Electric scooters are here. How do we make them useful?

Look, I’ll be honest. I love the scooters.

I’ve spent a few hours now riding around Raleigh to see what kind of havoc the polarizing machines cause, and I’ve enjoyed every second. As a recently established resident, I was able to become more familiar with downtown Raleigh over the course of an afternoon without breaking a sweat or spending half an hour finding a central place to park, which I count as a success.

I used the scooters to get from dinner on Glenwood South to dessert near Peace University, where I stopped to talk with a 6-year-old on a tiny Razor scooter who couldn’t wait to try out the “big kid scooters” one day.

I was a hesitant rider at first, staying slow and avoiding traffic, but now I’m having to stop myself from getting too comfortable. I’m definitely not alone either. This week, I noticed more riders taking the scooters farther away from downtown than even just last week.

I won’t call the scooters perfect. They’ve been criticized for being dangerous, for their owners’ habits of asking forgiveness instead of permission when it comes to regulation, and for being generally annoying to walk around. There’s also some confusion about laws surrounding scooter use, both among users and regulators.

But electric scooters are better for us and the environment than driving. They’re cheap. They take up less sidewalk space (even when awkwardly parked) than bikes. Bird, the only scooter company in Raleigh so far, even offers enterprising members of the gig economy $5 for every scooter they charge, up to $100 every night.

Finally, they’re just fun.

The scooters are also, so far, not terribly dangerous. There have been a few minor incidents involving the scooters in Raleigh, but people seem to be riding responsibly.

More than just fun?

The electric scooters aren’t much more than a shiny, new toy right now (or a nuisance, depending on who you ask). But could they be an agent for good when it comes to urban congestion?

Over the next few years, we can expect more cars on Raleigh’s roads than ever. The 2016 American Community Survey reported that 81 percent of workers 16 and over in the Raleigh metro area drive alone to work. Only 1 percent of commuters take public transportation.

When I talked to North Raleigh resident Brannon Votaw, 27, he and his girlfriend were just using the scooters for fun, but Votaw said he would use the scooters to get to work too. Votaw said the scooters made it “easier to get around than bringing in a car and parking.”

The City of Raleigh is investing in public transportation and rightly encouraging commuters to do anything other than drive alone in their own car to work, and the scooters could help. Electric scooters aren’t going to replace cars, but they do have the potential to move past their novelty status and ease traffic in a couple of different ways.

First, electric scooters can help make public transportation more attractive.

Driving or hiring a rideshare service will always be more convenient than taking public transportation. A car takes you from your home to your destination without waiting or walking, and public transportation won’t match that. However, adding a $1 scooter ride to an existing bus route is a cheap way to cut down on walking time to or from a bus stop.

Another way electric scooters could help with traffic is by encouraging drivers to park farther outside congested areas than they otherwise would. If we were to provide parking outside of already congested areas like downtown and rely on electric scooters to close the gap, traffic would be dispersed and congestion eased. So the scooters would both create and fill a last mile that would encourage single drivers to avoid areas like downtown.

More scooters needed

Raleigh resident Kayla Loyd, 25, was setting up Bird accounts for two of her friends when I approached her on Fayetteville Street. Loyd and both of her friends fully supported the scooters, but they had noticed a concerning trend. “It’s getting harder to find them,” Loyd said. “More and more people are using them, so I think they should have more of them.”

Right now, there are about 150 scooters in Raleigh, which makes it hard to trust that you’ll be able to find one when you need it. And the scooters are largely concentrated downtown, where they only serve a small portion of the population.

For the scooters to be useful, we would have to be OK with a growing number of scooters in neighborhoods and enthusiastic about having a higher concentration of scooters around the bus stops. Most importantly, we would need more scooters.

The idea of more scooters on the streets of Raleigh might not be attractive to everyone, but ubiquity in this case means reliability. Knowing that scooters will be available when needed will help consumers be comfortable parking farther away from their destination or taking a bus that doesn’t get them exactly where they need to go.

To really make this work, we scooter advocates need to do our part by being safe and smart when we do ride them. Follow the rules. Wear your helmet, even if it looks stupid, and ride the scooters in the street. Make sure you’re parking scooters somewhere that keeps the sidewalk navigable for everyone, including people in wheelchairs or on crutches. And whatever you do, don’t use the scooters as a substitute for a car if you’ve been drinking — you could get a DWI.

We should take the scooters seriously. On one hand, that means creating thoughtful regulations and enforcing them consistently. But taking the scooters seriously also means not immediately dismissing them. It means being willing to look at the potential benefit they offer the city and not enacting regulations that make scooters useless.

This story was originally published August 30, 2018 at 3:04 PM.