The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, the proverb goes, and that is especially true when it comes to the city managing electric scooters.
In the spring, the Dallas City Council approved a second attempt to introduce scooters to the city, establishing limits on how many scooters would be deployed, where they could operate, and how they would be distributed around the city. On Monday, a Dallas City Council committee got a report on how the new attempt at micromobility was faring. It needs work.
The first attempt three years ago resulted in a ban after—by most accounts—some light urban mayhem. Scooters were abandoned all over town. People were racing them in the streets and barreling down sidewalks in Deep Ellum and downtown. The city wasn’t even quite sure how many scooters their companies had dropped around town.
“Everything was learning. We went from this not even being a technology to being bombarded with it,” Kathryn Rush, chief planner with the Department of Transportation at the city of Dallas, said in May. “It was a totally new regulatory environment that really isn’t very comparable.”
Take two, everyone said, had more guardrails, more restrictions, and fewer scooters. Bird, Lime, and Superpedestrian were the only operators allowed, and each would be able to deploy a maximum of 500 at first. If all went well, each operator would be allowed another 250, with a cap of 1,250 each. The total would be 3,750 citywide among the approved vendors. If an operator has more than 20 complaints in a seven day period, it would face automatic suspension. Rush said Monday that one operator has been warned they were close to that mark. (She did not identify the vendor.)
Rush and Dallas Transportation Department Director Gus Khankarli met with the Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Monday, and highlighted a few issues that had emerged. Some of those issues, they told the committee, could be ameliorated by tweaking some of the rules.
For instance, the rules adopted in the spring prevented scooters from running between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. That resulted in the scooters turning off mid-ride.
“The actual result of that was that people were getting stranded mid-ride on their way to their destination when rides would cut off at exactly 9 p.m.” Rush said Monday. “So now we intend to clarify that language to say that rides can only start between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m., but then all rides must stop by 10.”
Part of the agreement for each company to have access to the Dallas market was that they employ GPS geofencing to keep riders off sidewalks.
However, many on the committee said they routinely saw scooters riding down sidewalks. Rush said that it turns out none of the vendors actually promised they could stop people from riding on sidewalks, but operators who told the city they had access to technology to prevent such actions were moved to the top of the list during the vetting process.
“It was our understanding the whole time that the operators did not have perfect technology to detect and prevent sidewalk riding,” Rush said. All three are looking at additional technology—including camera sensors—that could detect when a scooter is being driven on a sidewalk.
Parking corrals for up to 20 scooters were installed in Deep Ellum, the West End, and near the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. There are eight corrals distributed throughout those areas, but the city plans on asking operators to install more. The bulk of 311 complaints about scooters are about them being abandoned on sidewalks (44 percent), followed by devices being left on private property (17 percent).
The same geofencing allows for maximum speeds in specific areas, and prevents the scooters from being operated in places like the Katy Trail and Klyde Warren Park. Rush proposed revising the speed limit boundaries to allow people to ride in bike lanes on some roads, at a higher speed.
In the rules adopted in the spring, there were also provisions for how the fleet of scooters would be distributed—15 percent in Equity Opportunity Zones in Oak Cliff, southeast Dallas, and parts of North Dallas and 25 percent in the Central Dallas area that includes downtown, Uptown, and Deep Ellum.
Rush said Monday that the city was hearing from people who were unable to find scooters to ride in the Central Dallas area, and asked the committee to consider increasing the percentage to allow for 30 to 35 percent. They advised recalibrating the percentages of distribution around the city, not increasing the number of scooters out on the road.
“This was actually a recommendation that we heard from our partners in Downtown Dallas Inc.,” Rush said. ”They said that one of the key complaints they had heard was actually that it was very difficult to find a scooter to ride.”
That would also mean decreasing the number of scooters in transit-starved areas of town, where the city was hoping micromobility options would give residents another transportation option.
But the committee was unconvinced that the rules needed tweaking, or that the operators could be trusted with a looser leash.
“I don’t trust them,” said Councilman Omar Narvaez, who chairs the committee. “I’m not willing to give them more. I’d rather stay where we’re at with zero changes until they can come through with the things they told us they were going to do.”
Councilman Paul Ridley, who along with Narvaez and Jesse Moreno represents a significant portion of the downtown, Uptown, and Deep Ellum area, asked if the vendors had been cooperative when city staff raised issues.
“I would say overall it’s been very positive,” Rush said. “There has been a little bit of give and take.”
Councilwoman Kathy Stewart, who once served on the city’s micromobility committee that studied the prospect of bringing scooters back, said the operators did “promise a lot.”
“There are a lot of things that are difficult to enforce, and you guys are doing what you can,” she said. “I do hope you’ll continue to work with them and hold their feet to the fire because for safety reasons, we need to have all the things that were put in place by the microbility study.”
Before moving on, Narvaez reiterated that he felt the proposed changes were not “ready for prime time.”
“I think the committee overwhelmingly agrees, I see a lot of nodding heads,” he said.
So far, ridership fell after an initial high of 3,250 daily rides in May to an average of about 1,000 now, something Rush attributed to the high temperatures of the summer. As the weather cools and more people seek out alternative modes of transportation, scooter operators may get a bigger test this fall and winter.
What comes next isn’t clear—the briefing ended, and the committee moved onto the next order of business. For now, the scooters will continue operating under the ordinance approved last spring.
Author
