Council moved ahead to establish a permanent e-scooter micro mobility program on Tuesday with direction to move from a contact model to a permit system.
However, the debate to get to that decision meandered as councilmembers pontificated, sometimes incorrectly, on the nature of the devices in the city.
Two items, Consent Calendar item 5A and Ordinance item 10B from the agenda, were combined since they both related to the same subject. Two companies currently operate e-scooters within the city limits of Santa Monica, Spin and Veo, both of which are headquartered in San Francisco.
Jeffrey Hoover, Director of Government Partnerships for Veo was present in chambers and spoke during the public comment section of the meeting. However, no one from Spin was present.
"First and foremost, I’d like to thank the city … for creating one of the most robust and interesting micro mobility programs in the country," Hoover said, adding, "Tonight is truly critical for Santa Monica to maintain a vibrant and healthy micro mobility program. It’s an essential component for meeting several of the city’s priorities which were shared in a truly eloquent way by Mayor Brock and Mr. White at this year’s state of the city."
Trevor Thomas, Senior Transportation Planner, provided the presentation before discussion began. Some interesting points were raised by Vice Mayor Lana Negrete including the fact that the statistics provided that dealt specifically with the number of incidents reported, albeit a declining number, involving an e-scooter did not differentiate between privately owned machines and those from the shared mobility program.
However, Thomas explained that relevant comments and complaints from residents and riders were being listened to and that where possible geofencing was being adjusted to provide safer conditions for pedestrians.
If you’ve ever ridden a Spin or Veo e-scooter and have found yourself suddenly slowing down and losing momentum, it’s probably because you’ve entered an area designated as a no-go zone, which is enforced by some extremely sophisticated global navigation satellite technology combined with equally advanced recognition of local surroundings, all operating in real time. Either that, or the battery is dead.
But privately-owned e-scooters do not have this restriction and as such regulations have to be enforced the old fashioned way.
Other questions were raised that frankly would’ve have benefited from having the manufacturer answer them, since they were directly related to the software application that has to be downloaded to a smartphone in order to actually use the e-scooters; enforcing age restrictions for example.
"So we’ve talked to both of our current operators and there’s a few potential technological solutions here, partial solutions, but that could be helpful," Thomas said following a line of questioning about how e-scooters are often left in incredibly inconvenient places, blocking driveways or vehicle entrances for instance, or even toppled over on the sidewalk.
As part of the "sign out" procedure after having used an e-scooter in Santa Monica, the app requires that you take a photograph of where you’ve left the vehicle. However, no one even raised whether a potential fine system might work for disrespectfully discarded e-scooters going forward.
Councilmember Gleam Davis highlighted the potential number of car journeys the program has saved. During the last full calendar year, Spin and Veo were used on over 600,000 trips.
"And about a third of those at least, are replacing automobile trips … So that if we were to reduce or eliminate the program, we’d have 200,000 more car trips on the streets of Santa Monica," Davis said.
"As we improve what we typically think of as bike infrastructure, scooters can use that as well. So for example, protected bike lanes protect not only cyclists but also scooter riders," Davis said, adding, "So not only can we reduce the number of crashes by hopefully encouraging better behavior, if we build better bike infrastructure, it will also assist with other micro mobility devices."
For a reason that was never adequately justified, Mayor Phil Brock seemed to insist on separating e-bikes and e-scooters, praising the former and heavily criticizing the latter.
"I’ll make a declaration that I am fully in favor of a robust bike share system in the city, which we don’t have right now. And when we’re talking about usage, we need to parse out bikes versus e-scooters as well. And when we talk about visual blight, structural blight of scooters, I think we need to parse that out as well," Brock said.
"I’ll see some … scooters stay in the same place on someone’s lawn for three, four or five days. The battery’s obviously dead by then," Brock said, which is not necessarily true.
Also mentioned was the fact that residents in Paris voted to remove e-scooters from their city streets in April of last year. However, Davis shared some valuable elaboration on the statistics mentioned earlier.
"You cited the Paris example where they had a vote [and] 90% of the people in Paris voted against scooters, but it’s important to remember in that vote, only 8% of the registered or eligible voters in Paris voted," Davis said, adding, "So really when you take 90% of the 8%, it’s about 7% of the voters in Paris voted against scooters. It’s not like there was some overwhelming, for lack of a better term groundswell and 90% of the registered voters in Paris voted against it."
Ultimately, regarding the mechanics of regulating scooters in the city, a motion was made by Councilmember Caroline Torosis and seconded by Negrete to reject all bids for contracted shared mobility service providers and continue with a permit-based program with select revisions. This passed unanimously 7-0.
A second motion was made also by Torosis and seconded once again by Negrete to repeal chapter 3.32 of the municipal code and amend it to update for an ongoing permit based program and passed unanimously 7-0. A friendly amendment was also made that City staff return with some additional stats on 311 calls and both the number of reported incidents and accidents.
