Down & Outbound: The Hub

Scooters in the News

Readers of this blog know that when I am walking, electric scooters are not welcome on sidewalks and as a motorist and a fellow human being, I fear being part of or witness to a serious accident involving a scooter on a street. You can call it envy because of my own lack of balance (and thus I am excluded from the Lime club), but when I see a 185 lb. person scooting 15 miles an hour with no helmet in traffic, I shudder, not gaze wistfully. Given the durability of a scooter -- estimated between one and three months -- gives me further anxiety when I see scooters weaving amongst traffic and pedestrians. See this article for details.

Atlanta Journal Constitution Article

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a long feature article in the Sunday, September 1st edition, which covered many of the issues surrounding the use of scooters in Atlanta. I’ve highlighted one excerpt that challenges the much-marketed assumption that scooters replace car trips (they replace walkers as well). Of course, there is a lot of big money pushing these assumptions. Lime is financed by Uber and Google-Alphabet.

(Click on article to enlarge)

Scooter Myth: First and Last Mile Connectivity

Here's a short article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, December 20th written by Bill Banks about the City of Decatur where I live and walk the 10-15 minutes to the train station four days a week for the last 9 years. 

Though miffed by the sudden arrival of EScooters in the city last October without prior notification, Decatur commissioners believe the technology is, according to City Manager Peggy Merriss, “consistent with the city’s strategic plan and community transportation plan.”

The scooters, also called “dockless mobility scooters,” “longboards” and “stand up electric scooters” (and less savory designations by those in opposition), are marketed as a convenient solution for short trips.  Merriss believes there’s truth here and that potentially the scooters “can get people out of cars and contribute to better air quality. 

“I don’t have an issue with them, if used appropriately,” she added. “They are not toys, and there has to be education, enforcement and role modeling.”

On Dec. 17 the commission authorized the city manager (Andrea Arnold will take over for Merriss beginning Jan. 1) to execute an interim operating agreement for using the scooters. This interim agreement has room for flexibility and probably will take another month to finalize. But the eventual goal, Merriss said, is to pass an ordinance by the first quarter of next year.

Some key points the in the interim manifesto include keeping the vehicles on bikes lanes, streets and bike paths while prohibiting their use on sidewalks. Also, the age limit is 18, helmets are mandatory and usage is limited to daylight hours (although this could expand). Each company is limited to 50 scooters within the city, and strict parking regulations apply—currently scooters are often parked in clumps on sidewalks, or occasionally singly and abandoned.

“There are some cities in the state that have banned them,” said Mayor Patti Garrett. “We don’t want to go that route. The big problems are irresponsible drivers, underage drivers, people riding double and, in one case, I heard somebody say, ‘I don’t know how to stop this thing!’ 

Merriss said she doesn’t have a precise number but guesses there are over 100 scattered throughout Decatur’s four square miles. Most belong to Bird Rides and few to LimeBike. On Wednesday a third company, the “JUMP by Uber” launched scooters in Atlanta.

Though a short article it touches on several related issues about transit:

1. "First and last mile connectivity" is a transit wonk catch phrase that the scooter industry has used in marketing to convince people that scooters are a remedy for transit woes. (Anecdotally,  I have yet to see a commuter ride a scooter to or from an adjacent neighborhood to the Decatur train station.)
2. The sidewalks, especially on Church street are narrow and broken and underwater when it rains (shown here).Of course automobiles constantly buzzing at 35 miles an hour doesn't improve the walking experience. Plans are for improvement to slow the traffic but that has been promised or proposed for years. (Last word is that easements were being obtained.)
   
3. New developments in Decatur including the proposed one called the Quarters on Church Street near Glenlake Park seem to be an antithesis to make Decatur more walkable or sustainable by dumping additional motorists from the proposed 43 unit development onto an already very busy street.  Even if the developer puts in a wide sidewalk -- the development connects to nothing but narrow, broken, and flooded sidewalks. 
4. On a larger scale, isn't this development and scooter regulations indirectly a carbon issue? A developer cuts down large mature trees and more traffic is potentially dumped on the roads and more scooters dominate the discussion. This is really climate issue because everything is a climate issue. Below is the headline from the front page of the January 11, 2019 New York Times. Maybe its not as indirect as we have been thinking.
   

 

Price Comparisons: Hurricane vs. Public Transportation

The other day I was reading this article from the September 20th edition of The Economist while riding a crowded MARTA train:

And that's not all -- then there is the loss of poultry and pigs:

You could buy a lot of greenhouse gas-reducing public transportation for that kind of money and maybe save yourself the expense of a hurricane or two:

 

But either way, those chickens are not coming back...

Anti-Scooter

When I have to share the already narrow, crumbling sidewalks of Midtown Atlanta with speeding, silent scooters, ridden by well balanced, carefree,  young people, I will I admit I have evil thoughts about vandalizing the offending vehicles. And I am not only one, as reported in the August 18, 2018 edition of The Chicago Tribune.  

"You could say the scooters have created a buzz — not necessarily the good kind — in select cities. In Cleveland, city officials ordered Bird, another dock less scooter-sharing company, to remove its equipment, citing safety concerns and a lack of city permits that would allow the scooters to be parked on the sidewalk, The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper reported.

But in cities like Los Angeles, scooters have been set on fire, tossed off balconies and even dumped into the ocean — a backlash that is a melange of anger over so many tech companies popping up in Southern California and anger that they’re clogging up public spaces, according to news reports . That has resulted in cities in California limiting or outright banning the scooter-sharing services, the Los Angeles Times reported."

"Help me, I've fallen," said the scooter, but I stood by and did nothing.

Big SUVs and Small Cars

This morning's reading notes:

Followed by this quote:

"The small car is worn like shoes or pants. It transforms the motorist into a super pedestrian and renders him nauseating to all occupants of real cars."

-- Marshall McLuhan in the essay, Inside the Five Sense Sensorium (1961)

Climate Change's Biggest Problem

As I read Rob Walker's article "How to Trick People into Saving Money" in the May, 2017 issue of The Atlantic magazine, I drew a connection to behavioral economist Daniel Eckert's thoughts about saving money and how it relates to saving the environment.  Walker writes, "Americans difficulty saving, Daniel Eckert* told me recently, is a textbook example of how brains wired to reckon with short-term threats and opportunities struggle to think about long-term consequences  -- and struggle even harder to take current action to stave off future disaster."

Perhaps that is where the solution to slowing down climate change lies, tricking people into saving the environment.

*Footnote: Walker's article covers how Walmart is marketing a Moneycard type app to get their customers who don't normally save, to stash away money. Eckert oversees Walmart's financial service businesses.

 

Burning Memories #2

On Thursday, May 4th, I was on the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) train that filled with smoke during my evening rush hour commute. I ended up having to evacuate the train and take a tunnel catwalk back to the Midtown Station. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the following Saturday that, "MARTA Police and Emergency Management said an arc of electricity from a high voltage rail -- not a fire -- apparently created smoke that filled the train."  My re-occurring thoughts include:

• Where there is smoke there is fire. Not sure how that "not-a-fire" explanation works.
• What caused the arc of electricity? MARTA trains are notorious for electrical outages especially during heavy rains.
• As mentioned in a previous posting, if you ride MARTA regularly enough, something like this -- where a train breaks down or an incident with a passenger causes major delays -- happens every other month. (It was the second time in 6 days where I had to evacuate a train.)

My prediction is that once the I-85 bridge is repaired, commuters will return to their car driving ways, especially since gasoline prices remain low and they will know that the MARTA experience often requires passenger patience.