At last night’s City Council meeting, the Council made the first step to make its “Scooter Program” permanent and begin the process of bringing a third operator into the city or even a bike share provider. Santa Moncia has not had Bike Share since Lyft Bikes folded its operations during the pandemic.
Despite blustering in the Santa Monica Lookout that he would bring a motion to ban scooters from Santa Monica, Mayor Phil Brock declined when it was the time to make a motion after it was clear he lacked the support to pass it.
Santa Monica’s scooter program currently has 1400 shared mobility devices – 900 scooters and 500 e-bikes – down and according to a staff report they provide “a valuable alternative to the car, reducing pollution and congestion, according to transportation officials. At its peak, the city had 2,200 scooters and ebikes in its fleet, and it hopes that adding a new contractor can return to that number.
Based on a city survey, roughly 33-40% of the over 125,000 scooter trips taken in the city in the first quarter of the year replaced a trip that otherwise would have been completed by car. That comes to between 160,000 and 200,000 car trips removed from the road every year.
“Why are we insistent on increasing the number of scooters right now, rather than look at the use presently and possibly do the opposite,” Brock questioned. “Do we have too many devices?”
Brock was successful in getting the city to agree to base its goals of increased mobility devices based on usage statistics provided by the companies with licenses to operate in the city.
There was a discussion of whether or not scooters are “unsafe” compared to other modes of transportation. It’s hard to have good numbers on scooter crashes as the majority of crashes go unreported, but the trend seems to be fewer crashes occurring every year with only 23 crashes reported last year. Staff attributed this to a higher percentage of trips being completed by residents than tourists.
Brock expressed concerns with the amount of scooters blocking sidewalks, either upright or on the side. He wondered whether or not city residents would vote to ban scooters, as the people of Paris did, if given the choice. However, Paris only banned scooters after it had a ubiquitous eclectic bike share system.
