Cities struggle with scooter revolution

Two years into the scooter revolution and its promise of bringing inexpensive transportation to low-income neighborhoods, researchers and experts say vehicle providers are falling short.

Scooter companies and city officials have promoted the two-wheeled vehicles as an economical way to help communities that are often situated in transportation deserts.

It’s an enticing promise. Cities have long wrestled with how they can improve transportation for low-income residents, who often reside in neighborhoods isolated from areas with more job opportunities and food options.

But after two years of scooters on the road, and on the sidewalks, community advocates, researchers and experts say e-scooters are often concentrated in high-income, tourist-heavy areas of town, while disadvantaged communities are finding themselves left out of the latest high-tech transit innovation.

“It is not shaping out to be the equity solution that it’s painted as,” Salem Afangideh, a transportation justice advocate with Public Advocates, told The Hill. In San Francisco and Oakland, a coalition of transportation rights groups have been running focus groups with community members about so-called “mobility options” – meaning bikes, e-scooters and more – on the ground.

“A lot of scooters are concentrated in places that are not accessible to low-income communities,” Afangideh said. “They’re not populated in low-income neighborhoods. They’re populated in transit hubs.”

City governments scramble: Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are struggling to regulate the proliferation of e-scooters, which present safety and congestion issues along with accessibility concerns.

To confront the issue, municipalities are working up policies that require scooter companies to make their product equally accessible to low- and high-income neighborhoods. But the challenge there is finding out how they can force firms to put scooters in areas with potentially less demand.