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Lime Scooters to Offer Chance for Sacramento to Study Mobility

The recent arrival of Lime electric scooters and other looming rollouts are aimed at improving mobility for residents across Sacramento — but also helping city officials learn more about how people use the devices to get around.

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Sacramento’s latest urban micro-mobility deployment should help create for city officials a more nuanced picture of how residents get around — and what is and isn’t working, officials told Techwire.

Lime’s deployment Wednesday of up to 250 electric scooters around Sacramento was aimed, it said in a news release, at “providing affordable access to a sustainable, convenient mobility option.” The scooters are available around the city, with 20 percent of the fleet destined for “opportunity areas” in parts of north, south and southeast Sacramento “to ensure equitable service.” But Sacramento Chief Innovation Officer Louis Stewart said the initiative will facilitate deeper learning about scooter use and mobility itself, while preparing the city for what’s next. Among the takeaways:

• Officials hope the project will bring “huge benefits” for residents — while enabling Sacramento to “learn more about how to improve mobility for our citizens,” Stewart said, adding: “So, getting accurate data from these systems is crucial.” Clean data will enable city staff to understand when and where Lime scooters are used — and, potentially, examples from competing Bird, Lyft and Spin, all of whom have applied for city business permits. (Two to three similar deployments are likely later this month.) And it will help public and private sectors work together to shift scooters strategically where they could be best utilized.

• Stewart and Transportation and Planning Manager Jennifer Donlon Wyant offered advice for other munis contemplating their own urban mobility partnerships. He recommended other agencies “really think people first,” noting thoughtful work by Wyant and others on her team that has helped insulate the city from a backlash against electric scooters or bicycles that some peers have faced.

“It’s one thing to just have scooters flood the market. It’s another thing to actually sit and work with the companies,” Stewart said, noting that Sacramento seeks to recover its costs from these collaborations.

Wyant recommended other agencies collect fees to create parking spaces for electric bikes, scooters or other forms of mobility — and empower parking enforcement to cite devices that block sidewalks or other public areas. Sacramento’s fee, she said, is “a direct nexus between their operations and the need for that.”

In Lime’s case, the city will fine the company $15 per device found to be blocking a sidewalk. In addition to a $4,440 business permit fee, the company is paying a 10-cent per-trip fee per device, estimated at three trips per day per device. It’s also paying a $104 annual vehicle monitoring fee per device, to cover staff time; and, in the central city, a $32 annual device fee to cover the loss of parking meter space.

• Sacramento is still drilling down on enforcement issues; and, beyond “randomly parked” scooters and bikes, no obvious problems have presented themselves, Stewart said. However, the city has heard from a few private-sector vendors interested in helping it capitalize on the GPS tracking in electric bikes and scooters by providing a platform capable of aggregating that data and highlighting errant rentals.

Wyant said the city is actively exploring developing an internal dashboard in-house, to pull mobility data specifications (MDS) from bike- and scooter-share companies and show how many daily trips the devices are taking; how long those trips are; and where they start and stop.

• The exact timing is uncertain, and the city will have to keep pace, but Stewart said he expects a “convergence” between new forms of transportation like autonomous vehicles, and bike and scooter share; and infrastructure elements like street lights and cameras, to begin happening during the next year or two. He declined to offer specifics on how that might play out, pointing out, “I have a vivid imagination in that space,” but said: “At some point, all of these things have to converge because that’s just the nature of how they’re being built.”

Wyant called the Lime engagement a “fabulous opportunity for us to rethink about how we move, as we continue to grow as a city.”

“We can’t continue to have people driving around in their single occupancy vehicle or zero occupancy vehicle, when autonomous vehicles come. And so, we need to provide the options to folks and having these companies operate here with their shared micro-mobility is a great way to get people around,” she said.

Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.