From LAist:
How Santa Monica Established Order From Scooter Chaos (And What It Can Teach LA)
BY RYAN FONSECA IN NEWS ON NOVEMBER 22, 2019 8:15 AM
(Courtesy city of Santa Monica via Twitter)
In September 2017, Santa Monica became ground zero for a disruptive force that's been hailed as both the future of mobility and "the herpes of urban transit": dockless electric scooters.
Bird was the first company to start dropping hundreds of scooters in the tourist-rich beach city. Lime soon followed, and the companies' scoot first, regulate later approach quickly spiraled into chaos as Santa Monica leaders scrambled to put rules in place.
But while they rushed to restore order in the streets, city officials also recognized scooters' potential as a better mobility option in car-congested Southern California.
"Like everywhere else in Southern California, the highest percentage of trips are under two miles... there are lots of other ways to get around," said Francie Stefan, acting chief mobility officer and assistant director of planning for the city of Santa Monica. "That was sort of the mindset... we don't know, but we won't know if we don't try."
And scooters were a way to try.
In September 2018, the city launched a pilot program, embracing scooters and e-bikes as a viable transportation method, and studying how they were being used in Santa Monica. The city issued permits to four companies and set a vehicle cap for each, but allowed for fleet sizes to fluctuate based on the popularity of the devices. Here's the most recent fleet size:
Bird: 750 electric scooters
Lime: 750 electric scooters
Lyft: 750 electric scooters
Jump: 250 electric scooters, 750 e-bikes
That adds up to 3,250 devices, though on an average day, about 2,250 are available across Santa Monica, city officials said.
The 16-month pilot was set to expire on Dec. 30, but the Santa Monica City Council voted last week to extend it through May 2020. With that added time, city staff "will be developing a pilot 2.0," Stefan said, to explore enhanced regulations and improvements to streets.
City officials also published a report looking at the first full year of the scooter experiment, which offers the clearest picture to date on how scooter use can exist — and maybe thrive — within the region's transit ecosystem.
"Santa Monica has a relatively stable system... that can demonstrate to other parts of Southern California what might be possible," said Juan Matute, deputy director of UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies. "The worst fears of people who said, 'oh scooters are going to ruin the city' haven't come to fruition."
The 60-page report includes surveys of more than 4,200 riders, a separate communitywide survey, plus data collected directly from scooter and e-bike operators. It highlights the progress Santa Monica has made to understand how the devices are being used and wrangle them into a manageable system — but also notes plenty of room for improvement moving forward into the next phase of the pilot.
Here are several key takeaways from the report:
SCRATCH 1.3 MILLION CAR TRIPS
In the 12 months from October 2018 through September 2019, more than 2.67 million scooter and e-bike trips were taken in Santa Monica, according to the city's report. The average trip lasted 14 minutes with a distance of 1.3 miles.
Most notably, rider surveys showed 49% of those trips "replaced trips that would have otherwise been made by car, either driving alone or ride-hailing using Lyft or Uber." And nearly a third of the 2.67 million rides were work-related, according to the report.
Stefan said that makes it clear that dockless vehicles can play a key role in improving mobility — and reducing air pollution caused by car emissions.
"The macro narrative has been that these are toys and that they're not legitimate transportation," she said. "When we actually have data that shows ... that 1.3 million [trips] would have been by car — so we effectively reduced that many car trips — [that's] very significant."
Scooter and e-bike trips also replaced more than a third of walking trips in the city, according to the report. However, most surveyed riders reported that they still walk, bike and use transit "about the same as before shared mobility devices arrived in Santa Monica."
THE DESTINATIONS
So, where are people going on the vehicles? According to trip data collected by the city, the common "hotspots" include downtown around the busy Third Street Promenade, office spaces at the Water Garden, Santa Monica College and the beach (duh).
"This suggests that shared mobility is filling gaps in the transportation network to fulfill short trips between activity centers, potentially meeting new mobility needs that were unmet or underserved," the report states.
[...]
Read the rest by clicking the link:
https://laist.com/2019/11/22/santa_m...ity_future.php
Linear Mode
