On a bright summer day in Los Angeles, Karmen Curley went for a short ride on the city’s newest and most complaint-ridden form of transportation: the electric scooter. Before her planned short ride was complete, Karmen would be lying in the street staring down a brain injury.
Karmen was in town visiting her sister, Sian, when the two opted to try out the new mode of transportation that has been filling up the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles for more than a year.
“We saw her hit a pothole and come flying off over the front of her scooter,” Sian said, in a post on a GoFundMe page that she started for her sister.
Karmen is still recovering from a brain injury as well sorting out how to pay for a $150,000 hospital bill. As of August 9, she raised $17,000.
“We are still paying off the funeral costs of our Mum who died suddenly last year and with these mounting costs we do not know how we are going to cope,” Sian said, in another post on her sister’s GoFundMe page.
Karmen and Sian’s e-scooter rides represent only two examples of over 2 million times Los Angeles residents have picked up an e-scooter since March.
Karmen’s injury is just one of 160 incidents recorded by the Los Angeles Fire Department since the start of the year. Injuries aren’t the only e-scooter problem facing Los Angeles.
Complaints, Incidents & Responses
In the nine days from April 25 to May 3 this year, LA's MyLA311 service request system received more than 1,200 complaints related to e-scooters. That averages out to about 133 scooter complaints per day, or more than five an hour.
The number of e-scooter-related injuries and complaints have been of particular note with the total e-scooter count skyrocketing since the start of what many dub “Scooter Wars.”
Without advance notices, scooters from companies like Bird, Lime and Spin started to flood different cities throughout the United States in 2018.
The only requirements for use? A cell phone, a driver’s license and a credit card. The new trend prompted many public officials across the country to limit the number allowed in their cities.
In March 2018, Los Angeles city officials temporarily banned e-scooters and directed the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) to develop rules to manage their operations.
After reviewing the problems posed by the initial e-scooter deployment, LADOT announced a 120-day conditional permit program in November 2018 that allowed the department to study the new tool.
In March 2019, LADOT announced a one-year experiment called the “Dockless Mobility Program.” The program allows scooter and bike companies that comply with their regulations to continue to operate in Los Angeles.
The application cost $20,000 plus $130 for each vehicle in a company's fleet with a cap of 10,500 scooters per company. By June 5, LADOT has collected $3.2 million in fees from permitted operators.
A central requirement of the permit is that companies are forced to agree to pay the city for any removal or storage fees resulting from abandoned scooters. The program also requires each company encourage riders to wear helmets and respect proper traffic and parking procedures.
LADOT also installed 30 scooter-designated parking zones throughout the downtown area to clear up sidewalk congestion.
Despite the addition of governmental regulation, public complaints about e-scooters have continued.
Laura Davis, a resident of Hollywoodland, said while her neighborhood is accustomed to a regular flow of tourists visiting the Hollywood sign, the proliferation of e-scooters compounds the problems.
“I don’t even bother driving through the community anymore,” Davis said, adding that the city’s tourism plan has attracted more selfie-takers to her home in the last five to eight years than ever before.
“This is just adding to the chaos,” Davis said. “The Bird scooters are just making it worse and more dangerous without bringing any benefit to the community that I’m aware of.”
On July 9, Davis emailed Bird her solution for dealing with improperly parked scooters, including one she found in her yard that morning.
Davis told Bird that any scooter left on her property is subject to a $75 storage fee with a $50 additional charge for each day it is not picked up by the owner. Davis threatened to “properly dispose of” any scooter not picked up within a week.
After a short dialogue, she said Bird stopped responding to her emails. Davis would not confirm the scooter’s current location for this story.
Public Opinion on E-Scooters is Mixed, But The Devices Remain Popular
We asked people on the streets why they ride e-scooters and what they think about the city's yearlong experiment.
Sean Longstreet, a resident of Venice Beach, had similar complaints about the high number of e-scooters abandoned near his property, but noted a recent improvement after he used the city’s MyLA311 app.
“We couldn’t go on a walk without having to watch out,” Longstreet said. “The fear of getting sideswiped by a crazy person was real.”
Longstreet said that while he has noticed fewer abandoned scooters, he still thinks the improper use of e-scooters present new problems for LA.
“We still have the issue of people using them driving drunk,” Longstreet said. “Police officers are all over, but they don’t enforce it.”
Indeed, even a Bird employee admitted that he sees other employees using the devies on the sidewalk. In March, Longstreet snapped a photo of a Bird scooter thrown into a canal with other real “birds” near it.
“We see them quite a bit in the Venice Canals,” Longstreet said. “I even saw one tossed over the pier.”
Longstreet’s post was liked by the “@BirdGraveyard” Instagram account. The account has grown a community of over 100,000 followers by posting photos and videos of bird scooters that have been destroyed. The page has 14,000 more followers than the official "@Bird" Instagram.
Council Members Call for Action
While the Los Angeles City Council voted in March to approve the one-year pilot program, a number of the council members have been openly against any scooter-approval measures.
Councilman Paul Koretz, who represents the Fifth District, has made it his mission to see the scooters banned from Los Angeles. Koretz was the only member of the City Council to vote against the one-year program.
Koretz cites “the large numbers of injuries” as the reason for his longstanding opposition.
“We continue to see riders on the sidewalks, riders in traffic and almost 100% of the riders are not wearing helmets and the large numbers of injuries continue unabated,” Koretz said.
Koretz previously pushed for expanding the bike lanes throughout LA and incorporating a new traffic signal specifically for bikers and scooter riders.
“I think reports of improvement are greatly exaggerated by the comparable sense of futility in fighting the scooter infestation,” Koretz said. “I would be thrilled to see them go away until we have an adequate bicycle/scooter lane infrastructure for them.”
Councilman Mike Bonin, who represents the 11th District and chairs the city’s Transportation Committee, has been an ardent supporter of the scooters. However, he said that the scooter companies “need to do better.”
Eric Bruins, who is the transportation policy director in Bonin’s office, acknowledged many complaints deal with safety and said that the city is still “very much in learning mode.”
“Parts of our district are just being overwhelmed by these things,” Bruins said.
Bruins said that Venice has been a major target for scooter companies because of the level of tourism that the area receives, but that the effects are still being debated.
"The saturation of devices that are in Venice in order to serve that tourist market is having an extraordinary impact on the folks who live there," Bruins said.
Bruins said that a goal would be to establish a culture of safe behavior for both scooter usage and parking. Bruins emphasized that this is the responsibility of the scooter companies.
“The companies should have enough information where they should be able to evaluate whether their users are parking correctly or not,” Bruins said.
Scooter Companies Push for Change
When confronted with the many problems surrounding e-scooter usage, companies say they are attempting to improve safety and make streets more livable.
Ride-sharing services are notoriously difficult to reach for comment and the e-scooter companies we reached out to were no exceptions. We reached out to Bird, Lime and Spin (the three most popular e-scooter companies) a total of 15 times. Lime did not respond to a single request for comment, Bird insisted on email interviews with no response, but Spin, the largest distributor of e-scooters in LA, got back to us.
“The biggest one for safety is really infrastructure,” Douglas Curl, general manager for Spin in LA, said. “We are in direct partnership with the city to provide usage data, trip data and pattern data, to help the city understand patterns of dockless devices and heavy traffic, and to come up with plans to gain support and funding to build safe, protected, separated infrastructure for shared mobilities in general.”
Outside the program, there are also ongoing efforts to build new bike and scooter lanes in the city, according to Curl. Similarly, Bird’s safety report says that the city of Santa Monica has planned to construct 19 miles of new green bike lanes to support e-scooter riding.
In the future, Bird foresees turning parking spaces into multi-purpose parklets where people can easily park their e-scooters. Also, Bird reimagines space by suggesting 10 scooters can fit in one traditional car parking spot.
Lime partnered with LAPD’s Wilshire Division for the city’s inaugural First Ride Academy that offered a 30-minute safe-operation training course and provided free helmets to all participants. The company plans to continue this effort over the course of several weeks as well as distribute 250,000 helmets to riders in Los Angeles.
Curl emphasized their efforts to detect and lessen sidewalk riding through education. Spin says they are updating technology in cooperation with LADOT, to locate misbehaviors more precisely. Also, Curl said Spin is working with the Los Angeles Police Department to educate officers on e-scooter rule enforcement, according to Curl.
“Second to that we do events in communities to educate the public,” said Douglas Curl. “It is very difficult to control human behaviors, but we have a lot of resources to provide them with information they need, and they help us to enforce related rules.”
Though reports show numerous incidents and complaints, as a result of e-scooters, the city plans to continue to support companies with hopes of increasing the compatibility of traffic and infrastructure.
As LADOT is quick to learn and adopt new solutions in reaction to collected data in the one-year pilot program, companies like Spin maintain a positive attitude on the future of e-scooters in the city of Los Angeles.
“In response to collected data in the pilot program, we take swift action to correct certain behaviors or patterns of actions of not only customers, but also in some cases, companies and providers,” said Douglas Curl. “We can create communities that have the option of using shared micro-mobility, but also have it in a way that they feel is not obstructing their walk ways, not an eyesore and that all companies operate in a regulated way.”
While those proposals aren't convincing everyone, each company's ability to adhere to the rules approved by the City Council is sure to be of interest to lawmakers as they debate the issue going forward. Eric Bruins stressed that the impetus for continued scooter usage in Los Angeles is on the companies that deploy them.
"If the pilot [program] comes back and we say, 'These things were great, but they were just too impactful,' then maybe they go away," Bruins said. "Or we come back and say 'These things were really useful, but there's some specific things ... we need to have a tighter leash on.'"
