Why Are All These Kids On Scooters?

Let’s get two things out of the way up front.

First, nearly every kid you see on a shared-fleet scooter or ebike in D.C. shouldn’t be there. With the exception of Capital Bikeshare, which allows riders 16 and over, every operator in D.C. currently requires that riders be at least 18 years old.

Second, I’m going to talk in this post about the bike- and scooter-share operators’ Low Income Customer Programs (LICP): their structure, their confused incentives, and the ways they’re set to change. But I can’t prove to you that the kids you see on scooters and ebikes are there via LICP. That they are is clearly the surmise of many observers in D.C., and doubtless this is rooted in race and other observable class markers. I acknowledge that we could spend many engaging online hours yelling at one another about this.

I’d prefer to skip that for now, though, and focus instead on explaining LICP and why it may be contributing to the problems associated with kids using and misusing our city’s shared micromobility fleets.

Besides, the best reason for guessing that many of the kids we see riding scooters are using LICP is simple: rental scooters and ebikes are expensive! A 15 minute ride is typically between $5 and $8 on the fleets’ pay-as-you-go plans. The devices are undeniably fun, and I’m sure some young people spend their pocket money on an occasional joyride. But when you see kids cruising aimlessly or keeping active but unridden scooters at hand while hanging out with friends, it’s reasonable to wonder how it’s being paid for.

How Does LICP Work?

One more bit of throat-clearing: much of the following doesn’t apply to Capital Bikeshare. CaBi is owned by a regional partnership and uses docks. DDOT contracts with Lyft to run CaBi (in fact, they were awarded a new contract just last week). By contrast, Lime, Hopp, and Veo all own their fleets, are dockless, and operate under permits from DDOT. CaBi has its own low-income program, but it’s not defined by the same set of rules that the dockless operators face.

The LICP requirement wasn’t present when DDOT’s dockless program debuted in 2018, but in 2019 the city began requiring it for fleet size increases, formalizing it in regulation the following year. The scale and obligations associated with LICP expanded significantly in 2022, and today it seems to be a major part of how operators manage their relationship with the city, to the point where some do fawning press hits about it.

Under LICP operators must offer an option for D.C.’s low-income residents that meets certain requirements:

• Participants receive unlimited trips under 30 minutes

• No device deposit can be required

• Cash payment must be possible

Lime, Veo, and Hopp each run their own version of LICP, with some differences between them. But in all cases the eligibility mechanism revolves around confirming participation in some other low-income support program. All of the operators extend LICP to SNAP recipients, but credentials from other programs like TANF, Medicaid, the National School Lunch Program, Pell Grants, or showing a discounted utility bill can also qualify.

Fleet operators must show a minimum amount of LICP use before they can apply to increase their fleet size, and the size of that increase is tied to the percentage of trips that are LICP. Perhaps most significantly, the per-device fees that operators pay to the city–currently set to $10/month, though soon to be inflation-indexed–are rebated at a percentage based on 10x the mileage percentage. So at 1% of miles, operators get back 10% of their fees, and this scales up to 100% of fees when 10% of miles are attributable to LICP users. This doesn’t add up to an enormous pot of money–based on fleet size numbers from Ride Report, it’s likely less than $2 million per year across all operators. But the combination of incentives seem to be working: DDOT reports that 11% of trips were taken by LICP participants as of 2024.

How Do Kids End Up Riding These Things?

Establishing the facts about how LICP is supposed to work is easy: we can just look them up. Figuring out how kids wind up on scooters and ebikes is harder. But we can make some educated guesses.

The most obvious angle is sharing account credentials across devices, like letting your sister use your Netflix password. Alternately, adults who qualify but are uninterested in using the benefit might give or sell credentials to a young person who wants it.

There are parts of the program that are harder to guess about. Each operator offers a “group ride” function allowing multiple vehicles to be unlocked at once. This isn’t supposed to be used for kids, but in practice there are no real controls preventing it. It’s not completely clear whether group rides are eligible for LICP, but it may be usable for at least some fleets (particularly given the incentive structure operators face).

Similarly, DDOT’s requirements around cash payment and low- or no-device access to the vehicles, including via SMS unlock, may offer paths to improper access that are hard to detect and prevent. These program requirements come from an admirable desire to avoid excluding people without smartphones or formal banking options. But other cities have had serious problems when bad actors begin taking advantage of these kinds of accommodations, and smartphone penetration is now exceptionally high, particularly among the younger cohorts that favor bikes and scooters. We don’t have any evidence that DDOT collects information on how widely these payment options are used, nor much insight into how they interact with program priorities that require us to know who’s riding.

For ebikes, simple theft also plays a role. If you see a someone riding a Lime bike that’s clicking weirdly, it’s likely because they’ve defeated the lock and are riding it without its e-assist.

Operators Aren’t Incentivized to Stop Underage Rides

Fleet operators can get fee rebates and fleet increases based on LICP participation rates (the former for miles, the latter for trips). DDOT requires that LICP be made available to customers at or below 200% of the federal poverty guideline, but how the fleets operationalize this is up to them. The agency doesn’t set a verification standard or require any reporting on it. Nor is there any mechanism I can see that disincentivizes underage LICP riding. The rules say, in effect: get your LICP numbers up to 10%—we won’t be checking how you do it.

LICP Has Been Changing, and More Change is Coming

Still, it would be wrong to suggest that the operators haven’t worked to address underage riding. A number of voluntary measures have been put in place to discourage underage use, seemingly in response to government requests and unwanted media attention related to dockless vehicles’ frequent use in crime (a problem that may be getting worse).

Lime, which operates the largest fleet in D.C., appears to be at the forefront of these changes, limiting LICP use to a single logged-in device, raising the monthly fee for Lime Access (to $30, now $15), requiring monthly reenrollment, and requiring smartphone selfie-checks. Those checks are currently designed to evaluate the rider’s age, not to confirm their identity as the account holder, but Lime says this is set to change. Veo and Hopp’s LICP rules and fees seem to be looser.

But a bigger change is in the offing for all of the dockless operators. The same rulemaking that I discussed in my last post will, as drafted, restructure the central LICP benefit entirely, moving it from unlimited rides under 30 minutes to a fixed monthly benefit of 300 minutes that don’t roll over (plus a 50% discount on fees after that). This is structurally similar to how CaBi revised their low-income benefit in 2025.

The rule language also seems to assume a “reasonable” monthly fee for LICP participation, though exactly what this means isn’t defined. Taken together, these measures could make it more expensive and annoying for a qualifying adult to hand their LICP benefit to a kid who shouldn’t have it.

It’s Still All Carrots, With Few Sticks

These changes may help. But some of them are underspecified in the rule. And there’s still no clear requirement that would make operators inform DDOT about the part of the underage rider problem that they can see, nor much mechanism to encourage them to take it more seriously as they seek to keep their LICP participation rate up. The rule’s penalties are focused on what happens if LICP rates fall, not on ensuring that LICP use is legitimate.

Reasonable people can disagree on how much of a problem this is. Making our city’s micromobility program accessible to everyone is a worthwhile goal: the bikes and scooters impose some minor costs on us all, and it makes sense that we should all share the benefits, too. Whether those benefits should extend to teen joyrides rather than nuts-and-bolts mobility is a matter of opinion. But there’s no question that, under the current rules, kids aren’t supposed to be using these devices.

And, to the extent that our inability to verify rider identity is making ebikes and scooters useful to criminals, it represents an obvious and pressing problem. The city shouldn’t be subsidizing getaway vehicles. This must be weighed against the needs of residents for whom smartphone apps aren’t an option, but there are real tradeoffs here–ones that we probably need more data to fully understand. The success of D.C.’s Throne public bathrooms, which provide an amenity in part by using technology to prevent its abuse, suggests there’s a balance we can strike.

Improving the LICP program has the potential to preserve legitimate use while addressing these problems. DDOT will be accepting comments on the open rulemaking until October 4.

Capital Commonsense readers can share their perspective by writing to Jason Rubinstein, Policy Analyst, Policy and Legislative Affairs Division, Office of the Director, DDOT, 250 M Street SE, 8th Floor, Washington DC 20003 or publicspace.policy@dc.gov. If you refer to the NPRM on “Shared Fleet Devices (Notice ID N146433), 73 DCR Vol. 73/36, published September 4, 2026” he’ll know what you’re talking about.