In considering an experiment with electric scooters in the city, Vancouver City Council members are fortunate to have a petri dish of sorts in Portland and elsewhere. By examining the successes — and the failures — of others, local leaders can best determine whether it would make sense for Vancouver to hop on the e-scooter bandwagon.
“Tourists are using that all up and down the West Coast,” councilor Linda Glover noted this week during a council meeting. “I think that we’re expecting 200,000 visitors to come to Vancouver. It’ll help with parking. It’ll help with transportation.”
Those are the primary reasons for the e-scooter craze. As cities explore transportation alternatives and try to reduce the number of cars on the road and the amount of carbon emissions, scooters have become the go-to option.
E-scooters are essentially electric bicycles that allow users to get around without the pedaling. Commuters rent them for one-way trips using app-based technology and then leave them on the sidewalk for the next renter.
In Portland, that manifested itself in a four-month trial program last year. According to city officials, users logged more than 801,000 miles on about 700,000 scooter trips during the trial. With an average of 2,000 scooters in the fleet, that works out to about 350 trips per device.
Now, Portland has revived the program for a one-year trial. Scooters returned to the streets — or, hopefully, to bike lanes — in late April. City officials hope to incentivize companies to increase the fleet to as many as 15,000 scooters by the end of this year, but report that 9,000 or so is a more realistic number.
In the process, Portland also highlights the drawbacks of the program.
The most prevalent complaint is of scooters being ridden illegally on sidewalks, and officials plan stricter enforcement this year. According to OregonLive.com, a city report said: “Scooters are appropriate for bike lanes or low-volume streets, but they are too fast for use on sidewalks, where they make it unsafe or uncomfortable for people walking or using mobility devices.”
Officials also say that while the scooters likely reduce car trips by users, it is not clear how many trips are added by scooter companies collecting the vehicles at night for recharging.
And there are questions about safety. The Multnomah County Health Department reported 176 scooter-related trips to emergency rooms during last year’s trial, while 429 bicyclists went to the hospital during that period.
Of course, Vancouver is much different from Portland. A city with less than one-third the population and much less density is going to have different needs.
But in looking at Portland and other cities that have adopted scooter programs, Vancouver leaders can get an idea about whether a similar program would work here. With The Waterfront Vancouver taking shape and with a growing population, Vancouver is wise to consider big-city approaches for some issues.
All of this is merely in the discussion stage, but it might be worth a whirl. In the end, it should be left to market forces; if scooter companies believe there is adequate demand for their services in Vancouver, city officials should be willing to work with them to devise regulations for a pilot program. If such a program would be costly for companies or the city, the idea should be filed away for future consideration.
Electric scooters might well be the future of urban transportation. Then again, we once thought we would all be riding Segways by now.
