Introducing scooters to your city? You're in the right place!
Choose your city and see where scooter trips will be
Since Bird and Lime launched the first shared, dockless electric scooter services in Santa Monica, California in September 2017, scooters have rapidly spread across American cities, becoming a popular form of urban transportation. As of January 2020, there are 340 scooter share programs operating in 242 municipal areas and campuses across 40 different states (plus Washington D.C.). While scooter share providers initially entered new municipalities and markets without local officials’ permission or oversight, leading to spikes in scooter-related injuries and complaints of vehicles blocking sidewalks, cities have begun collaborating through coalitions like the Open Mobility Foundation to institute some oversight over these programs. Municipalities are now working with their scooter providers to ensure that their scooter share programs, among other goals, meet safety standards, distribute vehicles equitably across their cities, keep sidewalks clear, and protect rider privacy. Data standards like the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), created by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, help cities share scooter ridership data and make sure that their providers are complying with their policies.
While data initiatives like MDS help address cities manage more mature scooter share programs, there are no widely adopted models in place that help cities without shared scooters introduce the vehicles into their markets. In this project, we used data from 6 different American cities with shared scooters to develop a model that estimates what peak-season demand will be in cities without existing scooter programs. This application is built upon this prediction model serving as a scooter planning toolkit to help cities interested in launching scooter share systems but do not have any scooter experiences before learn from other municipalities that already have these systems in place and anticipate the geography of scooter ridership in their cities and its relationship to the city’s social and economic geography. We hope that cities like Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Madison, Wisconsin, which are considering adopting scooter share programs, will find this toolkit helpful as they work with providers to bring the vehicles to their communities.