Earlier this month the Washington Sun’s Martin Austermuhle reported that the District Department of Transportation is proposing to increase the maximum speed of D.C.’s rentable e-scooters from 10 mph to 15 mph. Under the proposal the companies–Hopp and Lime–would need to make their vehicles capable of distinguishing between sidewalks and roads, enabling the new, higher speed only when they’re in the street.
I read the sidewalk data as suggesting less about the speed limit FWIW and more about the relative level of pedestrian saturation within DC relative to most other places, e.g. Austin.
I think that's a defensible read. You are right that these are different built environments and it's hard to find perfectly clean inter-city comparisons.
On the other hand, lots of D.C. is residential and the DDOT program has specific mandates about fleet balancing between wards. So I don't think it's THAT wild of a comparison. You can actually see both cities usage patterns on Ride Report:
If anything, Austin's usage is more concentrated in its downtown core.
Paired with the Santa Monica study connecting speed and sidewalk riding (admittedly with some still-present confounders like alerts), I'm betting on the low-speed/sidewalk link being real (and based on this rulemaking, I think DDOT is, too).
A common theory is that much of the bad behavior and cost to the scooter companies is from kids using low income access (eg an EBT card) to ride the scooters. Do we know the difference in accident rates from different access modes?
This is a key question. The short answer is no: our insight into scooter safety doesn't really come from the DDOT micromobility program at all, but rather from a combination of researchers setting up camp in emergency rooms (who are concerned with the vehicle type, not the specifics of the micromobility program) and MPD (who are measuring overall road safety).
But! I do think there's a significant body of anecdotal agreement that youth misuse of the scooters and ebikes--and to be clear, any kid on a scooter is a misuse, all of the fleet operators except CaBi are 18+ only--is a problem, and the fleets have made some interesting voluntary changes. More significant is the change embedded in this same draft rule to the structure of the LICP subsidy, moving it away from "unlimited rides under 30m" and toward a defined number of minutes that can be used up. I think there's still some confused incentives embedded in the rule that are worth addressing--I'm hoping to follow this up with a post focusing on kids and LICP access before the comment period closes.
I read the sidewalk data as suggesting less about the speed limit FWIW and more about the relative level of pedestrian saturation within DC relative to most other places, e.g. Austin.
I think that's a defensible read. You are right that these are different built environments and it's hard to find perfectly clean inter-city comparisons.
On the other hand, lots of D.C. is residential and the DDOT program has specific mandates about fleet balancing between wards. So I don't think it's THAT wild of a comparison. You can actually see both cities usage patterns on Ride Report:
https://public.ridereport.com/dc?x=-77.0472865&y=38.9095930&z=11.01
https://public.ridereport.com/austin
If anything, Austin's usage is more concentrated in its downtown core.
Paired with the Santa Monica study connecting speed and sidewalk riding (admittedly with some still-present confounders like alerts), I'm betting on the low-speed/sidewalk link being real (and based on this rulemaking, I think DDOT is, too).
Well-argued - I think these are pretty persuasive points yeah.
A common theory is that much of the bad behavior and cost to the scooter companies is from kids using low income access (eg an EBT card) to ride the scooters. Do we know the difference in accident rates from different access modes?
This is a key question. The short answer is no: our insight into scooter safety doesn't really come from the DDOT micromobility program at all, but rather from a combination of researchers setting up camp in emergency rooms (who are concerned with the vehicle type, not the specifics of the micromobility program) and MPD (who are measuring overall road safety).
But! I do think there's a significant body of anecdotal agreement that youth misuse of the scooters and ebikes--and to be clear, any kid on a scooter is a misuse, all of the fleet operators except CaBi are 18+ only--is a problem, and the fleets have made some interesting voluntary changes. More significant is the change embedded in this same draft rule to the structure of the LICP subsidy, moving it away from "unlimited rides under 30m" and toward a defined number of minutes that can be used up. I think there's still some confused incentives embedded in the rule that are worth addressing--I'm hoping to follow this up with a post focusing on kids and LICP access before the comment period closes.