How cities in the country face the attack of scooters | Local

The bird may be new to Colombia, but none of this is new to Bird.

City officials across the country woke up to find their sidewalks cluttered with electric scooters from various companies with monosyllabic names at the hip, and Bird is one of the most prestigious. The company regularly places scooters in cities without warning, forcing local governments to scramble.

Some cities have passed orders requiring scooter companies to pay for their ability to operate, limit the number of scooters, share data with the city or educate runners on safety and regulation. Some cities have banned scooters temporarily while regulations are decided, and others have created temporary "pilot programs" in which they monitor scooter programs to see how they should be regulated.

Twenty universities have chosen to collaborate with Bird, according to the company's website. The company did not attempt to contact MU officials before arriving in Colombia, and the university is concerned about the impact of scooters on campus safety, according to Missourian's earlier reports.

"This could be seen as a solution or a problem," said Ben Jose, spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Board of Transportation. "On the one hand, they offer people a convenient option to get around the city without contributing to congestion, and they could possibly increase access to public transit. On the other hand, scooters scattered on our sidewalks were really considered a problem.

Bird – with Lime and Spin, from other companies with scooter sharing programs – filed electric scooters in San Francisco in March. According to Jose, the city has received more than 2,000 public complaints about obstructed sidewalks and sidewalks, illegal for motorized scooters in California. In response, the Board of San Francisco Supervisors met in April to create a new law requiring shared scooter programs to get a city license to park scooters on sidewalks and other public places. allow to apply. When the law came into effect at the beginning of June, the companies took their scooters out of the streets and began sending applications.

The requirements of the app were open invitations such as "Please describe your strategies to make sure your runners wear helmets," said Jose, hoping that companies would take initiatives and come up with innovative solutions to the problems. security and legal. In a chart ranking 12 candidates out of 12 evaluation parameters, the city rated Bird "poor" in all categories except two, a rating tied with Razor for the worst of all applicants. Jose said Bird did not give details on how he would listen and respond to community comments or how he could balance the distribution of his scooters across the city.

Of the 12 applicants, only Scoot and Skip were approved. The city intends to issue the first operating license in the city on October 15.

When it came to regulations, San Francisco had a big advantage: having already worked on new bicycle sharing and hosting programs, San Francisco officials had already created a set of "Guiding Principles for Emerging Mobility Services and Technologies". . to find out how scooters could fit into their transportation network. Not all cities are so well prepared, but the National Association of Urban Transportation Managers has posted a set of guidelines on its website that represent the minimum that "all cities should have to manage this new industry on the streets" .

Sometimes, however, pre-established regulations can be a barrier for cities to tackle scooters.

According to Denver Public Works in Denver, electric scooters are considered "toy vehicles" and are therefore not allowed on streets or bike lanes. This means that they can only be climbed on sidewalks, which many cities try to avoid.

"Currently, Denver Public Works is navigating through local and state laws to see if we can find a way to allow electric scooters into bike lanes," said Heather Burke, public information specialist at Denver Public Works. here again In the meantime, we ask runners to monitor their speed on the sidewalk and give way to pedestrians at all times. "

While not all cases are as extreme as those in Denver, many cities struggle to find scooter-friendly rules under current legislation. Terry Floyd, development coordinator for the city of Norman, Oklahoma, said the city did not have regulations that fit the new technology.

"Do you treat them like a bike?" Floyd asked. "It's not something that was designed when some of our prescriptions were written in the '60s and' 70s.

Norman law prevents scooters from being located in public rights-of-way, so the city seizes scooters found on public land – where Floyd said the birds were often deposited in "nests" to be picked up to issue a permit that allows that. Once this is completed, Floyd said, the city can start developing operational agreements for the company through new ordinances.

Norman began confiscating the scooters only after giving Bird two separate deadlines to voluntarily remove scooters from public rights-of-way, Floyd said.

On his website, Bird says he works closely with cities to improve transportation. However, some cities reported that the process was not always going according to plan.

According to the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Bird arrived in July, city authorities set a limit of 150 scooters for every scooter company operating on-site during a pilot program running in November. The contract also states that companies will pay $ 1 per day per scooter to the city, according to St. Paul Public Works, and that they must provide monthly data reports to the city, including information on the number of trips per month, the number of scooters in the service and safety reports for any accident involving a scooter.

But the agreement does not specify what these reports are supposed to look like. According to Reuben Collins, a transportation engineer at St. Paul Public Works, lime gives municipal officials access to a "dashboard" containing basic statistics, but by September 22, none of the companies had complied complete data reports.

Collins has some tips for Columbia and other cities battling the arrival of scooters.

"My general recommendations would be to be very explicit in the contract on exactly what information and what tools you expect from vendors to help you manage the program," Collins said.

Collins also recommends setting a predetermined dollar amount for businesses rather than the dollar model per day, as this would avoid having to rely on companies to provide accurate numbers.

While Columbia officials are working to find out what to do with Bird's scooters, another company is looking at the market: lime.

In an email, a Lime representative asked Columbia executives to provide information on what the city plans to do with Bird's scooters, criticizing Bird's aggressive business model.

According to the press release, Lime "can not ignore the competitive challenge that Bird's continued deployment in Colombia is to our core business model of unpaved mobility to solve urban transportation problems. As such, we are considering our next steps as a company if Bird is allowed to continue operating. "

It remains to be seen if Columbia is big enough for both scooter companies. If other cities are an indication, the city does not have much to say.