But a plan to do just that at 21 intersections across Pioneer Square is not going over well with some of the neighborhood’s most high-profile voices. The Pioneer Square Preservation Board is threatening to block the project or force a costly design overhaul.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has been rolling out on-street corrals around the city, utilizing space near intersections where drivers are prohibited from parking under state law. In practice, motorists often park within the 30-foot clear zone and risk parking tickets. SDOT’s micromobility and Vision Zero safety teams are collaborating to implement the quick-build projects as a proven safety countermeasure intended to reduce both the number of crashes that happen on city streets and their severity.

In Pioneer Square, street changes need buy-in from the neighborhood’s historic preservation board, which dates to the 1970s and gives local residents and business owners significant leverage to alter projects within the neighborhood or even hit the brakes.

Despite the fact that city code codifies that one purpose of Pioneer Square’s historic district is “to avoid a proliferation of vehicular parking and vehicular-oriented uses,” projects that reallocate street space away from cars in the neighborhood often meet opposition. One clear undercurrent of this discussion is the “removal” of parking spaces — spaces where it’s mostly not legal to park but where it still happens, thanks to lax enforcement.

Data collected from Seattle’s scootershare companies in 2025 showed around 750 trips per day ending in the Pioneer Square area, or around 275,000 trips across the entire year. Scooter usage in the city continues to increase, with a 96% jump in ridership between 2023 and 2025, according to SDOT. The proliferation of scooters and bikes on sidewalk edges have raised accessibility concerns, and the SDOT sees the on-street corrals as one element scooting riders toward better behavior.

But an initial briefing this week on the proposal brought out a litany of concerns and criticisms of the design of corrals that the department intends to roll out ahead of Seattle’s first World Cup match in June, primarily along the busy First Avenue S and Occidental Avenue S corridors.

The neighborhood’s primary business advocacy group, the Alliance for Pioneer Square, came out strongly against the corrals as currently proposed, pressing for more unique designs that reflect Pioneer Square’s character. The neighborhood already has its own specially-designed bike racks, intended to blend in better with the 1890s architecture common in the area. But the group also questioned the need for additional bike parking in the neighborhood, asserting that existing racks are underutilized.

“We have consistently communicated to SDOT that the proposed signs and designs and locations, particularly those that focus on daylighting, are not appropriate interventions for Pioneer Square,” said Anahí Bendeck, the Alliance’s Design and Planning Manager. “The proposal relies heavily on utilizing the same treatments, materials, and design that is being deployed citywide, without sufficient modification to reflect the neighborhood’s historic context or the actual lived conditions. And we just believe that this one-size-fits-all approach is fundamentally misaligned with the character and the knowledge of the neighborhood.”

Comments in opposition were also read into the record from Pioneer Square business owners, including the co-owner of Magic Mouse Toys, and the co-owner of Friend Museum. Neither business returned a request for comment from The Urbanist on their specific concerns. SDOT plans three corrals at First and Yesler near Magic Mouse, with another planned across the street from Friend Museum at First and King.

Comments were not universally against the proposal, however. In addition to supportive comments by a representative from Lime, Cascade Bicycle Club testified in favor.

“We believe these corrals are a practical, safety focused use of curb space. The majority of proposed sites utilize existing furniture zones or daylight intersections. Daylighting improves visibility at corners, reduces turning conflicts, conflicts, and helps prevent crashes,” Cascade’s Rachel Schaeffer said.

Schaeffer referenced a fatal crash just this week in Capitol Hill, where a turning driver struck and killed a 27-year-old woman at Bellevue Avenue and E Pine Street. “These are small design changes that can have lifesaving impacts.”

While the board wasn’t asked to make a decision Wednesday, numerous board members signaled that they wanted to see the proposal revamped to respond to community concerns.

“We’ve received more comments on this project than I’ve ever seen come in. And there’s deep concerns in the community, and a lot of it was feeling like, there needs to be more robust outreach to stakeholders and communication,” board chair Maureen Elenga said. “Out in front of Pioneer Park […] having that cluster [of corrals] up from there, I think really changes the character. Concern with the materiality of it, these plastic Omega posts are not really compatible with the neighborhood. And I’m wondering, what is the need for bike racks in this situation? We have parking for 200 and some bikes already. So if this is for the rideshare, nobody locks those up and they’re freestanding.”

“I’m fully persuaded by the public comments from the Pioneer Square businesses and from the National Park Service through the Klondike Historic National Park that the proposal is contrary to the nature of the historic district,” board member Catherine Walker said via written comments read by the city employee administering the meeting.

This isn’t the first time that an SDOT project has faced a tough crowd at the Pioneer Square preservation board. A plan to reconfigure S Main Street to upgrade a heavily used bus stop was delayed and nearly fell by the wayside after concerns were raised by nearby business owners and fretted over at the preservation board. Purported impacts to drivers from a proposed bike connection between Occidental Avenue and Western Avenue is a one reason that project hasn’t yet been completed.

Elsewhere in downtown, SDOT is currently navigating the Pike Place Historical Commission’s approval to add vehicle barricades at that popular tourist destination ahead of FIFA. Many of the same aesthetic concerns raised in Pioneer Square are being echoed several blocks north when it comes to changes to the streetscape, which is very different than it was during the time periods that both historic districts were created to highlight. When aesthetic gripes are front-and-center, it’s often hard to suss out whether they stem from a genuine concern over “character” or a simple desire to maintain the status quo.

The proposal will likely see one more briefing before the board is asked to vote. Comments can be submitted to the Pioneer Square Preservation Board on its website.

The post SDOT Bike Corral Plan Draws Fire in Pioneer Square first appeared on The Urbanist.

In fact, a recent op-ed in the Seattle Times by local author Steve Olson even argued the City should ban shared stand-up scooters altogether. It may sound extreme, but a few cities have gone down this route, including Paris, which approved a ban on scooters following a low-turnout 2023 referendum that indicated significant opposition among Parisians.

Of course, Olsen fell into many of the tropes of those opposed to scooters and bikes — blaming them for a spike in traffic deaths, and failing to identify cars as the deadliest force on the road.

“According to SDOT’s Vision Zero Action Plan, ‘the only acceptable number of serious injuries and lives lost on our streets is zero.’ Yet the city continues to allow scooter programs that are causing — and will continue to cause — widespread and devastating injuries as well as loss of life,” Olson wrote.

It’s a sentence where “scooter programs” could easily be replaced with “cars” — or “cars without speed limiting devices” for a slightly more moderate position. Seattle had 43 traffic deaths in 2024, and the vast majority not involve a scooter, but rather involved a motorist in a car. So far in 2025, motorists have struck and killed 16 pedestrians.

That is not to say that scooters aren’t dangerous. Axios recently reported that serious scooter injuries are on the rise, both nationally and locally in Seattle. The number of people admitted to Harborview Medical Center with injuries from e-scooter and e-bike crashes has increased every year since 2020, UW Medicine spokesperson Susan Gregg told Axios, adding that there were 29 such admissions in 2020 and 163 in 2024.

The high center of gravity when people are riding a scooter can make them especially prone to face planting when encountering a curb or pothole. These type of crashes can lead to ER visits, but statistics often lump scooter crashes together whether or not a motorist played a starring role.

Showdown at the parking corral

Seeking to address concerns about sidewalk clutter, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is planning to build more parking corrals for micromobility devices — the collective terms for shared vehicles, whether bike or standing scooters or seated scooters. Lime has encouraged the City to expand corrals at a faster pace and has ramped up education efforts about not riding in the sidewalk (including in a recent advertisement in The Urbanist).

Hayden Harvey, Lime’s Senior Manager of Government Relations in the PNW, said current plans do not provide enough corrals to meet demand.

“237 [parking corrals] is what SDOT sort of has built into their plan today,” Harvey said. “Our analysis is that something more on the magnitude of like 800 are needed in the highest utilization areas of the city, meaning the downtown core, the U District, small portions of Ballard and Fremont.”

Lime backed a city budget amendment from Councilmember Rob Saka, who chairs the transportation committee, which would have allocated $200,000 to accelerate the pace of corral deployment. That amendment was rejected on Friday, but SDOT is still set to spend $675,000 in 2026 to add corrals. The topic is likely to return; councilmembers included a statement of legislative intent asking for a report on corrals.

Without a dense network of parking corrals, the free-floating model is likely to continue. But, adding corrals at scale would open up the possibility of a hybrid model, requiring corral parking in Seattle’s busiest areas for micromobility vehicles.

“The cities that have done this at scale have been able to shift from what you experience today as free-floating parking within certain geographic areas where crowd density is high enough to move to a mandatory parking scheme, where the rider can’t just end their ride wherever they we have various technologies and app that sort of you can only end your ride at the pin,” Harvey said. “This is common in Paris. But what’s fundamental to this type of shift from free floating to like a hybridized mandatory parking scheme is the corral density.”

Safe streets advocates have also made the case that building out a more robust network of protected bike lanes and multimodal trails is a key ingredient to solving safety concerns and addressing sidewalk congestion and clutter. The question of people riding scooters recklessly on sidewalks recently came up during the Life After Cars book tour, which came to Seattle on November 5. Co-author Doug Gordon, who co-hosts the War on Cars podcast along with journalist and co-author Sarah Goodyear, argued more bike lanes and pedestrian streets was the fix.

“The answer is just more space,” Gordon said. “You know? I really think that it comes down to like, that person was on the sidewalk because the street probably didn’t feel that safe, and so we need to take a car lane, if possible, and make that street safer.”

Booming scooter ridership

In April, The Urbanist reported on the upward trend in scootershare ridership: “Across three companies, Seattleites clocked 6.3 million rides in 2024, a new record high, up 28% over 2023. The momentum has continued in the first quarter of 2025, with ridership up 76% over the first quarter of 2024. If this pace is maintained, Seattle would exceed 10 million rides in 2025.”

While Seattle has not crossed the 10 million rides yet, ridership has surpassed 9.3 million with nearly two months still to go. This suggests the city is still on course for 10 million before year’s end, with an average of about 30,000 daily trips.

Lime continues to be the most popular operator in the city; the company just surpassed 9 million rides this year. This spring, Lime launched a new vehicle type: a seated scooter, which has quickly leapfrogged electric bikes in garnering ridership. Standing scooters continue to lead the way, accounting for about three-fifths of ridership, while e-bikes and seated scooters provide the other two-fifths.

The only competition is coming from Bird, which has clocked 330,000 rides through the first 10 months of 2025. Most of those riders are on scooters, through Bird also reports a trickle of bikeshare rides.

Scooter trips are heavily concentrated downtown and in a few surrounding neighborhoods, along with the University District, although a few smaller hot spots are scattered around the city. Some ridership spikes are event-based, but the daily baseline appears fairly high regardless of conditions.

“The weather was pretty terrible yesterday, and something like 14,000 people took tens of thousands of rides in the monsoon,” Harvey said. “So this is not a FIFA thing. This is not a Bumbershoot thing or any other large event. This is Seattleites using Lime every day to conduct the business of their lives as core transportation.”

Parker Dawson, Lime’s Senior Regional Lead for Government Relations, said that the shared micromobility program has provide a good complement to the transit network.

“In many ways, we’re a direct correlation to reducing traffic congestion,” Dawson told The Urbanist. “We’ve also got a direct correlation between our ridership and increased public transit ridership, which is a really great symbiotic relationship to be having in the transit network overall.”

It appears the main thing standing in the way of continued micromobilty growth is scaling up the infrastructure to match the ridership boom — in addition to avoiding a backlash that leads to dropping the regulatory hammer on providers.

While the Seattle Times opinion pages may give readers a different impression, Seattleites appear to have a favorable impression of scootershare and bikeshare, overall. Lime commissioned a poll of Seattle voters from EMC Research, which found widespread support for the program and for expanding parking corrals.

“Two-thirds of Seattle voters think the overall impact of shared electric bike and electric scooter services is positive – despite the fact that most Seattle voters are not regular micromobility users,” a poll memo stated. “Seattle voters overwhelmingly support (82%) building dedicated e-bike/e-scooter parking corrals in higher use areas of the city.”

While most Seattle voters are likely not regular micromobility users, many have dabbled. Lime data shows more than 340,000 unique users have taken rides in Seattle.

Author’s note: Lime buys advertising space from The Urbanist, but does not have a role in dictating editorial coverage.

The post Seattle Scootershare Ridership Continues to Surge, as Critics Make Regulatory Push first appeared on The Urbanist.

Lime has settled into its role as the dominant scootershare and bikeshare provider, boasting nearly 5.9 million rides of those 6.3 million rides in 2024 — more than 93% of the total. The program’s performance led Hayden Harvey, Director of Government Relations at Lime, to call Seattle a top micromobility city.

“This year Seattle truly became one of the great micromobility cities in the entire world and Lime is so proud to be a part of decarbonizing the city’s transportation future,” Harvey said in a statement. “The city’s commitment to sustainable transit options and technological innovation make it a perfect place for Lime to go all out here, bringing new vehicle modes like our throttle e-bike and LimeGlider and we believe that new optionality played a key role in the incredible ridership records we saw throughout 2024.”

Lime is looking to expand its service area, with vehicles now available on the University of Washington campus, helping a few more students get to class on time. Seattle was also the first market that Lime tested out its new glider style seated scooter in fall 2024, with the company pledging more new types of vehicles down the pike.

“2025 is about building on that success by doubling down on investments, expanding our fleet and service area, and deepening our partnership with the city,” Harvey told The Urbanist. “We’ll be bringing more of our newest and best vehicles to Seattle, we have already expanded in 2025 to include the UW campus and hope to do more connecting the greater region, and we look forward to continuing to collaborate and advocate with the Seattle Parks Department and SDOT to increase access to Seattle’s beloved public spaces.”

Scooters are the most popular vehicles with micromobility app users, but the e-bikes in Lime’s fleet are always racking up rides, with nearly 1 million in 2024 — 15% of its overall ridership. The booming bikeshare ridership is part of a larger boom in e-bikes that’s accelerated in hilly Seattle. Free floating scootershare has continued to expand into other regional cities, with Woodinville just the latest city to consider allowing them to operate within its borders.

Lime has credited improvements to Seattle’s separated bike lane network with driving the program’s popularity.

Per ride costs have risen considerably since the $1 ride bikeshare heyday of 2018. Today, Lime scooters or e-bikes cost 47 cents per minute plus tax and an unlock fee. On the other hand, vehicle quality has increased considerably as well, with all vehicles electric-assist. Riders can save considerably by purchasing weekly or monthly passes or shorter term minute bundles. A 280-minute month-long Lime pass currently costs $43.99, which is a 70% discount over full pricing and waives unlock fees.

Parks are still mostly off limits

Increasing micromobility access within Seattle parks has come more slowly. In March 2024, The Urbanist highlighted the fact that Seattle Parks properties had been cordoned off to scooter and bikeshare access, even as access to cars had been restored throughout parkways after a brief pandemic hiatus.

Despite a vague pledge from the City to work on the issue, so far, the park “no-go zones” remain intact, outside of a few limited exceptions. Intended to limit the number of users flying through serene park spaces en route to somewhere else, the move counterintuitively encourages people to drive to parks instead.

Bikeshare’s winding history

Seattle recently passed its eight-year anniversary of shuttering its municipally owned Pronto Cycle Share program, which opened in 2014, but never got off the ground. That system relied on docked bikes, but the City balked at the startup costs necessary to expand the system and voted to shut down the program, which happened March 31, 2017.

Killing Pronto briefly left Seattle without a bikeshare program, but in August 2017, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) launched a new program using a public-private partnership with vendors offering dockless bikes. These startup companies were flush with investor cash at the time and soon flooded the city in bikes that were cheaply built but priced aggressively at just $1 per 30-minute ride initially as the companies battled to capture the market.

Given the low prices and proliferation of bikes, bikeshare ridership took off, reaching a million rides within its first year across the three initial providers. But it also was quickly becoming apparent the business model wasn’t working for many of the companies. Hopes of multiple companies firmly establishing themselves to compete and keep prices didn’t really materialize. In 2018, Chinese bikeshare company ofo pulled out of Seattle (and much of the U.S. market) entirely and by 2020 had folded under a mountain of debt. Spin, meanwhile, announced it was abandoning bikeshare and pivoting to scooters. That left Lime bikeshare on top.

Despite having the Seattle market mostly to itself for a time, raising prices significantly from those early one-dollar ride days, and still seeing significant ridership, Lime still was not turning the profit it hoped to and it wound down service and laid off staff at the end of 2019. Lime’s decision may have stemmed from Jump, a startup that was bought by Uber in 2018, entering and gaining a big share of the market.

Additionally, operators were starting to focus on e-scooters as a long-floated scootershare program finally emerged in 2020 after much foot dragging by the Durkan administration. Lime promised it was coming back.

The Jump versus Lime battle never happened, however, as Jump bought a stake in Lime, who folded the services together. This briefly left Seattle without bikeshare again as the companies processed the merger, but Lime slowly returned its e-bikes to service over the summer of 2020 — now rentable though the Uber app, in addition to the Lime app.

Seattle’s scootershare pilot launching in late 2020 did turn the companies’ attention away from bikes, at least initially, as scooter companies entered the mix. Scootershare ridership took off and exceeded 10,000 daily trips in August 2021, while bikeshare averaged below 2,000 daily trips all year, as the influx of scooters crowded out bikes. However, bikeshare rebounded in 2022 and continued to grow in 2023.

Injury and clutter issues

Micromobility programs, and e-scooters, in particular, have taken significant heat for safety issues. A recent KUOW report noted that the city saw 163 serious injuries from e-scooters and e-bikes last year — a figure that includes both private and rental vehicles. While the Pronto system included helmet dispensers with its bikeshare stations, the free-floating era has come with a ride-at-your-own risk mentality.

Safety concerns were the reason that Mayor Jenny Durkan cited for delaying approval for e-scooters early in her term. Ultimately, Durkan relented and allowed the program to move forward in late 2020.

The companies do offer discount for riders who verify they are using a helmet, but there’s no requirement to actually wear one. Helmets are not a safety panacea, but they do decrease the chance of catastrophic head injuries. A helmet rental system could make it more feasible for scooter users to deploy them, but hasn’t yet been implemented, and would be very cumbersome to implement given the free-floating nature of the network.

While scooter injuries are a growing worry, Seattle did have the distinction of recording no bike deaths in 2024, and halving its pedestrian crash death total from its 2021 peak of 20 to 10, at least in preliminary data. SDOT does not have a separate category for scooters in its data and lumps them together with pedestrian deaths and injuries. While trendlines for active users were encouraging, Seattle’s traffic fatality total was up slightly overall in 2024 due to an uptick in deaths among motorists and motorcycle users.

The other major criticism of dockless scootershare and bikeshare program is that the tend to clutter sidewalks, trails, and bike lanes when users are not careful about parking or they get knocked over subsequently. Similar to helmet, there hasn’t been a full fix, but the apps do incentivize users to park correctly by providing instructions about not blocking sidewalks and requiring users to take photographs of their parked vehicle, which is AI-verified for anything major amiss — hardly foolproof, but better than nothing.

Troubleshooting

An SDOT spokesperson has encouraged users to highlight issues so that the agency can help troubleshoot the boundaries or other issues with the service.

“We can’t fix a problem that we don’t know about, so if people encounter other roads where electric bikes and scooters are supposed to be allowed but the shared devices aren’t working, then we hope they will tell us so that we can look into it and troubleshoot the geographic boundaries,” Bergerson told The Urbanist in 2024. “In the past we have been responsive to the occasional feedback when the geographic boundaries weren’t working as intended, and have made adjustments to fix any unintentional issues.”

Program staff can be reached at ScooterShare@seattle.gov, BikeShare@seattle.gov, or by phone at (206) 684-ROAD.

The post Seattle’s Scooter and Bikeshare Boom Reaches New Heights first appeared on The Urbanist.

After fits and starts, bikeshare and scootershare has turned into a staple mobility option in Seattle, but one place people cannot take one of the rented bikes is to — or through — a Seattle park. Most of Seattle’s major parks are off-limits, with the system cutting power to vehicles when entering the “no-go zones” that surround many Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) properties.

This can create headaches for riders who have to park at the far edge of the park to access them or are forced to use a more circuitous or dangerous route when a pleasant shortcut through a park may have been the desired path.

Overall, ridership doesn’t seem to have suffered much for this anomaly in the Seattle bikeshare and scootershare program. However, it is an untapped market and use case that could help grow the program’s success. And the park zones that have been walled-off from access were apparently created with very little public input or coordination, a significant difference with how the City of Seattle treats plans that impact car access.

While three different private companies operate Seattle’s shared micromobility program, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) sets the parameters. SDOT press secretary Ethan Bergerson indicated the agency bowed to the wishes of Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) on the service zones for shared bikes and scooters.

“SDOT and SPR worked together to determine these boundaries when the bike and scooter share program was created,” Bergerson said. “SPR requested that SDOT set up geographic boundaries around parks to be consistent with SPR policy that motorized vehicles are not allowed in most areas of parks, and that bikes must remain in specific areas such as roads or designated multi-use trails.”

While keeping shared vehicles off areas where all bikes are supposed to be banned makes sense, the no-go zones are blunt. For example, none of Discovery Park’s 534 acres are in a Lime service zone at time of post, including roads with full car access and trails where regular bikes are permitted. Lime is Seattle’s top bikeshare and scootershare provider, accounting for more than 60% total trips in 2023, leading one competitor (Superpedestrian’s Link) to leave the market and another (Veo) to pause service this month while they retool with new vehicles.

Bird is the only other scootershare provider still presently operating in Seattle — and given the company’s bankruptcy proceedings it’s not clear how long that will remain the case. Bird has some no-go zones in parks, but not as extensive as Lime. Only the heart of the Discovery Park is off-limits according to their map, for example. However, the dearth of scooters active on the Magnolia peninsula suggest this part of town hasn’t been a hotspot for Bird generally. Likewise, the Washington Arboretum is more accessible on Bird scooters than Lime.

Seattle Parks staff did not respond separately respond to a request for comment for this article, but did collaborate with SDOT on their responses, Bergerson said.

While parks are a bit more accessible on Bird, the entire University of Washington campus is a no-go zone. In contrast, Lime vehicles are allowed on campus — a testament perhaps to a better working relationship with the university.

One service zone consideration at play is ensuring that the bikes and scooters will be reachable for maintenance staff from the respective companies, but that alone doesn’t explain the boundaries.

“Another factor in the decision was that bike and scooter share companies need to be able to easily retrieve their vehicles for charging or maintenance,” Bergerson said. “Allowing riders to end their trips on park trails where privately owned cars and trucks are not allowed would create challenges for the bike/scooter companies.”

During the early days of the pandemic, SDOT rolled out its Healthy Streets program to increase safe recreation opportunities, which included roads and parking lots within parks, turning more areas into car-free zones that were more pleasant for people walking, jogging, rolling, and biking. However, within the last few years, car access has been restored to most of these places. Yet, bikeshare and scootershare access has not been added.

“In general, we agree that it is reasonable to allow shared bikes and scooters to travel on more paved public roads where cars and trucks are allowed if we can address challenges such as ensuring that bikes and scooters aren’t left in places where they will be difficult for other people to use and the companies don’t have access to easily retrieve them,” Bergerson said.

No timeline on a decision is set yet, though.

“We’ll work with SPR to look into these concerns further,” Bergerson said. “We’ll need to take a closer look at the geographic boundaries in the park system in order to determine which roads and trails are appropriate to reconsider and get a better sense of the timeline to make adjustments.”

Seattle’s king of micromobility, Lime, said pushing the City to add parks to its service zones has not been a point of emphasis as of yet, but expressed some interest if the prohibition was lifted.

“Lime is committed to getting riders where they need to go and Seattle riders keep breaking ridership records,” Lime spokesperson Jacob Tugendrajch said. “We haven’t been pushing [for] parks being opened, but we are open to allowing our riders to enjoy Seattle’s beautiful parks and public spaces if allowed by our City partners.”

SDOT indicated a revision could be on the way.

“We intend to make it so that shared bikes and scooters can be ridden on public roads within parks where cars and privately owned electric bikes are allowed,” Bergerson said.

Bergerson encouraged users to highlight issues so that SDOT can help troubleshoot the boundaries or other issues with the service.

“We can’t fix a problem that we don’t know about, so if people encounter other roads where electric bikes and scooters are supposed to be allowed but the shared devices aren’t working, then we hope they will tell us so that we can look into it and troubleshoot the geographic boundaries,” Bergerson said. “In the past we have been responsive to the occasional feedback when the geographic boundaries weren’t working as intended, and have made adjustments to fix any unintentional issues.”

Program staff can be reached at ScooterShare@seattle.gov, BikeShare@seattle.gov, or by phone at (206) 684-ROAD.

Clarification: An earlier draft stated the Seattle Parks staff did not reply to a request for comment. This is misleading in the sense that they did collaborate with SDOT on their joint responses.

The post Bikeshare’s Limited Access to Seattle Parks Could Soon Be Changing first appeared on The Urbanist.

Seattle’s dockless bikeshare and scootershare program continues to boom, collectively reaching a new high of nearly five million rides in 2023. That works out to more than 13,000 rides per day.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has touted the versatility and utility of the program. SDOT press secretary Ethan Bergerson stressed the program is a complement for transit and a climate-friendly way to get from point A to B.

“In 2017, Seattle was one of the first major cities to launch a free-floating shared bike program, and our bike and scooter share programs have seen ongoing growth over the last few years,” Bergerson said. “People took 4.9 million bike and scooter trips in 2023, using the shared devices to get to work, parks, recreational facilities, restaurants, shopping, and a wide variety of other activities. It’s a quick, climate-friendly way for people to get to wherever they need to go.”

In particular, shared bike and scooter use has spiked during summer months and on big event weekends. As with King County Metro, bikeshare providers can tip their cap to Taylor Swift for their highest ridership day of 2023.

“Bike and scooter share has proven especially useful to complement transit and help people get to and from crowded areas quickly during major events,” Bergerson said. “This summer, we set a one-day ridership record of nearly 32,000 trips on Saturday, July 22 during Taylor Swift’s concert at Lumen Field.”

SDOT has credited the steady improvement of bike facilities with attracting more people to the mode.

“One of the key reasons for the success of the bike and scooter share program is that we are continuing to invest in bike infrastructure across Seattle,” Bergerson said. “As we continue to build more protected bike lanes and improve our network of Neighborhood Greenways and Healthy Streets, it makes the shared bikes and scooters ever more convenient and accessible.”

Accounting for more than 60% of trips, Lime is Seattle’s leading provider of both bikeshare and scootershare. Lime’s leadership agreed with SDOT’s assessment, saying the “micromobility program is stronger now than it has ever been.”

“Seattle may be our oldest active market but it continues to set the pace for micromobility programs in the United States and move the idea of shared e-bikes and e-scooters forward,” said Hayden Harvey, Director of Government Relations at Lime. “Ridership continues to break records and each one of those rides represents a potential connection to public transit, a trip that was sustainable instead of in a car, or a long walk that was shortened and made more convenient. We are grateful for the City’s focus and commitment to decarbonizing transportation, and happy to be Seattleites first choice when getting around on two wheels.”

Lime’s 2023 usage was up 50% over 2022, the company said, and that momentum has carried into 2024, with 55% growth in January and an even bigger uptick in February.  “Lime riders took an estimated 190,000 rides in February 2024, up 77% from February 2023,” Lime said.

E-bikes are booming broadly in the region as prices have come down and interest spiked in transit alternatives during the pandemic, when transit service levels decreased and Seattleites were encouraged to avoid crowded situations and practice physical distancing.

Bikeshare’s weird and windy road

Bikeshare has faced a weird and windy path in Seattle, with some false starts along the way. In 2014, Seattle launched a municipal bikeshare program with docks, which was called Pronto Cycle Share. However, Mayor Ed Murray and the Seattle City Council pulled the plug on Pronto in 2017 as the City balked at investments needed to maintain and expand the program with the addition of e-bikes.

That briefly left Seattle without a bikeshare program, but in August 2017 SDOT launched a new program using a public-private partnership with vendors offering dockless bikes. These startup companies were flush with investor cash at the time and soon flooded the city in bikes that were cheaply built but priced aggressively at just $1 per 30-minute ride initially as the companies battled to capture the market.

Given the low prices and proliferation of bikes, bikeshare ridership took off, reaching a million rides within its first year across the three initial providers. But it also was quickly becoming apparent the business model wasn’t working for many of the companies. In 2018, Chinese bikeshare company ofo pulled out of Seattle (and much of the U.S. market) entirely and by 2020 had folded under a mountain of debt. Spin, meanwhile, announced it was abandoning bikeshare and pivoting to scooters. That left Lime bikeshare on top.

Despite having the Seattle market mostly to itself for a time, raising prices significantly from those early one-dollar ride days, and still seeing significant ridership, Lime still was not turning the profit it hoped to and it wound down service and laid off staff at the end of 2019. Lime’s decision may have stemmed from Jump, a startup that was bought by Uber in 2018, entering and gaining a big share of the market. Plus, operators were starting to focus on e-scooters as a long-floated scootershare program finally emerged in 2020 after much foot dragging by the Durkan administration. Lime promised it was coming back.

The Jump versus Lime battle never happened, however, as Jump bought a stake in Lime, who folded the services together. This briefly left Seattle without bikeshare again as the companies processed the merger, but Lime slowly returned its e-bikes to service over the summer of 2020 — now rentable though the Uber app, in addition to the Lime app.

The scootershare pilot launching in late 2020 did turn the companies’ attention away from bikes, at least initially, as scooter companies entered the mix. Scootershare ridership took off and exceeded 10,000 daily trips in August 2021, while bikeshare averaged below 2,000 daily trips all year, as the influx of scooters crowded out bikes. However, bikeshare rebounded in 2022 and continued to grow in 2023.

A record-setting month of July 2023 saw scootershare average 15,600 daily trips and bikeshare average just over 5,400 daily rides.

Despite earlier concerns raised by former Mayor Jenny Durkan and other skeptics that scooters would be hazardous, there’s been no indication scooters are more deadly than any other transportation mode. Bumps, bruises, and broken bones have resulted from users, particularly inexperienced ones, having run-ins with motorists or obstacles in their path. But no increase in road deaths has been linked to the program. Instead, the increase in road deaths locally and nationally has been linked to larger and heavier cars on the road.

Likewise the worst fears that the micromobility program would pose a massive obstacle on sidewalks and trails appear to mostly have been avoided, outside of the occasional issues with vehicles being strewn about and impeding trails and sidewalk pinch points.

“We are also continuing to work on scooter and bike share parking to keep devices organized for customers and keep sidewalks clear,” Bergerson said. “SDOT manages the service areas and requires scooter and bike share companies to use GPS technology to control bike/ scooter movement and parking in certain areas. SDOT works collaboratively with the companies to ensure that these areas are working well.”

Of course, improvements are always welcomed, which in many cases could will include SDOT widening busy sidewalks and trails, or more quickly enforcing the rules when there are obstructions from parked scooters or bikes — or the proliferation of sandwich boards and other signage impeding sidewalks and decreasing the clear zone. This can be a huge issue, especially for people with disabilities or parents with strollers.

Lime gains as other providers pull out

In 2023, Lime is once again the undisputed leading provider in Seattle for both bikeshare and scootershare. For the year, Lime clocked 2.5 million Seattle scooter trips in 2023 and more than 800,000 bikeshare trips. No other company hit one million trips.

“Lime loves Seattle and Seattle riders love Lime, choosing our e-bikes and e-scooters for two out of every three micromobility rides in the city,” Lime spokesperson Jacob Tugendrajch said. “Ridership is booming because Seattle is successfully building the transportation infrastructure to truly integrate micromobility into its robust transit network. We are happy to work with Seattle to build on that success wherever possible.”

Link by Superpedestrian scootershare was its closest competition with just over 700,000 trips on the year. However, Superpedestrian opted to pull out of Seattle at year’s end.

On Thursday, Veo announced they were pulling their e-bikes from Seattle today, but said they were intending to relaunch with a new fleet. Veo’s vehicles had been a unique bike/seated scooter hybrid vehicle with seats but foot rests rather than traditional bike pedals. The planned new fleet would be conventional e-bikes, it appears.

“[T]his pause is necessary for us to make significant improvements to our service,” Veo wrote. “We’re excited to announce that we’ll be introducing refreshed Cosmo e-bikes equipped with upgraded technology. These upgrades will result in more available vehicles that are reliable, and will provide a smoother, more efficient riding experience for you.”

Veo portrayed the hiatus as lasting just a few weeks, and shared a promo code of SPRING24 for $10 in ride credit to lessen the sting while users wait for vehicles to be available again. Veo averaged more than 1,300 deployed vehicles in 2023, but it’s not clear what service level they will maintain with the new vehicles.

While Veo is out of service, that leaves just Bird scooters as Lime’s competition for now. However, Bird filed for bankruptcy in December so it’s not clear how long they can sustain operations either. Lime’s sizable fleet averaged just over 4,000 deployed vehicles in 2023. Bird averaged almost 1,900 scooters deployed in 2023, but has culled their deployment back a bit in the winter months, which is in line with the typical summer-peak seasonality among operators.

Companies are charging much higher rates than they did in the early days.

Lime e-bikes and scooters are currently priced at $1 to unlock and $0.45 per minute. That can add up quickly, but the Lime pass option can cut costs for longer trips or periods of high usage. Lime has priced 60 minutes of ride time at $11.99 for that option, waiving the unlock fees, but the credit is timed to expire after three days. Lime also has a longer 180-minute week pass for $33.99 or 280-minute month pass for $42.99. Pricing at rival companies is similar.

Outside of some no-go zones, Lime’s service area covers the entirety of Seattle city limits, which means it’s grown well beyond Pronto’s original scope. Lime also has a few limited service zones in Bothell and Redmond. Lime briefly operated in Bellevue under a pilot program, but pulled out in 2019.

Demand for first-mile/last-mile solutions that extend the range of transit is likely to jump later this year as the East Link and Lynnwood Link light rail extensions open. As it stands, Lime has no imminent plans to expand its range, but the company didn’t rule out the possibility.

“Seattle ridership is booming and we’re open to building on our success in the city with expansion to neighboring areas, and any move to do so would be done working as partners to those areas and their local stakeholders,” Tugendrajch said.

Another issue that has emerged for Seattle users is that many Seattle Parks properties remain off-limits to shared bikes and scooters. SDOT sets the service boundaries and said it was open to revisions to increase access to major parks. More on that in a future article.

The post Bikeshare and Scootershare Booms in Seattle, with Lime Leading the Pack first appeared on The Urbanist.

That could be in doubt. KIRO 7 seized on the non-scientific scootershare survey to portray the program as in the midst of a safety crisis, and Councilmember Alex Pedersen, who chairs the transportation committee and voted against the scootershare pilot, was on the same wavelength.

“We really need to prioritize safety before we extend and expand this program with private companies,” Pedersen told KIRO 7. This is an interesting statement from a chair that fought to divert street safety funding toward bridge maintenance in 2021. But even though scooter share is still in a “pilot” phase, there’s not an expiration date for the authority for SDOT to issue permits for their use.

SDOT’s analysis turned up 17 police reports indicating crashes that injured scooter riders, although they were unable to confirm all involved rented scootershare vehicles and not personal scooters. One scooter user has died in the history of Seattle’s program and it was in a collision with a person driving a car. The agency also conducted a broad survey of more than 5,000 scootershare users. Of the 4,578 respondents who answered the injury question, 11% said they had suffered an injury while riding a scooter and about a fifth of those said they sought medical attention for their injury.

Given the high injury rate, it seemed likely selection bias was at play in who responded to SDOT’s open call to complete their survey. SDOT spokesperson Ethan Bergerson confirmed survey was not designed as a random sample and sought to reach people who had mishaps riding scooters to learn how to improve the program.

“This was not designed to be a random sample survey,” Bergerson said in an email. “The invitation was intended to encourage people who had a specific safety [concern] to tell us about their experiences and opinions. The email invitation stated that it was about scooter safety in the subject line, and we described the survey as an opportunity to make their voices heard so that we could improve the safety of this travel option. So it is certainly possible that people who had experienced an injury were more likely to want to tell their story.”

SDOT is planning to finetune the program to promote safety, including with helmet giveaways and safety education programming.

“Since the start of the scooter program, we have implemented a variety of safety features and tactics including requiring companies to build safer scooters, making riders take a safety quiz before their first ride, and creating a built-in speed limit cap of 8 mph on people’s first ride and 15 mph after that,” Bergerson added. “As the scooter program moves forward, we are launching a competitive application process for any scooter companies that want to operate in Seattle. We’re asking companies to provide a specific plan for how they plan to address the challenges identified by our evaluation report, including safety, sidewalk riding, parking obstructions, and creating a helmet distribution plan.”

That re-application process could mean new scooter companies win out if they can make a case that they are safer and also have a handle on the sidewalk clutter issue. The agency did report some progress on the sidewalk clearance compliance front. “Our first quarter of audits in Q4 2020 showed 21% of devices as [sidewalk] obstructions, and by Q3 2021, the number was had decreased to 8%,” SDOT reported.

“Existing scooter companies must re-apply for new permits, and their responses will be evaluated side-by-side with any new companies that apply,” Bergerson added. “Companies with a proven track record of success on safety, compliance, and equity metrics will be considered in the scoring. A maximum of four permits may be granted for the companies with the strongest plans to address these issues.”

As it stands, the four scooter providers operating in Seattle are Lime, Link, Wheels, and Spin. (Note that Lime was bought out by Uber in 2020.) Over the past year, Lime has logged the most scooter rides, while Link is a close second, according to the dashboard. Lime also leads in the less contested bikeshare space. E-bike deployment has spiked in recent months, with both Veo and Lime ramping up.

The surge in e-bike deployment is a hopeful sign since policymakers had worried that companies would abandon bikeshare entirely in favor of scootershare, which companies had predicted would attract far more ridership per vehicle (or “utilization ratio,” in industry jargon) and thus revenue. So far scooters have attracted slightly more rides per vehicle: 1.4 versus 0.8. But the gulf doesn’t appear nearly as wide as predicted — perhaps explaining the bike comeback.

Seattle tallied 1.4 million scootershare trips from October 2020 through September 2021, according to SDOT. The agency’s data dashboard reported an average of 2,189 daily bikeshare trips and 5,465 daily scootershare trips in April 2022. The summer months get the highest ridership, as one would expect. In August 2021, the program peaked at an average of 10,826 daily scootershare trips plus 1,238 daily bikeshare trips.

Sharing saga

It’s been quite the saga for bikeshare and scootershare in Seattle.

As recently as 2017, Seattle was contemplating an expansion of the city-run Pronto bikeshare system, which relied on docked bikes. Instead, the Mayor Ed Murray and the Seattle City Council decided to pull the plug, sell off assets, and pivot to a dockless private vendor model.

Initially, many heralded that replacement system as superior in nearly every way, flooded as these companies were with venture capital to roll out thousands of bikes at aggressive loss-leading pricing as low as $1 for 30 minutes. The good times couldn’t roll forever, however. Some bikeshare companies folded, weighted by mounting maintenance costs and lacking a profitable business model. Others introduced e-bikes that were much zippier than the cheap traditional bikes most companies launched with, but also cost significantly more to rent.

Initially, Lime appeared to be winning the bikeshare battle, but soon Jump came in strong, buoyed by more dependable e-bikes and copious capital from Uber. In 2019, Seattle logged 2.2 million bikeshare rides in Seattle — averaging more than 6,000 per day.

By January 2020, only one operator, Jump bikes, was left standing, as Lime temporarily pulled out, citing a lack of profits. In another weird twist, after Uber bought out Lime nationally, they relaunched Lime, with some — but not all — Jump bikes rebranded as Lime. The real competition soon moved to scooters, as companies and advocates rallying to get scootershare legalized. With Seattle greenlighting scootershare pilot in September 2020, more companies entered the market with e-scooters, and Uber-backed Lime also began to shift to scooters, although they continued to offer e-bikes, too.

While Pronto had been criticized for its $6 pricing for rides up to 30 minutes in duration, ultimately the pricing for e-bikes and e-scooters has crept well beyond that. With a $1 unlock fee plus rates hovering around $0.40 per minute on most providers, a 20-minute ride costs about $9 and a 30-minute ride about $13.

Providers do offer a low-income program, such as Link’s Link-Up that provides free rides of up to 20 minutes to riders who have successfully qualified by verifying they belong to another assistance program, such as ORCA Lift or Apple healthcare. However, it does appear there’s a donut hole in the program between those who qualify for free or discounted rides and those well-off enough to afford dropping $10 per ride on the regular. It’s also not clear the low-income program is well publicized.

Helmets, car crashes, and other safety issues

Helmets have been a major point of contention that could complicate expansion of the program. The King County Council recently voted to lift its helmet requirement law, but authorities have still sought to encourage helmet use through a less punitive and hopefully less racially biased system.

SDOT’s survey suggests most scootershare riders do not wear helmets, with about 70% of respondents saying they never, or almost never, wore a helmet while riding a scooter — 40% of respondents said that this was because they did not own a helmet.

“Helmet ownership is a problem that we can help address, and in the future we plan to increase outreach with more riding safety demonstrations and helmet giveaways across Seattle, like this event conducted with East African Community Services last summer,” Bergerson said. “We are also working to strengthen our partnership with Seattle + King County Public Health, and with community organizations like Bike Works, to increase access to free helmets. This past November, we partnered with Seattle Public Schools and Cascade Bike Club to bring back and expand the Let’s Go safety education program for all 3rd to 8th grade Seattle students, including lessons on the importance of helmet safety. Finally, we require scooter vendors to have a helmet distribution plan, including partnering with us to distribute helmets at community events.”

Moreover, SDOT acknowledged its role is also to reduce car speeding and collisions in order to create a safe environment on its streets, including via protected bike facilities. “As a department of transportation, our role is to design a safe system that enhances public health,” Bergerson added. “This means continuing to build out a bicycle network for all ages and abilities, lowering vehicle speeds so we can reduce the frequency and severity of crashes, and engaging with community members. This helps improves safety for everyone, including people riding scooters.”

In 2015, the City of Seattle committed to a “Vision Zero” goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injury collisions by 2030, but progress on that goal has been slow and intermittent. Road deaths, and especially pedestrian deaths, have been trending up in recent years rather than pointing toward zero.

The KIRO 7 story quoted pedestrian activist Doug MacDonald who called for a watchdog investigation of the scootershare program and blamed them for the safety crisis. “We have a Vision Zero crisis because scooters are not safe on these roads,” MacDonald told KIRO. Turning blame toward scooters overlooks the fact that even in the scooter fatality recorded in Seattle, a motorist running over that scooter-rider was the cause of death. Overlooking car dependence is a hazard of the trade for MacDonald.

From 2001 to 2007, MacDonald served as secretary of the Washington State Department of Transportation, where he possessed the power to implement evidence-based traffic safety interventions across the state, but he mostly whiffed on that front, preferring to fight for highway expansions, such as the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project.

Taming cars

One concerning scooter survey aside, the key moving part in Seattle and the State’s Vision Zero aspirations is the car. Nearly every road fatality in the state involves a car to add enough speed and mass into the equation to prove deadly. For years, transportation secretaries like MacDonald backed by transportation chairs and state legislatures have prioritizes the free and speedy movement of private automobiles. Safety was long viewed through the lens of education and enforcement rather than fundamentally redesigning urban streets to be slower and safer, as many European and Asian countries have demonstrated absolutely works.

Rather than getting carried away with scooter scare tactics, like former Mayor Jenny Durkan did, any serious safety effort would be wise to focus most attention where it deserves to be: on designing safer streets, safer cars, safer motorist behavior, and fewer people driving two-ton vehicles in the first place. Everything else nibbles around the edges.

The Urbanist has covered what a real strategy to address the pedestrian safety crisis and get on course toward eliminating traffic deaths would look like, and sadly the U.S. appears headed in the wrong direction. Rather than requiring (or at least incentivizing) lighter-weight cars with lower front-ends and banning bull bars and other dangerous accessories, regulatory authorities have stood idly by while the American car fleet continues to grow heavier and larger than ever in our history. This trend toward heavier cars has also erased vehicle efficiency gains, boosting climate emissions. Studies have tied bigger cars to higher injury and death rates in collisions, particularly with pedestrians, but officials still do next to nothing. Rather than pouring investment into rapid transit, protected bike lanes, sidewalks, and pedestrianizing streets, highways continue to eat first when it comes to federal and state infrastructure spending. Plowing more highways through urban neighborhoods is still in the playbook.

Instead of a come to Jesus moment on Vision Zero or climate action, Seattle appears poised to wage a drawn-out debate over e-scooters right after cars killed 31 people in one year, most of them pedestrians, a 15-year high. Let’s implement SDOT’s commonsense scootershare improvements and move on to more pressing policy challenges more worthy of the hoopla and handwringing.

The full scootershare survey results are available here.

Update: SDOT announced on May 12th that its was approving permits for Bird, Lime, Veo, and LINK and parting ways with Wheels and Spin based on how the companies scored on its application.

The post SDOT Proposes Scootershare Safety Upgrades, but Will City Leaders Support the Program? first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) also selected Wheels and LINK to participate in the pilot and seek permits for scootershare release. Once they get their permits, the two companies will also get to release up to 500 scooters each in Seattle in the next few weeks, with an upper limit of 2,000 scooters each if things go well. Lime received their permit first and is subsequently launching their scooters first. Wheels is expecting to launch in a month, according to a spokesperson, while LINK is targeting “mid-fall.”

In their press release, Lime positioned their e-scooters as “a reliable solution for short and medium-length trips, as well as for trips not served by public transit.” The company hopes that the scootershare pilot will help reduce car usage with an appealing mode of transportation, augment transit with another last-mile option, and allow for safer, socially distanced, and more sustainable travel.

Lime will price their fleet of scooters equally to their fleet of bicycles. With rates of $1 to unlock and 36 cents per minute. To increase financially accessibility of the scooter-share program, the company has a Lime Access program that gives those qualified five free rides per day–the rides will be free in they come under 30 minutes each.

The pilot requires that 10% of each provider’s fleet be dedicated to equity in access. Scooters with seats will also be featured to give people with mobility impairments a viable option. The program will also fund SDOT’s partnership with Outdoors for All Foundation and continue free adaptive cycle rentals for people with disabilities.

For safety, SDOT worked with medical experts at the University of Washington and Public Health—Seattle & King County to outline safety standards for the pilot. Companies will have to provide safe scooters, a plan to have riders access helmets, and speed limits of 8 mph for first time riders and 15 mph thereafter. SDOT is also continuing work to lower speed limits to 25 mph on major roads and constructing protected bike lanes around the city.

The parking situation for scootershare had been a concern for some Seattle City Councilmembers and stakeholders. To address a concern that e-scooters may end up just parking on and obstructing sideways, SDOT has built 3,000 parking spaces for bikes and scooters in the past four years and released an app and guidance. It remains to be seen if that will be enough.

While scootershare didn’t get up and running for the peak summer, fall may offer some pleasant months for the program to get its footing. If you see the scooter fleet multiply up to the 6,000 maximum allowed in second phase of the pilot, assume that the pilot is a success.

The featured image is courtesy of Lime’s Jonathan Hopkins.

The post Lime Rolls Out Scootershare in Seattle, LINK and Wheels a Month Away first appeared on The Urbanist.

The pilot program allows for up to three providers initially with 500 e-scooters each, but then going up to 2,000 each in the second phase of the pilot–provided they pay the $150 per vehicle fee authorized in the legislation. The City has promised one of the permits to Lime since they are the only bikeshare provider still operating in Seattle and are keen on operating scootershare, too. The other two provider slots are up for grabs, but the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is seeking one seated scooter operator and one standing scooter operator.

Standing scooters have made up the bulk of the national scootershare market thus far, but SDOT believes having some seated scooters could expand the accessibility of the program and may be safer.

Safety concerns have been among the biggest stumbling blocks delaying the pilot. Many peer cities have had scootershare programs for several years now, and Seattle has debated joining the pack since 2018 (or earlier) and has been weighing pilot program legislation since early 2019. However, Mayor Jenny Durkan was adamant that scooters were risky and dangerous, saying “ask the trauma docs.” Beyond public safety, she worried about the City’s liability in injury lawsuits.

In an effort to curb crashes caused by inexperienced riders and excessive speeds, the pilot program caps the speed on a user’s first ride at 8 miles per hour, and 15 miles per hour thereafter. The speed controls seem like a promising safety innovation–if only we had them for cars, too.

Despite Chair Pedersen’s opposition, Transportation Vice Chair Dan Strauss insisted that the more abstract debate would only get them so far and it was time to start the pilot program to get real results to study. With the winter rain and cold on the horizon, the City and providers were hoping to get some pleasant fall months to introduce scootershare.

Lime is pledging its scooters will hit the streets soon. SDOT won’t start approving the permits until at least three have been submitted by providers, but it’s likely providers won’t dally too long to get their paperwork in order given the limited spots. Scootershare has already turned into a multi-billion dollar industry fed for a–for now–steady stream of venture capital.

Lime stressed the industry’s environmental credentials in its statement following the vote.

“Seattle is taking another major step toward a more sustainable future,” said Jonathan Hopkins, Director of Strategic Development for the Northwest. “It’s now more important than ever for residents to have safe, socially-distant transportation options–like bikes and scooters–that can help reduce car congestion. We applaud the council for its vision and look forward to serving Seattle residents with e-bikes and scooters for many years to come.”

Part of the downside of the volatile bikeshare and scootershare industry is that many operations haven’t lasted much longer than a year, and the equipment has been treated as disposable in some cases, even if they are nearly brand new. Uber reportedly scrapped 20,000 of its Jump bikes after selling its operation to Lime earlier this year, in an apparent act of sabotage and effort to protect proprietary technology.

If the industry is just dabbling rather than building a lasting operation, it’s hard to weigh the climate benefits as too significant. As with electric cars, the benefits have to outweigh the embodied carbon of the vehicles and any climate cost of the electricity.

That said, some promising news is that more than a quarter of scootershare trips have replaced car trips according to SDOT research, which suggests the potential to reduce emissions and traffic congestion really is there. So let’s get scooting.

The post City Council Greenlights Scootershare Pilot, Pedersen Dissents first appeared on The Urbanist.

There is something about dockless e-scooters that feels very pre-Covid. Back when people weren’t worrying constantly over a global pandemic, plenty of people were worried about private companies swarming Seattle with e-scooters that would sooner or later end up jettisoned on our sidewalks.

The potential for head injuries incurred by inexperienced e-scooter riders plummeting down Seattle’s steep hills was also a cause for concern, especially for Mayor Jenny Durkan, who in an op-ed for Wired asked for Seattleites’ patience as the City figured out how it could establish an e-scooter pilot that would promote safety, protect the City’s budget from personal injury lawsuits, focus on equity, and not detract from the Seattle’s then thriving dockless bikeshare scene. This is after the Mayor spread fears of crowded emergency rooms, calling scooters “too dangerous.”

The picture looks very different a year later. Dockless bikeshare disappeared from Seattle’s streets without the arrival of e-scooters, although the acquisition of Uber-owned Jump by bike and e-scooter industry giant Lime has brought some rentable e-bikes back to Seattle, with a promise of more to come. Now in the near future Seattleites can finally expect to see dockless e-scooters as well, and their arrival can be attributed–at least in part–to the Covid epidemic.

According to a recent presentation from the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) for the Seattle City Council Transportation and Utilities Committee, which recently forwarded the pilot on to a full City Council vote September 8th, cities with scootershare have seen their usage rates rise during the epidemic. For example, Portland experienced a 46% increase in e-scooter use, including a doubling of trips in low-income neighborhoods. Additionally, e-scooter travel patterns have also changed.

“In Portland and Detroit, people are traveling 2 to 2.5 miles on an average trip,” said Joel Miller, Micromobility Program Manager at SDOT. “That’s telling us that during this time when people are reluctant to get into transit, carshare, or a [ridehailing vehicle], they’re using scooters to get from where they are to their destination as a real transportation option for essential trips.”

SDOT’s hope is that dockless scootershare will offer Seattleites another option for transportation needs, and that the lesson learned from from previous bikeshare pilots and data collected from other cities will help the agency set up Seattle’s scootershare program for success, although some critics, including Erica C. Barnett of the C is for Crank remain unconvinced.

Key Facts to Know About Seattle’s Dockless E-Scooter Pilot

Here’s a breakdown of some crucial facts about Seattle’s dockless e-scooter pilot. It’s important to note that Seattleites can likely expect the pilot to include some changes as it unfolds. “We know this is an ever-shifting industry and we know we will need to stay nimble and adapt over time,” said SDOT Director Sam Zimbabwe, referencing how both bikeshare and carshare have gone through significant changes over a relatively short timeframe.

1. The e-scooter pilot will start small and (potentially) ramp up. At the outset, only 1,500 e-scooters will be permitted; however, that number has the potential to increase to up to 6,000 vehicles if things go well during the pilot.
2. Both standing and seated e-scooters will be available to use. Traditional standing e-scooters will be available to rent through Lime and potentially Bird, but Seattle will be the first US city to offer seated e-scooters through Tesla-owned Wheels. “We’re really excited about what [seated e-scooters] may offer Seattle. They tend to have larger wheels, a lower center of gravity, and further back center of gravity, which might be better suited to our pavement conditions, weather, and hills,” said Miller, who also added the seated e-scooters might be “a more useful device for people with disabilities.” Seattleites may also expect to see new “mixed” e-scooters in the future, although design prototypes have not yet been shared with the public.
3. Riders will be prohibited from using sidewalks. In the current legislation, e-scooter riders will need to stick to bike lanes and avoid sidewalks, other than in limited areas like the Fremont Bridge, where traffic uses merge. Councilmember Tammy Morales (District 2) voiced fears over rider safety in areas like Southeast Seattle, which have been underserved in bike facility infrastructure and contain dangerous busy streets like Rainier Avenue. (She still voted for the pilot.)
4. Permit fees will cover the cost of pilot and pay for other improvements and services. Companies will need to pay $150 permit fee per vehicle. The cost will cover all of the pilots expenses and also fund the creation of additional parking corrals for dockless bikes and e-scooters. It will also continue to fund a City program that provides adaptive bike rentals to people with disabilities through nonprofit Outdoors for All.
5. Rider safety continues to be a concern for the City. SDOT will continue to monitor data on safety in partnership with the University of Washington. Additionally, riders will continue to be required to wear helmets while riding and companies will be incentivizing helmet use by distributing helmets in low-income communities, and Wheels has even designed reusable helmets with biodegradable helmet liners for riders to use. Finally, during riders’ first e-scooter share rental, speed limits will max out at 8 mph to give people opportunity to learn how to safely use the vehicle. In general, speed limits will be capped at 15 mph.

The City is also hoping that increased use of e-scooters will help West Seattle meet some of its mobility goals by increasing access to the Alki Water Taxi and other transit hubs. The agency expressed hope that e-scooters could nudge the current 1% of bike trips that leave the West Seattle peninsula up to its stated goal of 10%.

While Transportation Chair Alex Pedersen opposed the pilot program, the other three transportation committee members present voted in favor. Councilmember Lisa Herbold–was absent for the vote because she left early to attend a West Seattle Bridge meeting–did express some concerns about whether this truly was a pilot program or basically just a full launch. People interested in scootershare should contact their councilmembers ahead of the September 8th vote if they’d like to weigh in.

The post Dockless E-Scooters Are Finally Headed to Seattle. Will They Live Up to the Hype? first appeared on The Urbanist.

We were one of the first major cities to launch a dockless bike share program, and with over one million rides in under a year, we were at the beginning of a wave of transportation options that swept across the country. However, we’ve yet to take advantage of electric scooters, part of the personal transportation revolution occurring thanks to micromobility innovation. Now our city is falling behind on our 2013 Climate Action Plan, which aims to reduce greenhouse emissions while also supporting vibrant neighborhoods, economic prosperity, and social equity. The longer we wait to bring e-scooters to Seattle, the more we continue to fall behind our own climate goals and allow congestion to increase.  

We could have used scooters to aid mobility during the viaduct closure. We could use scooters to alleviate traffic when we face a 10-week partial light rail shutdown in January of 2020. We’ve remained on the sidelines while many other Pacific Northwest cities such as Portland, Spokane, Tacoma, Everett, Bothell, Redmond, and more have launched popular and successful scooter programs.

E-scooters offer an affordable alternative to other transportation options, like personal car trips and ride sharing. Transportation is currently the second highest household cost after housing, disproportionately affecting cost-burdened households in Seattle. Some e-scooter providers charge as little as 7 cents per minute or provide $5 monthly passes for qualified low-income users, making first/last mile mobility genuinely affordable. 

As a result, e-scooters can help increase employment options for job-seekers without cars. A recent study of Seattle shows e-scooter services when added to e-bikes would increase by 35% the jobs reachable by Seattle workers, without lengthening commutes or adding cars to the road. Scooters also serve an important function as a transit connector to both buses and light rail. With half of our city more than a 10-minute walk from high-frequency transit, e-scooters can help fill the gap and increase employment opportunities for all 

Increasing transportation options for Seattleites of all socioeconomic backgrounds will help us address our longstanding commuting challenges in a sustainable and equitable manner. The Environmental Protection Agency reports the average passenger vehicle emits 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year– 404 grams of carbon per mile traveled, whereas e-scooters are emissions free and do not run on fossil fuels. Therefore every one mile that a scooter replaces a car saves 404 grams of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. Considering 60% of American car trips are under six miles, commuters could use clean-powered e-scooters as a greener method of transportation for short trips at a lower environmental and economic cost. Portland has shown that 34% of scooter riders would have otherwise used a car, reducing 200,000 miles of car travel over Portland’s small, four-month e-scooter pilot in 2018. 

With these new, green transportation options comes the need to modernize infrastructure. City leaders should work on updating our transportation grid to prioritize all green modes of transportation — transit, micromobility, and walking included. We could improve mobility for all and reduce transit delays with additional dedicated lanes; creating a connected, citywide network of bike lanes and multi-use paths for non-vehicle users; and providing more parking for bikes and e-scooters to help protect our sidewalks while increasing access to our multi-billion dollar investment in light rail. All of these measures would further enhance the impact of e-scooters and move us closer to our climate goals.  

It is also important to remember that investments in pedestrian and micromobility infrastructure are investments in safe car infrastructure–we’ve prioritized cars in our urban environments and must also make our city safe for other forms of transportation. As Anna Zivarts, Director of Rooted in Rights notes “These investments are needed not just ‘for cyclists’ or ‘for pedestrians.’ They’re needed to allow road users to exist with some degree of safety in a transportation system designed for cars.” It’s with those needs in mind that I’m proposing a $1.4 million investment in on-street micromobility parking corals, to clean up our sidewalks, and make them safer for everyone.  

Seattle must take advantage of this crucial opportunity to help solve congestion, decrease carbon emissions, and address equity challenges with this innovative new technology. Bringing e-scooters and micromobility infrastructure to Seattle will firmly position the city as a leader in transportation, proving convenient, affordable, and eco-friendly micromobility is not an unreachable ideal but a modern-day reality.  

The post The Time is Now to Start Seattle’s Next Transit Revolution with E-Scooters first appeared on The Urbanist.