The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York | the New Yorker
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4/26/2021 The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York | The New Yorker Shared electric scooters offer a solution to what transportation experts call the “last-mile problem.” Illustration by Igor Bastidas Our Local Correspondents April 26 & May 3, 2021 Issue The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York Fleets of electric scooters have taken over city streets worldwide. With New York nally climbing aboard, do they represent a tech hustle or a transit revolution? By John Seabrook April 19, 2021 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-e-scooters-loved-by-silicon-valley-roll-into-new-york 1/18 4/26/2021 The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York | The New Yorker ew York City used to be an early adopter of new transportation modes. In the late eighteen-sixties, New Yorkers took up the velocipede, a primitive version of the bicycle. Half a century later, the city N embraced the automobile, and eventually made free parking available for the fossil-fuel-burning machines—a remarkable giveaway of expensive public space that many carless citizens would like back now. New York also engineered and built a subway system, above ground and below ground, which, before the -19 pandemic hit, carried ve and a half million riders every weekday—a landmark of American people-moving the city may never reach again, if remote work is here to stay. But when it comes to shared electric scooters—the adult, motorized versions of the standing “kick” scooter that you push with one foot—New York has taken the slow lane. As with its bike-share scheme, Citi Bike, which launched in 2013, years after most other big cities, New York has adopted a conservative approach to this ballyhooed new mode of getting around town. Beginning in Southern California, Bird and, later, Lime, both venture-capital-backed tech startups, dropped eets of rentable electric scooters onto the streets of Santa Monica, where Bird’s vehicles appeared in 2017, and San Diego, Lime’s rst city, in 2018. Bypassing municipal regulators, the companies hoped to attract customers as quickly as possible. Under Uber’s former head of international growth, Travis VanderZanden, Bird got its black-and-white scooters into a hundred cities globally during a yearlong blitzkrieg. Blindsided city governments, struggling to respond to this onslaught, temporarily banned scooters in Seattle, West Hollywood, and Winston-Salem, among other places. Although Bird wasn’t close to protable, it soon reached unicorn status—a billion-dollar valuation. Lime then joined Bird in the unicorn paddock. Investors went all in on “micromobility”—the buzzy, catchall term for bicycles and lightweight electric vehicles—hoping to stumble onto the next Uber. Within a year, more than thirty scooter-share startups had popped up around the world. In many cities, scooter-sharing was adopted faster than bike-sharing, and by a broader demographic of ridership. Bird amassed more than ten million rides in its rst twelve months. Users loved the scooters for their convenience. In Austin, Texas, for example, during South by Southwest, scooters proved to be ideal for hopping between venues. On the West Coast, Venice Beach sizzled with the sound of scooter wheels. By 2019, the long-necked, at-bottomed machines had become a xture of the urban landscape in Paris, Vienna, Madrid, and Mexico City, like for-hire mechanical swans clustering on sidewalks. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-e-scooters-loved-by-silicon-valley-roll-into-new-york 2/18 4/26/2021 The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York | The New Yorker Transportation wonks hailed scooter-sharing as the best solution to their “last-mile problem,” when the trip between the train station and home is a little farther than walking distance—around a quarter of a mile, for most people. Futurists saw it as the rst transportation mode to incorporate mobile- computing and global-positioning technology in its core design, and touted the e-scooter as a harbinger of the battery-powered, software-controlled car of the future. But to detractors e-scooters were a fad, and scooter-share programs were a tech hustle that exploited a limited public resource—city streets—to enrich private investors. Bird and Lime attracted lawsuits from injured riders, and passionate animosity from lots of people who encountered the dockless scooters that were left in the middle of sidewalks. In May, 2018, San Francisco, after receiving almost two thousand complaints, issued cease-and-desist orders to Bird, Lime, and a third operator, Spin, which was bought by Ford in November, 2018. A class-action suit in Los Angeles the same year accused Lime, Bird, and others of “aiding and abetting assault.” Scooter vandalism became a performance art. The Instagram site Bird Graveyard documented busted Birds, trashed Birds, Birds in the Bay, and Birds ambé. Among the big transportation hubs in the West, only New York and London stood fast during what is now seen as the Wild West phase of scooter mania. Then came the pandemic, scrambling transport habits around the globe, and creating rare opportunities for what transportation theorists refer to as “mode change.” To judge from New York’s increasingly crowded bike lanes, the scootering mode has arrived. -scooters aren’t the rst standing electric vehicles to attempt to enter New York’s transportation E system. The Segway, a two-wheeled “human transporter,” was released in December, 2001, and hyped by Jeff Bezos as “one of the most famous and anticipated product launches of all time.” There were photographs of Bezos and the Segway’s inventor, Dean Kamen, riding the machines on sidewalks around Times Square. Today, the human transporter is perhaps best remembered as the electronic steed that Paul Blart mounts in “Mall Cop,” a 2009 lm that leans heavily on the sight gag of a casually standing person who is in motion. But the Segway’s inuence lingered in the broad set of state and city laws that banned most forms of single-person E.V.s from the streets and sidewalks, including e-bikes and e-scooters. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-e-scooters-loved-by-silicon-valley-roll-into-new-york 3/18 4/26/2021 The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York | The New Yorker In the late two-thousands, the rst wave of e-bikes arrived in the city as food-delivery workers, virtually all immigrants, began using them. For a fteen-hundred-dollar investment in an e-bike, a worker can increase his nightly earnings by two dollars an hour—which could amount to thousands more in yearly earnings. Some Yuppie early adopters had also taken to the outlawed bikes: my sister-in-law’s elbow was shattered in Manhattan, in 2010, by an e-biking lmmaker who was going the wrong way in a bike lane. A crackdown began in 2017, shortly after a sixty-year-old Upper West Side investment banker, Matthew Sheer, who used a speed gun to clock cyclists in the Columbus Avenue bike lane, called in to “Ask the Mayor,” on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” and decried the dangers of the modern-day velocipedes to Bill de Blasio. The following year, the N.Y.P.D. issued delivery workers hundreds of ve-hundred-dollar citations and sometimes took away their e-bikes. Workers who spoke Chinese or Spanish had their bikes conscated at a much higher rate than those who spoke English. The Deliver Justice Coalition fought back with the support of inuential local politicians, including Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens, and Carlos Menchaca, a City Council member from Brooklyn, but they lacked the funds to lobby state lawmakers in Albany effectively. The status of pedal-assist e-bikes was eventually claried as exempt from the law—Citi Bike began electrifying its eet in 2018—but the full-throttle e-bikes favored by the city’s forty thousand delivery workers remained illegal. During the same period, micromobility companies began to eye the lucrative New York market, despite being blocked by the Segway laws. Bird and Lime did have the funds to spend on lobbying Albany lawmakers. Bird brought in Bradley Tusk, who had designed Uber’s strategy for disrupting New York City with its gig-working drivers in the early twenty-tens; between January and June of 2019, Tusk was paid a hundred thousand dollars. Lime also spent heavily on lobbying. Phil Jones, Lime’s senior director of government relations, took a leading role in crafting the new law for the scooter companies. “There were a lot of overarching state laws put into place that made two- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-e-scooters-loved-by-silicon-valley-roll-into-new-york 4/18 4/26/2021 The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll Into New York | The New Yorker wheeled electric vehicles illegal, inspired by the Segway,” he told me. “That’s what we were up against, and that’s what delivery workers were up against.” Jones helped consolidate ve bills aiming to legalize two-wheeled E.V.s into a single piece of legislation, Senate Bill 5294A, sponsored by Jessica Ramos. With the nancial capital of the scooter bros and the political capital of the persecuted deliveristas, the bill was passed by the New York Assembly in 2019, but Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed it, ostensibly because he wanted all e-scooter and e-bike riders to wear a helmet. According to insiders, the underlying reason was the Governor’s hostility toward Ramos, a rising star in state politics.