Seattleites may be scooting around town later this fall.
The Seattle City Council will vote on a scooter-share pilot program Sept. 8 after the transportation committee approved the plan Wednesday.
Last year, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan pledged to launch a scooter-share pilot but the process has become bogged down by bureaucratic hurdles and other municipal priorities.
After an environmental review and an application process that garnered interest from nine scooter share companies, the city is ready to test the new mobility option.
Three companies will be allowed to operate up to 500 scooters each at the outset; that number could grow to 2,000.
The city said scooters can help with COVID-19 recovery efforts and aid in travel challenges created by the closure of the West Seattle Bridge by replacing car trips with an open air mobility option. It cited data showing that post-COVID scooter rides in Portland, Detroit, and Baltimore are 2X longer and 2X more likely to be used for “essential” trips.
Companies will be required to sanitize all common touch points each time they service a scooter. They also must provide reduced-rate plans to low-income communities, and deploy at least 10% of their fleet to neighborhoods “with a higher proportion of communities of color, immigrants, refugees, people with low incomes, and limited English-proficient individuals.”
The scooters will be capped at 15 MPH. Riding is allowed on bike lanes, public paths, and roads with a 25 MPH or less speed limit. Scooters are not allowed on sidewalks unless as part of a bike route. They can be parked in bike racks, in furniture zones — the area between the roadway curb face and the front edge of the walkway — and in scooter parking corrals.
The city will also have “incentivized helmet use”; city law already mandates that scooter riders wear helmets. Safety is a key issue for city leaders as studies indicate that scooter-related injuries are on the rise, particularly among riders who don’t wear helmets.
Companies will have to pay a per-scooter fee, which will fund the administration of the pilot.
The pilot will include both stand-up scooters and scooters with seats.
You can see the city council presentation here; and the draft pilot permit requirements here.
Scooters will join shared bicycles on Seattle’s streets. Bike-share services disappeared earlier this year due to the pandemic but Lime said earlier this month that it plans to have 2,000 JUMP bikes back in Seattle by this fall.
Lime also said the long-term viability of the bike-service depends on whether city officials also allow its scooter-share program to operate, given that its electric scooter business is more profitable.
This week Lime began testing a pilot program for scooters with King County in the White Center area, just south of downtown Seattle.
Seattle was one of the first cities in the country to embrace dockless bicycle share, launching a pilot in 2017 and formalizing the program in 2018. The city is taking its time before allowing scooters, even as surrounding communities such as Redmond, Tacoma, and Bothell embrace them.
“The COVID-19 public health crisis holds many uncertainties for the near future, but as more people return to work and other activities, transportation and congestion management continue to be essential,” the city wrote in a blog post. “Like bike share, we think scooter share could be an important choice to get people where they need to go.”
Watch the transportation committee discussion below (starts at 1:59:30):
