Electric scooters zooming down city sidewalks and being deposited in random places -- from doorsteps of businesses to even Lake Merritt in Oakland — became a hot topic and challenge for local governments this year, as a number of companies began setting up scooter rental businesses without the blessing of cities.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is in the process of reviewing applications from a dozen scooter rental companies and is aiming to award permits to five companies in August.
“I am a big fan of scooters," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at Wednesday's summit. "They are the coolest things to get around. You can wear a skirt or a dress and hop on a scooter and get anywhere quickly, and I think that’s great. “But, sadly, a few bad actors make it bad for everyone else.”
The scooter issue largely centers on the safety of pedestrians, the mayors say.
For San Francisco, that means ensuring that the city has the infrastructure to accommodate new technologies and opportunities before introducing them to the streets. A case in point is the width of the sidewalks in San Francisco.
“Not all our sidewalks are wide enough [to accommodate electric scooters], and we also have to be respectful of one another,” Breed said. “Part of our goal is trying to regulate the scooters to make sure we keep people safe.”
As for Oakland and San Jose, the mayors’ responses to scooters were more tempered.
“I am not sure if scooters are transportation or entertainment,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said during the panel.
Oakland Cty Council members are proposing that electric scooter companies obtain new permits, according to an NBC report. San Jose City Council members, meanwhile, are eyeing potential restrictions on how many companies can get permits and whether to require annual fees, The Mercury News reports.
One of the challenges cities have had to face with the initial flurry of electric scooter rental companies is a marketplace built on the ethos of “ask forgiveness, not permission” when setting up shop, Schaaf said.
“We want you to come to our city and ask permission, so you can work with us around our unique needs,” said Oakland’s mayor.
And if vendors’ customers continue to ride the electric scooters on sidewalks, the city of San Jose is considering a technology workaround. San Jose is talking to geo-fencing companies about the potential for deactivating electric scooters when they are on sidewalks and reactivating them when they are in bike lanes, said Mayor Sam Liccardo. The city of Los Angeles is also considering geo-fencing scooters, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“We love the scooters, but we want them off the sidewalks and into the bike lanes,” Liccardo said during the panel. “And that can be a challenge.”
Oakland’s mayor uses Zoom’s remote video conferencing service to hold invitation-only town halls with various communities that run up to an hour long with groups of 20 to 30 people.
With news outlets shrinking their reporting staffs, Schaaf said, it's important to use such technology tools to inform people what their cities are doing.
The cities of San Jose and San Francisco, meanwhile, are among the 3,000 public agencies that use Nextdoor’s platform, which is a private social network that allows members to communicate with neighbors. The San Jose City Council, for example, is on Nextdoor’s government dashboard, Nextdoor for Public Agencies.
But although 205,000 households are on it, Liccardo said, many San Jose residents are not. And he further points out that 40 percent of its residents are born in foreign countries and that for many, English is not their first language.
