San Francisco Thinking About Doubling Number of Scooters

Article from the SF Chronicle is tracking the conversation about E-Scooter expansion in San Francisco. Scoot and Skip have been operating there for the last year after a contentious start to scooterdom in the city. A number of companies flooded the market, prompting the City to ban them altogether until they developed a plan for pilot deployment. That went well and now they are thinking of going from at total of 1250 scooters to 2500 scooters.

Some of the secrets to success of the roll-out:

• Regulation and enforcement that keeps scooter riders off of sidewalks
• Locking! The entire SF fleet has locking mechanisms that seem to have 1. reduced overall number of complaints about scooters misparked on sidewalks and 2. have limited the number of scooter thefts.

Some problems to keep working on: demographic using the scooters is still largely white, male and wealthy.

Come to the Urbanism Next Conference to learn how cities throughout the country are shaping micromobility in their communities!