﻿They’re hard to miss on the streets of Ottawa, the controversial electric
stand-up scooters that have taken off in so many cities over the past few years. Most of
them are dockless rentals from the three companies allowed to operate here (Bird, Lime, and Neuron),
but some people just buy their own eScooter from a company like Segway to use personally. We didn’t
encounter these very often in Montreal and Toronto because both cities cancelled their modest pilot
projects for rentals and on top of that they even go as far as to ban privately-owned eScooters from
operating in public, although occasionally we saw people defy that and ride in the city anyway.
We talk a lot about bikes on this channel because we find them particularly fun and useful,
but we’re very much interested in other forms of transportation too. We walk as much as we bike,
if not more, we consider quality public transit to be essential to a serious city,
and it’s also hard not to also be intrigued by other new ways to get around like these eScooters,
both as a way to give people more transportation options but more specifically as a way to reduce
the effects of cars on our cities, from noise to pollution to injuries and sedentary lifestyles.
As we’re going to see from some studies on how eScooters are used,
the results are mixed but in our view more positive than negative.
First though we wanted to get some experience using these ourselves. Neuron, the company with
the orange scooters, is more safety-oriented, with a bigger deck to stand on and an attached helmet.
It’s a good idea but we already have our own trusty purple bike helmets so we ended up
trying the other two brands, Bird and Lime. Access happens through an app that lets you
see the location of each available scooter in the city. The scooters are dockless,
meaning there aren’t fixed stations like on a Bixi bike, so you can find them and
leave them almost wherever you want, subject to important rules like not blocking sidewalks.
There are a total of 1,200 rental scooters around central Ottawa this year and they’re pretty easy
to find if you want one, although technically for access to every one you’d need all three apps
installed. We thought the perfect place to try these out would be the active mobility parkways
that we talked about in another video, although they ended up being geofenced as “no ride zones”.
There are a lot of these around, including the whole of Carleton University,
which seems inconvenient to students who might want to use these in their commute.
We found the riding experience to be fun, although it didn’t feel as safe or as stable as a bike.
Riding these is fairly intuitive, for the most part; you get on, push yourself forward with
your feet, and then use the throttle to go faster, up to 20 km/h. Lime scooters have a screen showing
your speed, although for some reason it was in miles per hour, an oversight for the Canadian
market. Despite it being fun to zip around quickly without much effort, there are a few downsides
compared to bikes, like that you really feel the bumps of the road and also that it feels harder
to do arm signals for turning because taking one arm off the handlebars feels less stable.
We found it easy to think of use cases for eScooters, maybe they replace a bike commute
on warmer days to avoid arriving to work sweaty or they solve the last mile problem of getting
people from a subway or metro station to their home, but one major problem is just the cost.
For rides over a few minutes it quickly becomes more expensive than a transit fare,
and for any ride it’s more expensive than Bixi in Montreal. Maybe more importantly though, these
rentals are expensive compared to buying your own eScooter, which can be well under $1,000.
If we were going to use one of these on a daily basis, like as a last mile solution alongside
transit, we’d probably just buy one to own. We’d lose the flexibility of leaving it outside the
destination, but eScooters are smaller than bikes and easier to fold up and take places,
even compared to a folding bike. The rentals weren’t light, the Lime scooters are almost
30 pounds, but if you buy your own then you have the option for a lighter commuter model.
A study from Vienna backs up the effect of pricing, finding that people who own
eScooters ride daily or weekly but renters tend to use them a few times a month at most.
Depending on where you live there might be another more relevant payment option for daily users on
the rentals, although this is hard to rely on because it varies by company, market, and
presumably it could also vary by year. Currently in Ottawa Neuron offers a monthly pass for $90,
which is pretty reasonably priced for daily commuters. Bird and Lime’s passes
seem targeted at tourists though, at $30 for 3-days or $20 for one day.
So that’s the user experience, but are eScooters good for cities? In terms of offering more options
to get around the answer is clearly yes, they fill a niche that a lot of people seem to find
useful. In terms of reducing car dependence, the results are more modest. Studies from the
U.S. and New Zealand do definitely find that eScooters replace many car trips, both private
cars and taxi services. One study from Portland, Oregon found that 6% of eScooter users got rid of
their cars as a result, and many more considered doing so too. That’s pretty encouraging. However,
these studies also find that eScooters actually replace active transportation, mainly walking,
as much as cars or more. It might still be good to give people the choice, but that part is harder to
be enthusiastic about. A study from Vienna also finds that eScooter renters replace car trips
less than eScooter owners, which is definitely an advantage for privately-owned eScooters.
Interestingly, those studies from the U.S. and New Zealand find that eScooters don’t compete with
public transit that much, and various studies, including from Montreal, find that eScooters are
often combined with transit. The New Zealand study also found that they increase overall mobility:
7% of eScooter trips wouldn’t have been made at all without the eScooter.
Another concern around eScooters that people have is safety, especially around illegal sidewalk
riding and, for the rentals, unsafe storage if they’re left in the middle of the sidewalk. Those
are the main concerns that cities like Toronto have when they ban them. There are many valid
concerns about eScooter safety, certainly we found that they feel less stable than bikes, but
eScooters actually seem to be a bigger danger to their riders than to pedestrians or anyone else.
In Portland, the vast majority of emergency room visits were the riders tripping or falling.
Of 176 scooter-related visits to the emergency room, only five involved pedestrians.
Part of the safety problem is that helmet use on scooters is generally very low,
which is a weakness of rentals because people spontaneously deciding to take a ride won’t have
their own helmet with them, and lots of people are hesitant about using shared helmets. Riding on the
sidewalk definitely seems to be a problem too—a study from Nashville found that most eScooter
collisions with cars happen at intersections when riders come from the sidewalk and drivers don’t
expect them. A study from Washington DC found that eScooter riders were more likely to be
injured than cyclists per mile traveled, and they were especially likely to be hurt by potholes,
cracks, sign posts, and curbs, some of which are related to riding on the sidewalk.
Fortunately eScooter riders do seem to change their behaviour based on the infrastructure
available. The study from Portland found that sidewalk riding depended massively on the road’s
speed limit and whether it had bike infrastructure to use. This makes sense—like cyclists,
most eScooter riders don’t want to ride on the sidewalk. It’s not fun sharing the space with
pedestrians, and often sidewalks are bumpy because they’re made to be walked on, not rolled on.
As for the parking problem, keep in mind that it doesn’t really affect privately-owned eScooters
at all. Parking is a concern for rentals, with studies finding that about 5% of them are parked
in the middle of the sidewalk and more are parked other places where they shouldn’t be,
like on private property. One of the studies also reports better compliance as their pilot
project went on. From our experience in Ottawa, it seems pretty rare for them to block a route
in a way that might stop someone in a walker or wheelchair from getting by,
although someone who’s visually impaired might pretty understandably find them threatening.
So after all of this, how should we approach eScooters in cities? For privately-owned eScooters
the answer to us seems really clear: they should be allowed. eScooter owners don’t have the problem
of blocking sidewalks with parking, they’re more likely to replace car trips than renters,
it’s probably easier to get them to wear helmets, and really, if regular people can drive 5,000
pound pickup trucks through town as a personal vehicle but 30 pound eScooters are illegal,
something is deeply, deeply wrong with transportation policy in our cities.
The rental scooters are a different question because they have more downsides and fewer
benefits than privately-owned scooters, and it’s not necessarily crazy to ban them
because these companies are asking to use public space for their commercial goods.
However, we still think that cities should keep experimenting and trying to make them work,
which can help us rethink how we use public space; maybe there isn’t enough room to park
these on our sidewalks because our sidewalks are too small? Maybe bike lanes aren’t just for bikes,
and that’s a reason we need to build more of them and build them bigger?
Maybe a few car parking spaces every block can be dedicated to bike and scooter parking,
kind of like a taxi stand? Those are just some ideas. We don’t know
the right model for these rentals, but they’re a legitimately innovative and interesting addition
to the transportation mix and they shouldn’t be dismissed without giving them a serious try.