Here come the scooters!

Source: Veoride.com

Electric-assist scooters will go "on trial" next month in Cedar Rapids, with a rental concession run by Veoride, the same firm that runs the bike share program. The timing is set to coincide with the start of fall classes at Coe College and Mount Mercy University. Thirty scooters will be available for a two-month period. The fees will be the same as for the bikes: $1 to unlock plus 15 cents per minute, with discounts for those who qualify for local, state or federal assistance programs.

If the bikes, which I've ridden a few times, are any indication, the scooters will be serviceable and durable if not glamorous. From the Veoride website:

Each VeoRide scooter features 10-inch wheels with a proprietary, shock-absorbent tire and comes equipped with a built-in sensor to detect road conditions and automatically engage the motor and braking system to slow the vehicle and protect the rider. The swappable battery located in the deck of the scooter creates a lower center of gravity, the motor positioned at the rear provides greater stability and keeps the vehicle from lurching forward, while the mountain-bike type suspension ensures a smooth ride. The speedometer lets riders know how fast they are traveling, and VeoRide can program and adjust scooter speed to meet a community’s standards.

Atlantic writer Robinson Meyer offers these additional tips, which you may not need, but for which I will be grateful if I ever find myself on one of these things: 

It’s best ridden with one leg on the platform and the other hanging off the side for emergency braking, or fleeing. For a classic scooter, all propulsion has to come from either gravity or the rider’s body, pushing off the ground with his foot. An e-scooter only needs you to push off when coming out of a stop. (After that, the engine takes over.) The push-off/scoot-forward/hit-the-throttle movement is the only real coordination required.

Meyer recommends riding in the bike lanes: Sidewalks are small, and are reserved for pedestrians, poor dears. Roads are big and have lots of space for us Big Scooter Adults. [SEE ALSO: Benjamin Schneider, "What Happened When I Rented an E-Scooter for (Almost) a Month," City Lab, 1 July 2019]

Bird reached agreement with Kansas City after starting there with a "guerilla drop"
(swiped from kansascity.com)

Scooter programs come highly recommended. Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan was nothing short of ecstatic after trying them out in Kansas City last year. They are amazing, he wrote. Every city should have them. All the good things you have heard about the scooters are true. He went on: They are cheap, fun, and useful. For one trip, I went two and a half freaking miles and it was delightful.

Meyer of the Atlantic says his three-mile commute to work in Washington, D.C. "had never gone so fast" as when he finally tried it by scooter. His main concern is that scooters are too "socially conspicuous" to endure, and will soon join the ranks of transition lenses, cargo shorts, and Camelbacks which "have never escaped their dorkiness." Ben replies: Are they dorky? Hell yeah. Will you care once you're on one? Hell no.

Jenny Durkan, mayor of Seattle

Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves, are we doomed? If you're like me, you ask yourself this question all the time, anyway, so let's consider whether electronic scooter rental in Cedar Rapids--or your town, if you're not fortunate enough to live in the city SmartAsset rated #6 Best City of Living the American Dream--will exacerbate or mitigate this doom.

Concerns about scooter invasions fall into two categories: danger to the riders themselves, and danger or at least inconvenience to everyone else. Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan, before changing her position in May 2019, had long been opposed to scooter rentals in her city. She explained in an interiew:

It's so funny, every mayor who's got them says don't take them.... [E]very city that has scooters has had significant traumatic injuries. And one trauma doc was quoted as saying it's like we forgot everything about seatbelts, helmets, and other safety equipment. So, look, I know that some people think that scooters are fun. I think the danger of them, and the demonstrated danger of them and the liability of the City--cities now are paying out millions of dollars in judgments for people who are hurt, because you're the City saying here use a scooter. (Trumm 2018)

Nashville, Tennessee is suspending their pilot scooter program, which featured 4,000-odd scooters being rented by seven companies. The immediate stimulus was the death of a 26-year-old man last month; he was struck by a car while riding a scooter with double the legal maximum of alcohol in his blood, but complaints had been building for awhile (Short 2019).

Then there's the impact on everybody else. In April, an 81-year-old man was killed in a Paris suburb when he was hit by a scooter; Paris, too, is considering fewer scooters and more regulations (Prigent 2019). Also this month, in Oregon, the Multnomah County Sheriff's office found 57 rental e-scooters in the Willamette River near Portland. A Chicago friend and community activist of many years standing expressed exasperation on Facebook: Are there no rules of the road for the damn scooters? Her friends sympathized: Does not appear so.... Apparently not.... None. About 10 years ago when they first came out people were riding them and they were getting tickets. The city passed the law: no scooters. Now they are legal because I can rent them. One of them hashtagged "#rahmsrevenge," referring to the unpopular former mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, whose administration introduced the rental program.

Californians interviewed by the New York Times complained about scooters scattered willy-nilly on the sidewalks and blocking handicapped ramps, and sidewalk-riders terrifying the disabled and elderly (Bowles and Streitfeld 2018). As they did in Kansas City, Bird, LimeBike, and Spin began renting out scooters in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Monica without consulting with the governments or the neighbors. "They just appeared," said a San Francisco official. "I don't know who comes up with these ideas or where these people come from."

Scooter safety tips, from Veoride.com

Is riding scooters dangerous? Maybe, if you're inexperienced, or drunk, but evidence from Kansas City Tacoma and Portland found relatively few injuries. Nashvilleans on scooters go to Vanderbilt Medical Center with injuries from crashes one or two times per day, but in the first three months of this year 7,859 motor vehicle crashes caused 2,145 injuries and 15 deaths (Short 2019). (See also Cortright 2019). As Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns Tweeted:

After decades of pedestrian deaths on their streets, Nashville is making a big move: they're banning cars completely, then gradually allowing them back on the streets new commitment to safety.

Wait...sorry...uh...they're banning *scooters* instead. https://t.co/ML9OJeQl2v

— Strong Towns (@StrongTowns) July 5, 2019

Some citizen complaints about scooters may be a response to their novelty. In Cedar Rapids, the scooters aren't here yet, but electric assist bike rentals began in May. Local TV station KCRG ran an arguably overblown story about rental bikes not being returned to rental stations, even though that is not required. (Riders are only instructed to lock the bike to end the ride, and to leave the bike in an upright position in a place that does not impede pedestrian or vehicle traffic, or access to private property.) The report quoted a downtown worker: I walk through Redmond Park every day to and from work and usually at the night time is when I'll see a bike or two there (emphasis mine). And, lest we forget, bike lanes freaked us out when they were introduced in 2013.

Alert the media! Dockless car blocking a driveway in New Bohemia

Wellington Heights: Where do the scooters go in this picture?

A huge part of the problem, to the extent there is a problem, is that Cedar Rapids, like most towns, has for decades built transportation infrastructure with one goal in mind: the speedy movement of motor vehicles. The realities of the 21st century, along with demand from some members of the public, have caused our city to adopt a complete streets policy, but accommodating multiple modes of transport with a network built for cars is no easy matter.

Education, and informational videos like this one, will help reduce accidents due to user error, and encourage cooperative mixing:



But when problems arise with the introduction of scooters in Cedar Rapids, and there will be problems, the people who watch this video will not be the ones causing them. The public will exaggerate the problems because we're used to cars and we're not used to scooters, but the problems will be real, because aggressiveness and opportunism are part of the human experience. The 21st century is requiring more sharing of space, even in spacious and sparsely-populated Iowa, which means there will inevitably more encounters with assholes using a variety of modes of transport.

Is enforcement the answer? I often hear complaints that cyclists and pedestrians aren't subject to law enforcement the way motor vehicles are. This is bunkum; anyone with eyes can see motor vehicle violations on a daily basis that aren't penalized, either. (For the tragic side of this, see Shill 2020.) The fact is, our streets are pretty much anarchic, and I have to admit for the most part it works. Should the police reallocate their resources to provide more traffic enforcement? If so, I pray it's done in an even-handed way, and not in a way that targets scooter riders, or young people, or poor minorities.

I am a transportation omnivore: I drive, cycle, walk, and take the bus. I would like to continue to do all those things without the fear of being struck by an errant scooterist, or (in my car) striking the scooterist. And if scooters as great as Ben says they are, then I want a chance to add them to my transportational toolbox.