The Sweep Model Policy
INTRODUCTION
Electric scooters and bicycles have arrived in American cities with great fanfare — but not everyone has been so enchanted. Despite the litany of challenges raised, these new vehicles hold much promise for cities. But many are the promises that go unfulfilled and unkept. To bring this promise to life, cities require sound rules.
Good policy means creating a city that works for everyone, from children running to school, to retirees idling in the park. Striking a just balance to foster health and freedom for all is difficult enough; but the nature of cities is change, and so too the slew of challenges facing them; among these challenges, they must mediate the use of public space, now with the arrival of an industry in its infancy, and a vehicle class that eludes easy classification.
How should a city regulate a technology so new — funded by a business model so nebulous — whose impact on urban mobility is as-of-yet uncertain? Any approach that advocates for hard and fast rules will be obsolete at best, or, at worst, hostile to health and freedom. Even the best rules must be written more in sand than stone: they must adapt, flex, and change.
In creating these guidelines, we have set out to combine our hands-on experience managing the public right of way with the battle-tested wisdom of industry insiders and city officials alike. We believe our position in the industry makes us uniquely well-suited to find policy solutions that can benefit the public and private industry.
Solutions are overdue: the hairy problems that cities face with respect to scooter parking, sidewalk usage, pedestrian safety, rider safety, consumer protections, labor practices, and sustainability are only set to become hairier as scooters become as ubiquitous as telephone poles and fire hydrants. Without the right rules in place, cities risk succumbing to reactionary and patchwork demands when the inevitable “scooter crisis” hits. Good policy can guard against this, and ensure that cities see the many benefits of vibrant, sustainable streets — where people, not vehicles, are at the center.
Naturally, these guidelines owe a debt to the many institutions shaping today’s mobility policies: the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), an authority on the use of data sharing in transportation to serve the public interest, and ensuring services offer equitable coverage; the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) which is devoted to “raising the state of the practice for street design”; the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) which provides general, comprehensive guidelines for “promoting sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide", especially for bike share and public transit; and the North American Bikeshare Association (NABSA), which advocates for bikeshare funding and shared mobility regulations. Our guidelines aim to supplement the work of these organizations.
THE LIGHT VEHICLE, DEFINED
The past few years have marked a “Cambrian explosion” of micromobility hardware. Some of these are tethered to docks, some are dockless, some have seats, some have pedals, some are human powered, others rely on batteries. For simplicity’s sake, we will use “light vehicle” as a catch-all term to refer to all bicycles, electric kick scooters, and light mopeds that this policy guide intends to cover.
Light vehicles are characterized by the following conditions:
Form: two or three wheels, with or without a seat
Speed: maximum motor-assisted speed of 20 mph (32 kph) on flat ground
Weight: maximum unloaded weight of 100 lbs (45 kg), but usually under 80 lbs
Size: maximum width of 30” (75 cm)
Motor power: maximum of 1 horsepower (750 Watts) of continuous output
Maximum occupancy: 1 occupant*
*Vehicles with multiple occupants (e.g. cargo bikes) would likely require more motor power, especially in the absence of pedals. These would be covered by different guidelines. For now, these have not surfaced as commercially shared vehicles in North America.
This is not a prescription for what vehicles should be — it merely describes the vehicles that are in use. They are based on Dutch laws on bicycle dimensions, the Class 1, 2 & 3 system that is increasingly used to regulate electric bicycles in North America, and the dimensions observed on prevailing scooters and electric bicycles.
As the forms of micromobility vehicles evolve, new categories will be described as needed.
HIGHER SPEED VEHICLES
Notably, Class 3 e-bikes (capable of reaching 28 mph) and mopeds (30 mph) are not covered by this definition.
Class 3 e-bikes — also known as “speed-pedelecs” — are currently not available in North America. Meanwhile, mopeds like those provided by Revel and Scoot (the “Scoot Moto”) fall under more conventional motor vehicle guidelines. We recommend that operators require prospective riders to take in-person or online instruction before they can access these higher speed vehicles, except for those who already have a motorcycle license. Mandatory helmet verification is also a sensible requirement here: riders of Class 3 e-bikes (and usually mopeds) are required to wear a helmet — riders could confirm they are wearing one by taking a photo on a mobile app.
WHERE TO RIDE: ROAD OR SIDEWALK?
One of the early flashpoints of controversy for shared light vehicles has been sidewalk usage.
For riders, the sidewalk can be a safe haven from busy roads full of cars and trucks going 30+ mph. However, this can put pedestrians at risk — especially where sidewalks are crowded.
Every city, neighborhood, and street are different, so blanket right-of-way rules will invariably gloss over the specific context. The risk posed to riders and pedestrians must both be considered, especially as more cities adopt “Vision Zero” policies to slash traffic deaths to zero by 2030.
To date, riders have died in crashes with cars, with other riders, while pedestrians have also been struck and killed by riders. The city of Lexington, KY (which has a ban on sidewalk riding) has been reconsidering its ban in the wake of a rider who was killed while riding on a high speed road. Cities ought to be proactive, and strive to make these considerations before tragedy strikes.
Nevertheless, while there is no “one size fits all” resolution to right-of-way questions, the following rubric offers some baselines that cities can adapt to their specific local context:
States like California require setting speed limits in 5 mph increments for roads — we can apply that convention to light vehicles, too.
RIGHT-OF-WAY PARITY FOR BIKES AND SCOOTERS
Wherever cities allow people to ride bicycles on sidewalks, it is worthwhile to extend those same allowances to shared scooters (albeit while limiting the vehicle speed to 10 or 15 mph). This prevents needless confusion in situations where bikes, but not scooters, are allowed to use the sidewalk.
SMART CONTROLS ON VEHICLE SPEED
To ensure that operators are complying with speed rules, cities should identify areas where riders must travel at lower speeds. Those areas can include bike paths or mixed-use paths. Louisville, KY is an example: it has limited speeds to 10 mph near a certain mall, a large park, and the University of Louisville. Operators can be required to remotely reduce their shared vehicles’ top speed when entering such areas. These location-based controls are known as “geo-fencing”.
There may be places where no riding is allowed — these can also be fenced off by the operator, who can turn off the motor remotely once a vehicle enters a “no-ride” zone.
INAPPROPRIATE PLACEMENT OF VEHICLES
Unfortunately, the surprising popularity of light vehicles sometimes puts them in surprising places. Subway platforms, malls, trash cans, trees, and local bodies of water are just some of many unlikely habitats occupied by the occasional scooter. If riders or vandals put scooters in inappropriate places, the responsibility falls on the operator to fetch (or fish) their property out.
We recommend a system of fines — with a smaller fine issued when an operator tells the city that a vehicle has been misplaced/submerged ahead of time, and a larger fine issued if city agents discover one themselves. When the city is notified, city employees or city contractors retrieve the misplaced vehicles. City workers may also conduct periodic checks of areas of interest, monitor social media, and speak with local residents to detect inappropriately placed vehicles.
RISK AT NIGHT
Pedestrian and cyclist crash deaths have increased in recent years, especially at night. As for electric scooters, the rate of crash deaths per trip is roughly ten times higher at night than the comparable rate during the day. Doctors in San Diego report that 48% of injured riders had a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit for intoxication, and “52% tested positive for an illicit substance.”
How might cities prevent these injuries and deaths? Riders might not be aware of the risks, might be intoxicated, and might reasonably expect a city would not allow a service to operate unless it was reasonably safe.
While proper infrastructure and lower effective speed limits for cars are fundamental solutions to traffic violence, implementing them is a slow and politically tortuous process; regulating light vehicles could prove less burdensome. The use of smaller wheels on scooters makes them particularly susceptible to crashes when they encounter potholes and other road flaws — these are much less noticeable at night, and when intoxicated.
Cities thus may choose to limit riding at night, especially in nightlife areas where drinking is common; Louisville chose to ban riding between 9 PM and 6 AM. After three deaths at night, Atlanta chose to ban rides between 9 PM and 4 AM as well.
DC considered a similar restriction, but ultimately nixed it out of concern for restaurant workers and others who rely on the devices. Cities with lower speed limits, with better maintained pavement, and with more bike lanes will likely have lower “absolute crash risk” to riders. In such places, night time bans may be less prudent.
FUTURE SOLUTIONS
Sidewalk riding detection: a suite of sensors and supporting software may be able to detect whether a rider is operating a light vehicle on the road versus a sidewalk with a high degree of accuracy. Students and faculty at a university in Central California, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo have developed a proof-of-concept device that can detect if a rider is on the sidewalk, as noted in a report for the city of Santa Monica (where Sweep assists the city with managing the public rights of way).
GPS that is accurate to ~10 cm may also serve this purpose, by definitively identifying the user’s location.
While these devices are only in the concept phase, if they prove to be precise and accurate, cities could require operators to use them to limit sidewalk riding. The city or its agents could be tasked with installing such devices (if they aren’t yet installed), verifying they remain in place, and confirming they are in working order on an ongoing basis.
Remote repositioning of vehicles: if the technology proves capable, some operators could even install hardware to remotely reposition vehicles (e.g. for vehicles parked inappropriately, or to move them to areas of higher demand). Remote repositioning could help raise vehicle utilization rates, and cover areas more reliably with fewer vehicles required.
Rider intoxication: the operator Lime has spoken of an in-app sobriety test to prevent intoxicated riding, but has not implemented it yet. Liability concerns may imperil it.
Illegal “doubling up”: weight sensors could be used to prevent multiple riders from piling on to a vehicle designed for one person. There has been no indication operators will implement this.
WHERE AND WHEN TO PARK
Parking has been another pesky issue for light vehicles. Improperly parked light vehicles can block sidewalks and building entrances, which poses difficulties for pedestrians — especially those with disabilities. More benignly, light vehicles parked in an “unfastidious” fashion have been known to rankle residents by upsetting the usual vehicle feng shui. Cities have taken different approaches to parking, with varying success.
Whatever the rules on where to ride and park, they must be mutually supportive to make complying with the rules easy, intuitive, and safe.
Since sidewalk riding is generally undesirable or illegal, light vehicles should be parked on the road except where riding on the sidewalk is preferred. This aligns protocol for riding and parking, and conveys to riders where vehicles should and should not be used.
Consistency here is important, especially in light of how heavy light vehicles have gotten over time — due to bigger batteries, bigger wheels, and sturdier frames, they are often 50 lbs or more. Lifting a vehicle from the street to the curb to park can be strenuous, if not dangerous, for many. (Electric kick scooters are particularly tricky to lift, with smaller wheels that require lifting the whole vehicle up at once, while an equally heavy bike can be lifted one wheel at a time.)
VEHICLE CORRALS AND WHERE TO USE THEM
Corrals (i.e. specific areas for vehicle parking) can prevent light vehicles from blocking sidewalks and the roadway, and from being parked in disarray. They can signal to riders where and where not to park. Unlike dockless “anywhere you want” parking, corrals require riders to find and walk to a designated parking area at the end of their trip, in exchange for a parking experience that is cleaner and less disruptive to pedestrians.
Interestingly, corrals could be a counterweight to operators trying to “lock in” users to their app and their app alone, by bringing riders to a “mini-marketplace” of vehicles from different providers.
Cities such as Santa Monica and San Diego have used corrals extensively — Phoenix and Montreal even placed corrals before any dockless light vehicles were deployed. Confining parking to corrals in congested areas may indeed cut the number of complaints that cities get from residents and local businesses.
If a city requires shared e-bikes to be locked to public bike racks, like Montreal and Sacramento do, the sudden addition of hundreds of e-bikes to city streets will reduce parking available for personally owned bicycles - so adding more bike racks in one form or another is likely necessary.
Corrals do require some resources to set up. This makes them less practical for areas where ridership is low and parking is not chaotic. With that in mind, cities considering putting corrals on particular streets should look at the rate of people arriving there (whether by foot, public transit, light vehicle or car).
Because busier streets have a higher need for order, they are better candidates for corrals. Below is a general framework for setting parking requirements:
Requiring light vehicles to park on the road does not need to come at the expense of on-street car parking. In areas with low-to-moderate visitor flow, light vehicles can simply park perpendicular to the street, in between cars.
In higher flow areas, cities can set up corrals near intersections as the preferred (or required) place to park light vehicles. These corrals should be fairly frequent, ideally on every block, to make finding and using light vehicles safe, easy, and quick. When it is easier to ride and park properly, fewer violations and complaints to the city will occur.
Light vehicle parking may also be suitable at curbs where car parking is forbidden (i.e. where curbs are red) as pictured in Lexington, KY, below.
Tysons, VA; from Tysons Reporter
Lexington, KY; from @erinmhathaway
CORRALS AT INTERSECTIONS
Placing corrals at intersections has a number of benefits:
Efficient use of empty space: intersections are often unsuitable for car parking because they hinder the visibility needed to prevent crashes between drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Light vehicles are much smaller though, which means cities can use this space for light vehicle parking without sacrificing visibility.
Greater proximity: naturally, being at the intersection of 2+ roads means a light vehicles will be effectively closer to more people — thereby increasing the number of potential riders within, say, a 3-minute walk.
Predictability: instead of trying to ride right to the door of their destination (and then have to hunt for a place to park on a busy street) riders could reliably find parking at a nearby corner, then walk the last half-block or so.
Ease of use: rather than being forced to use an app to track down the nearest light vehicle, users could just find one by walking to the nearest corner.
Streamlined operation & maintenance: by concentrating light vehicles at miniature hubs, the city would be able to perform simple vehicle inspections more quickly, efficiently, and comprehensively. Even if most of the light vehicles in a city are parked in low-density areas (outside corrals) they will still tend to circulate throughout the city — in and out of corrals — where they can receive inspections.
MANAGING THE PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY
Operators are increasingly using tools like geo-fencing and user incentives to comply with city regulations. Still, violations around use of the public right of way (PROW) are commonplace. They require city attention to avoid impeding pedestrians, people with disabilities, and other PROW users.
Cities could use existing code enforcement personnel, like parking enforcement offers, and/or hire additional staff. However, the rules around shared light vehicles are quite a departure from other policies; staff will have to be trained to be capable of effective enforcement. Moreover, parking enforcement officers that are also tasked to enforce light vehicle regulations may need specialized equipment to haul away light vehicles.
USING AN OUTSIDE HAND
Some cities, such as Santa Monica, have used a third party contractor, specifically Sweep, to facilitate enforcement. Contractors with specific domain knowledge in managing shared light vehicles will have access to more specialized tools and expertise. They can draw on the expertise accumulated from work in other cities, rapidly apply old lessons to new cities, and do it without the city taking on the obligations of conventional municipal hiring.
The independent transportation consultancy Nelson\Nygaard produced a report on Santa Monica’s shared light vehicle program, and wrote the following about the city’s chosen contractor, Sweep:
PROW Management: The City hired a field crew during summer 2019 to support code enforcement efforts. The contractor documented field conditions and impounded immediate hazards to maintain a safe and orderly public right-of-way. The results were nearly instantaneous, as the contractor allowed for quicker responses from the City, increased capacity to impound, and improved self-regulation by the service providers…
Section 3.4: What did we learn about how the shared mobility industry operates?
Lessons
Managing four operators challenged staff capacity, but City efforts improved areas of service provider compliance. The City effectively leveraged service provider data and contracted with enforcement support services to scale up work needed to issue citations, impound, and monitor compliance...
Over the course of the pilot, Santa Monica achieved the following successes:...
The City partnered with third party contractors for enforcement and analytics support, which effectively expanded staff capacity [emphasis original]
After Sweep began operating on behalf of the city of Santa Monica and others (and notifying the city of improperly placed vehicles) operators started putting noticeably more effort to ensure their vehicles were parked properly — including hiring additional staff to address complaints.
If a city chooses to hire an outside hand, we recommend paying the contractor on a fixed monthly basis. Paying contractors “per-piece”, i.e. per vehicle impounded, will most likely lead to bad faith, bounty hunter-style conduct and improper impounds. A monthly rate also provides predictability for the city, which may pass on the cost through permitting fees.
LABOR PRACTICES
Shared light vehicle operators may use independent contractors, part-time, or full-time employees to recharge, rebalance, and repair vehicles. However, the use of “gig workers” (independently contracted staff) is increasingly under scrutiny, and can often run afoul of the law and foment conflict.
Informal, independent contractors may:
Lack a required business license to operate on city streets
Be running a commercial business of recharging vehicles on residential property, which may violate zoning laws, landlord-tenant leases, auto insurance policies and other pre-existing agreements
Use substandard, dirty, or inappropriate equipment to recharge devices*
Compete with one another to collect — to the point of issuing threats and violence
Use unsafe or unsound practices and/or equipment for gathering and hoarding devices
Be treated like employees while having the status of a contractor, violating employment law
Exercise less care in handling light vehicles, which could lead to rider injury
*In Austin, a truck caught fire after using electric generators to charge 23 scooters, and the nearby air became toxic.
Gig worker truck charging scooters
Gig worker hauling scooters unsafely
Independent contractors can nevertheless be useful for vehicles found far afield, especially when using an employee to find and fetch them would be costly. Given these tradeoffs, we recommend that cities require operators to ensure that no more than 20% of wages are paid to independent contractors.
Another solution is rewarding riders themselves. JUMP and Lyft’s Citi Bike both operate peer-to-peer incentive programs, with in-app ride credits and prizes being given to riders for moving a single vehicle at a time to a desired location. These have not seen the problems associated with using gig workers.
CHANGING TECHNOLOGY, CHANGING WORKFORCE
Operators are now starting to deploy vehicles whose batteries can be easily and quickly removed. This means when a light vehicle is low on battery, an operator employee can come on a cargo bike with charged batteries, and easily swap a depleted battery for a charged one. Without these “swappable batteries”, operators must either bring the vehicle to a warehouse (typically, with a non-electric van) or have a contractor charge the vehicle at home. The shift to swappable batteries now makes it more sensible to use employees instead of gig workers.
SUSTAINABILITY: VEHICLE CARE & DISPOSAL
Operators should commit to providing local on-site repairs of light vehicles, and should have a commercial work space in the metropolitan region to do so. Additionally, each month, operators should provide a record of the number of batteries and vehicles repaired, recycled, or otherwise discarded.
Responsible disposal policies encourage operators to field more durable vehicles — which reduces overall waste. Batteries and aluminum hardware should be recycled whenever possible, as they can most often be repurposed for other uses. Operators should be required to dispose of batteries and other electronic components through a certified e-Stewards or Responsible Recycling (R2) vendor to ensure disposal is done in a sustainable, humane fashion. If not handled carefully, the disposal process of light vehicles (particularly batteries) can be detrimental to the environment.
VIABILITY: CREATING A HEALTHY MARKETPLACE
With billions of dollars raised to deploy scooters and other light vehicles, operators have been flush with cash. Because of this, operators have been willing to take financial losses in exchange for rapid growth. However, the pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction, and operators are now becoming more selective about where to operate, under what conditions, and what to charge riders — all in a bid to cut losses.
Even the city of Santa Monica, where e-scooter sharing first started with Bird, city officials are concerned about the stability of the current market. Kyle Kozar, Santa Monica’s e-scooter pilot coordinator, is concerned that ‘operators could shut down suddenly or sharply increase prices, as all four companies allowed to operate in the city did this year.’ Kozar writes: “The business model of how to generate revenues sufficient to continue operations without ongoing losses that require continued, and generally increasing, investor subsidies, is not yet clear.”
While cities have had leverage over operators, this leverage will decline as subsidies subside and/or operators withdraw, especially in cities that are smaller and/or less hospitable to riding light vehicles safely.
Whatever potential rules cities consider, they should weigh the cost of these rules to the operator versus the public benefit, and look for ways to serve the public interest while leaving space for financially-viable operations. Over the long term, operations should be profitable, but modestly so.
GREATER ACCESS THROUGH CONTROLLED DEPLOYMENTS
Open data from Austin reveal that scooter trip volume grew rapidly from April 2018 until September 2018, when demand was saturated. However, the number of deployed scooters continued to rise, so scooter utilization rates (i.e. trips per vehicle per day) sank. The same volume of trips now chases many more scooters, thereby increasing costs for operators without increasing demand.
Limiting the number of vehicles, within reason, can avoid this problem. Santa Monica, for one, only allows fleet sizes to grow if utilization rates are above three trips a day for e-bikes and four trips a day for scooters. Operators, notably, did not consistently surpass these thresholds.
The ITDP recommends (p. 22) a target of four to eight rides per vehicle per day for conventional bikeshare; thus, even if vehicles are seeing five or six rides per day, there may be enough vehicles on the street.
Perhaps in the future, cities could obtain data on the number of vehicles near prospective riders, to determine if they should allow more or fewer vehicles; it should be noted that shared electric light vehicles have far higher operating costs and user prices.
If utilization rates are too low, operating costs may exceed revenue, while a very high utilization rate may indicate an operator’s overreliance on high ridership areas.
Some cities are now deciding to take a further step and issue permits to fewer firms in the future. These cities include Paris, Santa Monica and Washington D.C., among others. Denver may take only one.
FROM STREET FIGHTS TO RFPS
Splitting the pie among fewer players can result in greater efficiencies, both for operators (through economies of scale and more concentrated demand) and for cities (with fewer firms to manage). To date, operators have put out very similar products — with the exception of JUMP’s e-bikes — meaning that the effective product range is roughly the same, even where fewer operators are active.
Cities can use leverage the efficiency gains from having fewer operators to get (1) better compliance with riding and parking policy; (2) lower prices for riders; and (3) more equitable deployments for neighborhoods. Riders also won’t need to juggle as many apps to access all the nearby services.
Despite the efficiencies in having fewer players, competition is important — especially at the contracting stage. This has been proven out in bikeshare, where operators receive exclusive contracts in return for meeting goals set by the city.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM BIKESHARE
With bikeshare, city officials award an exclusive contract to the most promising contender. With dockless light vehicles, riders pick between one operator’s vehicles and another’s on the street — the best-funded operator will likely have the most visible fleet, and be the last one standing.
As long as the government contracting process is thoughtful and well-executed (as it has been for bikeshare), cities can better capture the value created by partial or full exclusivity with scooters and other vehicle types. Right now, there is no risk of one or two operators dominating the North American market, so local exclusivity will not threaten the sector’s promise at large.
One notable feature of city-directed bikeshare has been the affordable price structure for routine users. Users can purchase a subscription for $100-200 per year, and take as many 30-minute trips as they like. It helps that pedal bikes are sturdier and don’t require recharging, but exclusivity certainly plays a role in making rides more affordable.
AFFORDABLE SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR GREENER CITIES
Compare that with shared e-scooters today, which cost ~$4-5 for a one-mile ride and rarely offer an opportunity for subscriptions. (Uber offers a $25 a month “Ride Pass” option which includes 30-minutes per day of JUMP rides, though Uber says this is a “limited time” offer.) Higher prices may also breed resentment among residents, with vehicles ‘odiously’ occupying public space while being out of financial reach for many.
The average scooter user takes only one or two rides a month where data is available.* Low usage per rider has meant that despite popular casual use, the total share of trips on e-scooters and JUMP e-bikes has been low — below 1% of all trips — and growth has leveled off in existing markets like Santa Monica & Austin.
* See: Brookline, Calgary, Christchurch, Hoboken, Kansas City, Waterloo; Lime reported 3.4 lifetime rides per user in February 2019.
Scooters appear to have broader but shallow adoption; with the average American already spending 15-20% of household income on transportation, replacing more than a few miles per month with a high cost mode is a tall order.
EQUITY: PROMISE VS REALITY
A Vancouver study found that for conventional bike share, super-users (20+ rides per month) “were two and a half times as likely to be in the lowest income category (with an annual household income below $35,000) as compared to the highest (over $150,000).” Bike share subscriptions may well be the most valuable to the least fortunate
In Santa Monica, all shared scooter operators offered reduced fare programs, offering either 50% off fares or a $5 per month subscription - but saw only 253 sign ups. To receive reduced fares, riders must establish their eligibility, by proving they already receive state or federal assistance.
However, there is an increasing awareness that means-tested government assistance programs are flawed for a number of reasons, among them that many of the people eligible for aid never receive it, because ‘proving’ eligibility is difficult and bureaucratic.
Reduced fare programs for shared mobility add yet more barriers, as the city of Santa Monica’s mobility report found:
“Accessing information associated with these programs was challenging. App interfaces directed individuals to the operator’s main website, typically linking the reader to customer service contact information. The process required applicants to email each respective service provider with a valid form of photo ID and proof of enrollment in state or federal assistance programs.” (p.34)
In general, the report found that marketing to communities of concern, such as low-income, senior, and unbanked populations, was limited. Despite serving 2.7 million trips total, there were only 253 enrollments for reduced fares.
While operators need to do a better job of marketing and enrolling these groups, even in the best of cases many of the intended recipients will miss out on aid. Having streamlined enrollments, lower pricing and/or subscriptions, made possible through market consolidation, can help the disadvantaged as well.
Scooter-sharing operators also lack full price transparency, and effectively require riders to download the service’s app before they can see the cost to ride. Conventional bikeshare operators, in contrast, prominently display prices on their website and in their marketing materials. Ideally, up-to-date service prices would be included in open data specifications like the Mobility Data Specification or the General Bikeshare Feed Specification (managed by OMF and NABSA, respectively).
Given the higher operating cost per ride of electric vehicles, a subscription model of $150-400 annually plus $1-2 per e-bike or scooter ride is a worthy target. This is the current (but tentative) practice in bikeshare, as evidenced by Motivate systems in Montreal, New York City and Washington D.C. The Bay Area’s bikeshare system will likely be a bellwether for light vehicle subscriptions: its contract forbids charging extra for electric rides — something that future companies may or may not agree to. Scooters, with their shorter vehicle lifespans and lower design maturity, will likely cost more.
Subscriptions, by ostensibly providing a bigger base of routine scooter users, might help cut crash rates, since crashes are often concentrated among the newest users. More experienced users can also be expected to comply with parking rules more reliably.
With or without subscriptions, cities ought to require operators to stand by the pricing in their proposals; despite promising a price of $0.15 a minute in response to a Santa Monica RFP, operators in Santa Monica increased their pricing during the pilot, from $0.15 a minute to $0.25-0.32 a minute; the RFP did not have any provision to mandate or ensure that prices would remain the same. Conversely, Bay Wheels, the bike share of California’s Bay Area, is offering e-bikes to riders at no additional cost, due to the contract terms in place.
NARROWING THE FIELD
Exclusivity does carry the risk of relying on a single party, which is especially fraught with new technologies. Exclusivity is not recommended for unproven technologies. Cities will need effective rules for ensuring operators provide reliable service and high availability, as it has done for bikeshare.
Already, operators are strategically leaving cities where their optimal fleet size is too small, whether due to regulation or demand. According to TechCrunch, Lyft left six cities partly “because it found that cities with the greatest population density are best for micromobility.”
By narrowing the field of operators to one or two, cities would effectively increase the ‘rider population density.’ Instead of being loyal to any one particular operator, riders tend to choose the closest scooter — so demand could still be met by only a few players.
For determining the right number of vehicles, instead of using daily vehicle utilization, a city could request that the exclusive operator share app data that more directly addresses user access. A city could stipulate that say, the operator must provide enough well located vehicles, so that users can find a vehicle available within 1,000 feet of their location, at least 90% of the time.
A city will have more leverage to attract a quality operator (and make demands in the public interest) if it chooses one or two operators from the beginning, rather than allowing a de facto oligopoly to develop once all but one or two operators have left the city.
Based on conversations with operators, we believe those cities that anticipate their light vehicle fleet will be under 1,000 vehicles should move to allow only one operator, since demand is too small to split efficiently among multiple ones.
In general, we think limiting the field to two or three operators per city is the right move. In general, consolidation is proven practice in urban transport. Having fewer operators lets officials negotiate better terms from applicants on behalf of the public; users eligible for reduced fare programs will have fewer hoops to jump through, to ensure they always receive the appropriate fare. One operator for each major form factor may well be optimal, within the next year or two.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Despite the appearance of radical change, the role of city leaders remains the same: how to foster human health and freedom, in the face of warring voices, inequity and now, ecological crisis. We do not purport to have any firm answers, so much as a commitment to experiment and improvise, and to settle on those rules that make cities work, as places of opportunity, of social mobility and sustainable living. New technology and new ways to share public space offer much promise, and we aim to help cities bring that promise to life, with sound rules for a complex world.