‘Wild West’ environment easing with citations, impounds, speed curbs
Blog note: this article references a grand jury report.
For more than a year, San Diego was all carrot and no stick when it came to electric scooters.
Now the stick is out, hitting both the scooter companies and their riders.
Three months after new city regulations went into effect, two companies, Jump and Skip, have left town. Another, Lime, may lose its permit because of repeated operating infractions. Almost 500 riders received traffic tickets, more than half of them for riding on sidewalks. The city impounded more than 3,700 scooters for parking violations.
The Wild West, it seems, may finally have a sheriff.
It’s too soon to say how effective or long-lasting the crackdown will be, or what it means to the future of dockless scooters here. Depending on the time and place, this can still look like a town that’s been overrun. When the New York Times did a story recently on the situation here it carried this headline: “Welcome to San Diego. Don’t Mind the Scooters.” And when Seattle started pondering how to regulate scooters, a TV station sent a crew here for a “what not to do” piece.
Still, the rules appear to be having an impact. Ridership is down, as measured by average daily trips, from 33,000 in July to 17,000 in the first half of September, according to city data compiled from the rental companies. Fewer scooters are in use, from a daily high in the 15,000 range three months ago to about 10,000 now, officials said.
Some of that may be seasonal, because a significant portion of scooter riders are tourists. Some of it may be the weather, summer turning toward fall and taking hours of sunlight with it. And some of it is the inevitable growing pains of an industry that is barely two years old — a toddler, with all the usual consequences.
“The idea is to get to the point where the operators are enforcing the rules themselves and self-regulating the size of their fleets,” said Erik Caldwell, deputy chief operating officer for the city, who oversees scooter issues. “I think we’re starting to see that happen.”
Self-regulating is not a trait ascribed often to scooter companies, which like a lot of start-ups favor the maxim that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. They are now in more than 65 cities in the U.S., and their mass arrival in San Diego, beginning in February 2018, is by many accounts a lesson in “disrupter” chaos.
Suddenly there were hundreds of scooters on street corners and sidewalks downtown and along walkways in the beach areas. Billed as environmentally friendly, and easy and cheap to use, they quickly attracted riders: residents on short trips to work, restaurants and stores, and tourists sight-seeing in Mission Bay or the Gaslamp Quarter. Lime, the first operator here, said it has logged more than 4 million rides, making San Diego one of five cities globally in its network to reach that milestone.
But the scooters also quickly drew complaints, mostly about sidewalk riding and wayward parking. Part of the attraction of scooters is that people can leave them where they want when they’re done riding, and leave them they do. That’s led to a lawsuit by disability rights activists over scooters blocking wheelchair access. It’s led to legal claims filed against the city by people who said they were injured after tripping over scooters. And it’s spawned a niche business: scooter removals.
Reports of injuries mounted, too, including three fatalities in the region. Scooter companies say safety is their top priority and that their vehicles have injury rates similar to bicycles. A recent 13-month study of cases at three trauma centers, including two in San Diego, showed a couple of key differences: Scooter riders are more likely to forgo helmets, and they’re more likely to be intoxicated. That’s prompted talk of the need for public-health campaigns aimed at preventing injuries.
When it comes to scooters, the dust is still settling.
Too slow to act?
City officials welcomed scooters as an important part of efforts to decrease short-trip car rides and reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Too many regulations, they said, might strangle a valuable “micro-mobility” option before it has a chance to succeed.
“San Diego was one of the first cities to embrace scooters, and it remains an important market for us, one that we continue to be excited about,” said Maurice Henderson, director of government partnerships at Bird. “The relationship with the city and our riders has been really good.”
The city’s approach ran counter to what happened in several other California jurisdictions, which immediately outlawed scooters or restricted them through pilot programs. And it drew criticism in late June from the county’s grand jury, which called the city “too slow” in regulating scooters. Jury members drew parallels to “failed” responses by the city to the emergence of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft and short-term vacation housing rentals like Airbnb.
“Other new and innovative businesses and products will undoubtedly be introduced into San Diego, with dangers and/or benefits greater than posed by the ‘micro-mobility’ industry,” the grand jury said. “It is incumbent upon the city leadership to act promptly to protect its citizens while still encouraging and promoting innovation.”
The city says that its regulations, passed in May and put into effect July 1, are beginning to lessen scooter problems.
“Creating clear rules of the road ensures this emerging industry grows in a safe and responsible way, while also improving public safety and increasing mobility options for residents,” Mayor Kevin Faulconer said in a statement. “These are common-sense rules that will protect quality of life, foster innovation for an emerging industry and provide more options for people to get around.”
But violations have continued, especially in busy pedestrian areas — Balboa Park, beachfront and bayside walkways, Little Italy — where “geofencing” technology is supposed to restrict the speed of the scooters. Steady complaints prompted city officials to send “secret shopper” teams out to rent scooters and see for themselves.
Several companies received violation notices, and Lime may lose its permit for repeated infractions.
“The mayor has made it abundantly clear that operators who don’t follow the rules meant to protect public safety could lose their permits and no longer do business in San Diego,” said Christina Chadwick, Faulconer’s press secretary.
A Lime spokesman said, “We feel we’ve fixed the problem and we’re going through the formal review process to show that to the city.” If the permit is revoked, Lime would have to pull its scooters and wait until July to apply for a new one.
The regulations take aim at another persistent problem: People riding on sidewalks. The scooters are required to have “no sidewalks” stickers, and would-be riders have to scroll through and manually acknowledge that they’ve read the applicable rules. Still, police handed out more citations for sidewalk riding than any other violation — 255 of the 487 tickets issued from July 1 through Sept. 15. The next most-common infraction, with 168 tickets: More than one person on a scooter.
When it comes to parking downtown, scooters are supposed to be left in “corrals,” large curbside rectangles painted on the ground. There are 265 of them downtown (and another 245 in beach areas, with 250 more planned for downtown and uptown). But there’s no requirement for the riders to leave them there and many don’t. It’s up to the companies to wrangle their own herds.
That, too, has been a continuing problem. The city recently gave a $25,000 contract to Sweep Inc., a Santa Monica firm, to help with enforcement. On a recent weekday morning, John MacArthur, Sweep’s chief operating officer, cruised the downtown area in a white van, looking for scofflaw scooters on public property. He spotted one on B Street, near Sixth Avenue.
It was illegally parked in the street, posing a safety risk, so he impounded it. Using an app on his phone, he recorded information about the scooter, took a couple of time-stamped photos and sent a notice to the owner, Lime. If it wants the scooter back, the company will have to pay $65, plus $1 for every day it’s in the city’s impound yard. According to city officials, 3,733 scooters were impounded between July 1 and Sept. 15, generating more than $212,000 in fees.
MacArthur also spotted a half-dozen scooters parked near the entrance to an office building, another no-no but not an immediate hazard. He recorded those on the app, too, and sent notices to the various companies — Lyft, Bird, Lime, Wheels. Under city regulations, the companies have three hours to move the scooters before they are impounded.
“We appreciate the need to address these problems, but sometimes getting to a site in a couple of hours can be a challenge,” said Henderson, the Bird administrator.
So the scooter companies have brought their own crews in, with names like “Bird Watchers” and the “Lime Patrol.” They roam the city and move incorrectly parked scooters, according to company officials.
There’s a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game going on, too. Sometimes, MacArthur said, Sweep drivers look in the rear-view mirror and see behind them a vehicle belonging to someone working for a scooter company. “They’re following us,” he said, “trying to beat us to whatever we’re going to do.”
Heat maps
San Diego City Councilwoman Barbara Bry, an outspoken critic of scooters, said she hasn’t noticed much difference since the new rules went into place.
“I think there’s still a lot more we need to do to keep everybody safe, and that would include scooter riders, pedestrians and motorists,” she said. “More of the scooters are being left in appropriate places, but I still see them in areas where a wheelchair can’t get through or where a person might trip. And we don’t have the resources for the kind of enforcement we need.”
Bry supports a moratorium on scooters until the city can develop a better plan for managing them. Several other cities have taken that approach. She would like to see a cap on the number of scooters, too.
Under the current system, the scooter companies set their own limits when they obtain their permits, with some variation allowed for special events. Combined, they signed up for 19,150 scooters, with Bird (9,000) and Lime (4,500) having the largest fleets. The companies each pay a license fee of about $5,000, plus $150 per scooter. The permits come up for renewal every six months.
Bry isn’t alone in her concerns. According to city records, from late June through mid-September, almost 15,000 complaints about scooters have been logged through the “Get It Done” website and mobile app. Some people are more annoyed than others. Almost three-quarters of all the complaints have come from 20 people, the city said.
Others seem to be venting in more physical ways. Scooters sometimes get tossed in trees, dumpsters, fountains — even atop the arms of traffic lights. Business owners sometimes call in a private towing company, Scoot Scoop, to take scooters off their properties.
Justin Vaiciunas, for one, doesn’t get the outrage. He’s a prolific Lime rider, more than 600 trips since he arrived in San Diego from Miami last New Year’s Eve. “I pretty much ride a minimum of four times every day,” he said. “I try hard not to be a jerk, and I think most of the riders I see out there are the same way. I don’t understand why people get so frustrated about scooters.”
The 32-year-old chef lives and works downtown. “For me, it’s a very good, cost-effective mode of transportation,” he said. “They’re right there when I need them, and I don’t have to worry about where I’m going to park my car or how much traffic there’s going to be.”
His short trips dovetail with what Lime is seeing among other riders, according to a company spokesman. The median distance for a scooter trip is 0.6 miles, and the median time is about eight minutes.
A “heat map” produced by the city, using data from the companies, shows heavy concentrations downtown and in the beach communities, and smaller ones near San Diego State, UC San Diego and a large apartment complex in Mira Mesa, just west of Interstate 15. Those groupings hold steady throughout the day, according to Caldwell, the city official.
Another city map shows where scooter rides begin and end downtown. Much of the traffic is along recently opened “protected” bike lines on Sixth Avenue and Beech and J streets — “scooter highways,” Caldwell called them. Maps like this, produced over time, may help point transportation planners to where other lanes are needed.
The companies said their data indicate many riders here are using scooters as part of their commutes to and from work, and that the rides are replacing some that would otherwise be taken in cars. Vaiciunas, the frequent scooter user, said that’s been his experience, too. “I don’t buy gas hardly at all for my car any more,” he said.
Another thing that makes him like many other riders in San Diego: He doesn’t wear a helmet. “You really have to mess up to hurt yourself,” he said.
Troubling trends
Dr. Leslie Kobayashi is a trauma surgeon at UC San Diego Medical Center and the co-author of a recent research paper, “The e-merging e-pidemic of e-scooters.”
It tracked injuries at three trauma centers — hers, Scripps Mercy Hospital, and Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas — from September of 2017, when scooter use was just beginning in the U.S., through October 2018.
“Little is known about the public health risk of this newly popularized form of transportation,” according to the report, which was published in August.
Widespread scooter use didn’t begin until almost halfway through the study period, which limited the number of injuries they found — 103. The study was also limited by the nature of the hospitals; as trauma centers, they saw only the most seriously injured.
Still, some troubling factors surfaced, Kobayashi said. One was how few of the riders wore helmets — 2 percent. That’s far less than bike riders (16 to 39 percent) or skateboarders (about 50 percent). Scooter companies regularly give away helmets and encourage their use, but adults aren’t required to use them.
“Helmet use has been shown to significantly decrease the risk of traumatic brain injury in motorcycle, bicycle, and skateboard accidents,” the study says. “Helmet use is likely to have a beneficial effect in this population as well.”
Another important finding involved riders who were under the influence. “It was more than we expected,” Kobayashi said — of the 79 percent tested for alcohol, 48 percent were intoxicated; of the 60 percent tested for other illicit substances, 52 percent were positive. Cannabis was the most common substance, followed by methamphetamine and amphetamine.
The average age of those injured was 37, with the majority (62 percent) in the 20-40 range. Sixty-five percent were male. Extremity fractures were the most frequent injury (42 percent), followed by facial fractures (26 percent) and intracranial hemorrhage (18 percent).
Scooter company officials said they are paying attention to the injury research, and making adjustments. When a study of accidents in Austin showed that one-third involved first-time riders, some companies began offering free lessons.
Kobayashi said she believes people in various arenas — public health experts, government officials, scooter-company executives — “are actively looking at how to make the devices safer” and that studies like hers can provide data that could help shape future laws and information campaigns about helmet use, driving under the influence, and other issues.
“We need to continue studying this,” she said, and then she added something that seems true for the wider scooter world as well: “This is just the starting point.”
October 10, 2019
The San Diego Union-Tribune
By John Wilkens
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