outraged, but there was little they could do – the city's transportation agency acknowledged the scooters were "not explicitly covered in the transportation code." As thousands of complaints of obstruction and bad rider behavior flooded the city's customer service center call line, the municipal government moved forward with a new regulatory ordinance. Bird, before any new law was actually passed, launched a counterattack, declaring officials were curtailing the democratic process. The city attorney followed with a cease and desist. Soon the scooters, nearly as quickly as they appeared, were gone. "It would be very nice," Supervisor Aaron Peskin told the San Francisco Chronicle, "if the tech bros could come in and ask for permission instead of asking for forgiveness."
For millions of Americans, the rapid proliferation of electric scooters has meant a sudden exposure to, and often benefit from, a revolutionary new transit option. But for cities the trend has presented a dilemma: how best to respond to the arrival of a potentially transformative – but highly disruptive – new technology. It's a problem framed, to a large degree, by cities' recent extended battles with hyperaggressive ride-sharing apps.
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2018-10-02/city-governments-take-different-approaches-to-electric-scooters
