Solving the scooter problem

Scooters are everywhere they shouldn't be. Perhaps you've heard?

 I

Why are the scooters among us? Rental scooters and bicycles are one way for cities to reinvigorate their downtown areas. Cedar Rapids, like most American cities, saw their downtown areas transformed in the second half of the 20th century from town centers into clusters of offices. Analysis by Costar shows the percentage of real estate devoted to offices in major American cities varies from less than a third in Nashville, San Diego, and St. Petersburg to two-thirds or more in Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Washington. In downtown Boston, offices occupy a staggering 83 percent of real estate (Badger and Bui 2021).

Offices provide a lot of use maybe 10 hours a day, five days a week, and hardly anything the rest of the time. (Think Cedar Rapids before the flood.) This might be a net-win for property tax collection, but wastes prime city space. Monocultures are not resilient, as we saw during the pandemic; as professionals shifted to work-from-home, it exposed cities' vulnerabilities to shifts in worker behavior. Services like restaurants that were dependent on a stream of office workers suffered. "Single-use office districts--that's not a formula for success," Philadelphia's Paul Levy told The New York Times (Badger and Bui 2021).

What cities, including Cedar Rapids and even Boston, have been trying to do for most of this century is to diversify the economies of their core areas to create 24-hour downtowns. Studies cited by Jeff Speck (2012: 17-35) show advantages of walkable urban neighborhoods over other development types: attractiveness of street life to mobile professionals, financial and health benefits of walking to individuals, more money stays in the local economy, more job creation, productivity and innovation. A substantial residential population can support ongoing economic activity, besides making the area look active and interesting rather than empty. Jane Jacobs (1962: 198) makes this part of her first condition for a vibrant city:

The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common....

For a humble example of the economic effects of people spread through time of day, I [offer] a city sidewalk scene: the ballet of Hudson Street. The continuity of this movement... depends on an economic foundation of basic mixed uses. The workers from the laboratories, meat-packing plants, warehouses, plus those from a bewildering variety of small manufacturers, printers and other little industries and offices, give all the eating places and much of the other commerce support at midday....  The enterprises we [together] are capable of supporting, mutually, draw out onto the sidewalk by evening many more residents than would emerge if the place were moribund. And, in a modest way, they attract still another crowd [who are] people who want a change from [other] neighborhoods.... This attraction exposes our commerce to a still larger and more diverse population, and this in turn has permitted a still further growth and range of commerce living on all three kinds of population in varying proportions: a shop down the street selling prints, a store that rents diving equipment, a dispensary of first-rate pizza, a pleasant coffee house.

In Cedar Rapids, census tract 19, which includes downtown, grew only 1 percent from 2010-2016, but vigorous construction in adjacent tracts accompanied 19.3 percent growth in tract 22 (Kingston Village) and 7.6 percent growth in tract 27 (New Bohemia and Oakhill Jackson) (density.website). We're getting there.

II

Part of reinvigorating downtown areas is providing transportation alternatives to cars. If all the people we need in our downtown and Main Street District came in their own cars, the congestion would choke all the fun away before it began, and we'd take up even more space for parking than we already do; more room for parking means less room for fun and/or economic productivity. Like bicycles and buses, scooters are a sustainable, resilient transportation alternative. City Observatory's study of Portland's scooter program found scooters were not only frequently used, but they had positive effects on traffic congestion and air quality, not to mention providing people downtown with an alternative to cars. (Scooter riders were also paying about ten times as much per mile as car drivers.)

3rd Av SE: 4 bikes and 8 scooters clustered around a bike rack

These are important considerations, but they're small consolation when you're being run off the sidewalk by an aggressive scooterer, or you have to step around, or push a stroller around, or maneuver a walker around, a carelessly discarded scooter. No wonder people want to see them gone. Yet, given their benefits, we should not be too hasty.

III

So what do we know for sure? Cedar Rapids's bike and scooter share program is run through a contract with Veoride. Veoride's website offers encouragement and general instructions like "Ride in the bike lane or vehicle lane unless local laws say otherwise" and "A bike rack is the safest place to park." Also, "The furniture zone of the sidewalk (where benches, lamps & the tree lines are) is a safe and visible place to park." 

Scooter in the furniture zone. Note the adjacent capacity for parking cars

The map with designated parking zones are only on the Veo app, not the website. This includes the service boundary, where you are allowed to park ("forced parking zones"), no parking zones, no ride zones, reduced speed zones, zones with special rewards for parking there,  It also says that "you have to take and submit a parking photo to end your trip..." That means the user is responsible for showing Veoride that they have stored the scooter in a safe and responsible way.

On Thursday morning, I walked 16 blocks of Cedar Rapids's downtown area, from 1st to 5th Street and 1st to 5th Avenue SE. I saw 29 Veoride bikes and 80 Veoride scooters that were not in use.

• Of the bikes, 18 (62.1%) were parked at a bike rack, 11 (37.9%) were in the furniture zone: 100% legal/proper
• Of the scooters, 32 (40%) were parked at a bike rack, 33 (41.3%) were in the furniture zone, 11 (13.8%) were on the sidewalk to some degree, 2 (2.5%) were down an alley, and 1 (1.3%) was in a parking lot. Two of those left on the sidewalk were in cutout areas that were not usable for walking, so I'm saying: 85.2% legal/proper
• There were 40 bike racks, some city-owned and some privately-owned but publicly-accessible. Of these, 16 (40%) were in use.
• I didn't count car parking spaces. There are many, many of them, not nearly all in use. No one parking a car has any excuse for not parking it properly. And yet people do.

Counted as improperly placed, but not really a problem 
even to the most infirm walker

A skeptic notes that Veoride has added staff to manage the bikes, so the problem now seems less dire  than it is, and that I really should do this survey on a Saturday night. Or maybe go to Redmond Park, or New Bohemia, or some place on the west side where they're more higgledy-piggledy. That would be interesting to do. However, it suggests the problem is confined to specific times and places, which makes management i.e. mitigation more of a viable option.

Counted as being in the furniture zone, which it mostly is.
Better where it is than on the rack, though, which would put it right where people walk!

IV

So how do we live with scooters, enjoying their advantages while minimizing the inconveniences? Scooter return is a classic example of an externality i.e. there is a cost to the transaction that is not borne by the user or by Veoride, but by innocent bystanders who have to navigate around improperly left scooters. The policy text I use in my introductory American government class, Public Policy by Michael E. Kraft and Scott R. Furlong (2020: 107-111), lists five general ways of addressing any externality: direct government management of the situation, regulating individual behavior, providing incentives to individuals, market mechanisms that account for externalities, and persuasion.

Government management: More Veoride or city staff could be in charge of returning vehicles to their proper spaces. Or rental could be done from a central location with an actual staff person, rather than a credit card. The bike program came with a lot of new racks, painted a prominent shade of green, but these might need to be moved around to make docking the vehicles more convenient.

Regulation: The rules for proper scooter return are on the app. They could be more strictly enforced, either through fines when the user does not provide the proper picture, or through police guidance. If the police are involved, though, I would hope they would not focus on scooters but address aggressive or unsafe vehicle use in general. 

Incentives: Free rides for people who successfully return a scooter or bike a certain number of times without fail.

Market mechanisms: Require a deposit for rental that would be used to cover loss or damage to the scooter, including the cost of transporting it to a proper location? Allow users to buy stock in Veoride's Cedar Rapids operation, which would understandably increase or decrease in value based on the overall performance of city riders at returning their vehicles?

Persuasion: Social media or other outreach explaining and re-explaining how to return a scooter properly, and stressing the importance of proper scooter return. As I understand the whole nudge thing, it is better to stress the number of people who do it right rather than the inconvenience to children and the elderly who have a sidewalk blocked.

These are some ideas off the top of my head. They assume that there are benefits both to having a local scooter rental program, and to having sidewalks, doorways, &c. clear for people to walk. If your attitude is, "Drivers are normal, scooters are different therefore bad eww eww eww get rid of them," then you  already know what you're going to do.

SEE ALSO:

"The Crisis of Authority and Our Common Life," 19 June 2021

"Here Come the Scooters!" 8 July 2019

Ben Kaplan wrote "The Scooter Problem" in 2021 and "The Scooters Are Good" in 2018

George Kevin Jordan, "Can a New Kickstand Help Curb the E-Scooter Domino Effect?" Greater Greater Washington, 9 August 2021

BOOKS CITED

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library, [1961] 2011)

Michael E. Kraft and Scott R. Furlong, Public Policy: Politics, Analysis, and Alternatives (Sage CQ Press, 7th edition, 2020)

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus and Giruox, 2012)