Recommended Read: E-Scooters in New York

A must-read article (from, not surprisingly, The New Yorker) recommended by Peter Ladner, and seconded by me.  It’s about more than e-scooters – namely the micromobility revolution, the relation of technology to human beings, and at the end, a rather dark scenario as we return, post-pandemically, to the streets:

Some tasty nuggets from the complete article here:

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 first 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. …

In the late two-thousands, the first wave of e-bikes arrived in the city as food-delivery workers, virtually all immigrants, began using them. For a fifteen-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. …

On March 20, 2020, Cuomo put the state into lockdown. Within weeks, the food-delivery workers whom the N.Y.P.D. had been harassing were being hailed as frontline heroes. During the terrifying early days, particularly, it seemed as though ambulances and delivery e-bikes were the only vehicles moving. …

In renting a scooter—or a bike—you provide the hire company with information about you, your route, your travel speed, your driving style, and your destination. Cities grant scooter concessions in part to have access to these data, which are aggregated and anonymized according to rules that underpin the Mobility Data Specification, an open-source digital tool. This information is far more granular than the data that can be gleaned about subway or bus ridership. …

A data-driven form of collective intelligence employed in scooter fleets, geofencing uses G.P.S. to create virtual boundaries around terrestrial places. The technology can keep scooters off sidewalks and away from restricted areas by automatically cutting the power to the motor when the scooter crosses the geofence. Geofencing also requires users to end rides in designated scooter-parking areas, reducing sidewalk clutter. You could still pick up a parked scooter, though, if it isn’t locked to anything, and throw it into the East River. …

(Horace) Dediu argues that, just as the heavy desktop computer has been superseded by lighter laptops, tablets, and smartphones, so the automobile will be “unbundled” into much lighter, cleaner, and less resource-dependent E.V.s that can be used for most of the trips people now make by car. (In the U.S., sixty per cent of all car trips are less than six miles.) Lithium-ion batteries, first introduced to consumers by Sony in high-end camcorders, today power an ever-expanding array of mobile devices—not just our phones and laptops but also vehicles like e-bikes, e-scooters, e-monowheels, e-skateboards, and other continually evolving forms of micromobility that no longer require the user’s energy to move them.

Dediu calls e-scooters “smartphones on wheels.” No other vehicle on the road has a higher proportion of brains to brawn. …

Superpedestrian’s operating system was performing more than a thousand autonomous maintenance checks a second—brake issues, battery-cell-temperature imbalances, severed internal wires, water penetration—so that an algorithm that has learned to detect signs of incipient scooter failure can take the vehicle out of service before a serious malfunction occurs that might land the machine in the shop and the rider in the hospital. (The system can also detect collisions and report unsafe driving to local control centers.) As a result of this regimen of automated self-care, Link scooters require maintenance once in every two hundred and fifty trips, versus the industry standard of once in every fifteen to forty trips….

Even cities with smoother infrastructure have reported an epidemic of certain types of injuries at the beginning of sharing programs. Wally Ghurabi, the medical director of the emergency center at UCLA Health Santa Monica Hospital, participated in a 2018 study, conducted by the university, of two hundred and forty-nine patients admitted to the E.R. after scooter accidents, of whom ten had worn helmets. A hundred of them had head injuries. …

Even before the pandemic, transport planners knew that many people who take up biking are shifting from public transit, or walking, and not from cars. The micromobility gains in Paris and London are mostly at the expense of their Métro and Underground systems …

As people go back to working in offices and shopping in stores, but potentially remain leery of trains, buses, and car pools, many will mode-shift to four wheels rather than two. Ridership on the subway is still at only thirty-five per cent of its pre-pandemic levels; bus ridership is about fifty per cent. Traffic, however, is already reaching pre-pandemic levels at the river crossings and on interborough expressways open to commercial traffic, even as it remains depressed in midtown. According to Sam Schwartz, a longtime New York transportation analyst, the city is facing a “scary” traffic scenario this fall, unless something is done to redirect the public’s atavistic retreat to private automobiles.

If seventy-five per cent of remote workers return to their Manhattan offices, he explained, but twenty per cent of them remain fearful of public transit and mode-shift to driving, the number of vehicles entering the central business district in Manhattan will increase by two hundred and nine thousand cars over the 2018 peak, when midtown traffic crept along at an average of five miles an hour. (Congestion pricing, the plan to toll drivers crossing the East River and entering Manhattan below Sixtieth Street, seems all but inevitable now.) Unless the M.T.A. receives additional funding, there will almost certainly be cuts to subway and bus service to make up for missing fares. Instead of the fifteen-minute city, we may be looking at a ninety-minute one.