Scooters Were Popular, But Will They Return?

The dockless scooters that dotted Milwaukee’s streets last year were popular, but there are no immediate plans to allow them to return.

A new Department of Public Works report quantifies the scooters’ usage and public sentiment, but doesn’t make explicit recommendations on how to proceed after a 2021 pilot study concluded. A pilot study, which allowed Bird, Lime and Spin to operate in Milwaukee, was also conducted in 2019.

In 2021 people took 481,706 riders on the electric scooters, an average of 2,452 rides per day over the five-and-a-half month pilot study. That’s up from 350,130 rides in 2019.

The total number of rides would have been higher, but a ban on scooters in the downtown went into effect on August 3. This happened after a city-hired consultant found more than 10% of riders were riding on the sidewalk. The ban prohibited operators from allowing riders to start or stop in what the city called “Zone 1,” the downtown area.

“The Zone 1 prohibition had a significant impact on overall ridership. Total rides in August dropped to 70,558, or 44.5% of July’s 158,662, and continued to decrease in subsequent months,” says the report. As a result, the Lower East Side was the most popular area for trips. The city was divided into seven zones in an effort to encourage equitable scooter distribution.

The average ride time was 10 minutes, with an average distance of 0.9 miles. Each individual scooter, rentable with a smartphone application, was used an average of 2.6 times per day. The companies were each allowed to deploy up to 1,000 scooters in the city.

There were 15 scooter crashes reported to the Milwaukee Police Department, the majority of which occurred in an area bounded by W. Locust St., Interstate 43, W. Lisbon Ave. and N. Sherman Blvd. None were reported Downtown or on the Lower East Side. In one of the crashes, one rider ran into another head on. At least two crashes occurred because riders were improperly using the sidewalk then re-entering the street. Though, many crashes, based on one-sentence descriptions, were the fault of motorists.

In 2021 DPW received 89 comments about the pilot study and the mayor’s office received 13, down from 141 and 243 respectively in 2019. The report indicates virtually all of the comments were complaints and declined throughout the study period. The city website also directed individuals with complaints about specific scooters to call the applicable operator directly.

The city collected $179,563.35 in fees, including $75,000 from a $25 per scooter fee, $72,763.35 from a $0.15 per trip fee, $30,000 from a $10 per scooter fee for the third-party consultant and $1,800 from a $300 per operator applicable fee. DPW officials initially believed up to $350,000 could be collected and much of it used to build bike lanes and other infrastructure for scooters.

Bringing The Scooters Back

Common Council approval is required to reauthorize the scooters. But there are not currently any proposals pending to issue another pilot study, nor is DPW recommending one at this point.

That doesn’t mean nothing is happening.

“I think they’re exploring some alternative models for doing it, which have promise,” said downtown Alderman Robert Bauman, who has traditionally been one of the most vocal skeptics of the scooters and created the 10% sidewalk riding ban threshold, in an interview.

He said different options being considered include having only one operator, establishing a local partner or operator and charging a flat fee per scooter to that operator.

Would he support that? “Potentially.”

Rider Survey

An online survey circulated by DPW, and reshared by the media and the scooter companies, yielded 5,428 responses, 49.4% of which were people that had never ridden a scooter.

The biggest concern of non-riding respondents was sidewalk riding. For those who had taken at least one scooter trip, the greatest concern was there isn’t a safe, connected network of trails and bicycle infrastructure to ride in.

The survey revealed that the most common reason for taking a trip was going to or from an entertainment destination or event (33.5%). Scooters most commonly replaced walking (39%), driving a personal vehicle (24.2%) or taking a taxi or transportation network company vehicle (23.2%). Respondents said 11.4% of trips replaced a public transit or bike trip.

Slightly more than three-thirds of trips (70.2%) were for transportation purposes, not joy riding, according to the survey responses.

Nearly half the respondents, 48.3%, had an unfavorable view of the downtown riding prohibition, but 33.9% of respondents favored the ban.

Permanently legalizing scooters is supported even by those that never ride them. Only 51.2% of survey respondents that had never ridden a scooter favored permanently prohibiting them. More than 70% of all respondents favor legalizing them in some way. Those figures were similar to what the 2019 survey found.

Sidewalk Riding

Each company operating in Milwaukee integrated technology into its scooters to detect sidewalk riding. But it wasn’t entirely effective. The third-party consultant found that 25.5% of all riders observed over three visual monitoring periods were riding entirely on the sidewalk.

Bird relied on a GPS-based technology. Approximately half of its scooters had the technology by fall 2021, with scooters eventually stopping if sidewalk riding continued on a trip.

Lime used GPS location data mixed with vibration data to warn riders that spent more than 50% of a trip on the sidewalk that a fine of $10 could be issued. No fines were issued, though the technology was integrated into every scooter it offered.

Spin used a camera mounted on 100 of its scooters to detect sidewalk riding, with an audio alarm that went off until a rider returned to the street.

The city installed 58 on-street parking corrals for scooters primarily in areas just north or south of Downtown. They were funded with money from the city’s $65,000 settlement with Bird regarding its unauthorized 2018 deployment of scooters. The on-street corrals are intended to reduce situations where scooters are obstructing sidewalks when parked, a concern that increased in 2021, according to a survey.

The requirement to add 100 adaptive scooters per operator proved to be an issue for every operator according to the report. “These challenges included supply chain issues, the short time frame to incorporate adaptive scooters, and the need to develop stronger local partnerships,” says the report. The adaptive scooters demonstrated were vehicles with seats.

A full copy of the report can be found on Urban Milwaukee.