On Behalf of the Invisible End-User
A downed Lime e-scooter in Santa Monica, Los Angeles (image: Cory Doctorow).
In the spring of 2018, Los Angeles’s transport ecosystem was changed forever by the introduction of dockless Bird, Jump, and Lime e-scooters. It was as if we all woke up one morning to find brightly coloured mini-mobility machines piled up on every corner of the arts district; scattered across downtown; lining the beachfront corridors; and leaning up against the walls of the city’s high-end shopping districts.
Although these scooters had been aggressively introduced into the streetscape by tech startups, there was a surprising lack of instructions for how to access and use them. If you wanted to try them out, you needed both the time to learn the basics, and enough money to cover the near inevitable mistakes of parking incorrectly or accidentally leaving the meter running. The scooters made certain people more visible (both on the street and in data), while making others invisible and adding to the complexity of their mobility.
A few weeks after e-scooters’ initial introduction in California (and within months across the rest of the United States), stories began to emerge (often leaked by current or ex-employees) about e-scooter companies placing restrictions on travel to and from certain neighbourhoods. In response, the companies cited concerns about scooter theft, hacking, and vandalism. Meanwhile, people with disabilities and elderly citizens shared videos of e-scooters blocking passageways and whizzing past them at 15mph on sidewalks, causing them to lose their balance. Elsewhere, homeowner associations complained about the impact of e-scooters on the aesthetic quality of their blocks. Faced with this kind of backlash, the e-scooter industry went into limbo for several months. Once cities like Los Angeles had realised there was a need for regulations, however, the e-scooter industry was permitted to continue limited operations while policies and deployment structures were negotiated. The result was a season of nominally-regulated e-scooter rollouts, almost entirely focused on areas that already had plenty of alternatives for travel. Nobody, it seemed, could figure out who exactly e-scooters were for.
“Travel is the demanding prerequisite of every aspect of our lives, meaning that for those of us who don’t live in a realm of autonomy and excess, mobility is high-stakes. ”
Determining who e-scooters serve is important. In the late 1990s, for instance, Black and Brown children were being taken off of streets and thrown in jails for riding homemade electric scooters on public roadways. Or consider the fact that over the last three years, Southeast Asian gig economy workers in New York have faced impoundment and imprisonment for using e-bikes to deliver goods faster – it was only during lockdown that City Hall brought the crackdown on e-bikes to an end, announcing “We will be suspending enforcement while restaurants are take-out and delivery only.” Because of mobility’s complex history in the United States, many people still struggle to understand it as a set of choices. Destinations such as grocery stores, offices, favourite parks, and the homes of friends and family are static pinpoints on the maps which make up our individual networks of connectivity, and we rarely see ourselves within the context of the broader network – most of the time, we’re simply in survival mode. Movement is an ebb-and-flow, a rhythm we begin to develop as adolescents: complex, yet predictable. Travel is the demanding prerequisite of every aspect of our lives, meaning that for those of us who don’t live in a realm of autonomy and excess, mobility is high-stakes. This makes innovation a destabilising nemesis. The idea of shifting modes – trying new vehicles, or changing the layout of infrastructure we’ve come to know – is unsettling. We already know where we need to go and how we will get there – life demands this level of foresight.
What this means is that scooters can’t simply be injected into city spaces under the assumption that people will immediately take to them. As such, when cities began to scrutinise e-scooters’ deployment, the tech industry and press stepped forward to give us the detailed pitch for e-scooters that had been bypassed in the initial rollout of the vehicles. A 2018 article by Levi Tillemann and Lassor Feasley in Wired, for instance, touted the scooters as efficient, easy to manufacture, nimble, and easy to store: “Micromobility can be just as transformational as solar power or electric vehicles – with impacts that will be felt much sooner”. A cursory analysis of this claim reveals a number of assumptions about e-scooters’ benefits, but the far more problematic selling point was the premise that scooters are catalysts for what Spin refers to as the “freedom to move.” “Spin partners with cities, campuses, community groups and businesses to provide dockless scooter-share services to get you where you need to go,” says the brand. “With Spin, you’re free to move.” Yet a 2018 analysis of e-scooter distribution in Washington D.C. by the mobility data company Coord undercuts this claim, finding, as summarised by journalist Eillie Anzilotti, an “excess availability [of e-scooters] in wealthier areas, that are already well-served, and a lack in lower-income neighborhoods”. It quickly became clear that e-scooters had fortified freedom of movement for some, while making potentially harmful assumptions about those among us who are invisible on the streets and in data.
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was first published in 1952, yet it continues to perfectly describe the polarity across experiences of people moving through cities today. Ellison writes about an unnamed man whose experience is rife with so much social erasure that the reader begins to wonder whether or not he is literally invisible. At one point, the character describes the ways people fail to engage with him. “My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own,” he says. “I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.” His solution is to create a home underground where, ironically, he is able to see his own reflection and body for the first time.
“The people and communities that e-scooter companies had failed to see had leveraged their invisibility, innovating on their own terms. ”
While the initial rollout of e-scooters left companies, transportation agencies, and regulators negotiating over whom the scooters should serve, how revenues would be taxed, and which policies should accompany their deployment, a community of invisible end-users began to emerge: e-scooters moved underground. In Los Angeles, investigative reporting by Curbed reporters Alissa Walker and Jenna Chandler revealed that students had started to use the scooters to get to and from school: “The students say the scooters are fun, affordable, and efficient,” Walker and Chandler wrote. Gig economy workers looking to save money on the overheads associated with cars have also started opting for dockless scooters to make deliveries at shorter distances, while social service providers began advocating that the startups should subsidise the cost of micromobility for clients to improve access to quality of life destinations – locations that are essential to meeting basic needs, especially for marginalised people. The people and communities that e-scooter companies had failed to see had leveraged their invisibility, innovating on their own terms. While the tech industry was busy trying to make e-scooters appealing to people who already had a wealth of mobility options, it had missed the opportunity to also create a mobility solution for the unseen and immobile among us.
An LAist article by Ryan Fonseca described this botched rollout of e-scooters as a “grand experiment” – a pilot season which would help startups collect data that would inform who their target customer base should be and help them “figure out how the devices might fit into local governments’ wider vision for mobility”. The dockless bicycle sharing model introduced in the mid-2010s had already demonstrated how unprepared transportation agencies were for new forms of mobility, and how long it would take to even begin negotiating operating agreements. In the United States, such agreements typically enforce data privacy laws, ensure equitable access to the service, and limit the monopolisation of the service by individual companies. In Los Angeles, one characteristic of the bike share schemes that was replicated in the e-scooter rollout was the conscious omission of predominantly Black, Brown and low-income neighbourhoods. It is glaringly obvious that while the e-scooter startups were unsure and unbothered about who they’d target as end users, they were, at least initially, incredibly certain about who they didn’t want using their products.
In May 2020, Tom Holub of Bike Lab published a map of Los Angeles that showed how bike share coverage of the city sat in relation to its Black neighbourhoods. The visual was stark. “Bike share does not reach the Black areas of the city at all; in fact, there’s not a single bike share station located in a census tract that is even 25% Black[…]” wrote Holub. “This disparity is consistent in every U.S. city I’ve looked at; bike share gets located in whiter, more affluent areas, because there’s no money in selling services to poor people.” This, despite the fact that many mobility companies emphasise equity as part of their applications to cities to receive approval to operate. In 2019, e-scooter company Scoot Networks pledged to “serve more of San Francisco than other operators who will focus on the busiest and most lucrative neighborhoods”, eventually receiving approval from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which described the company as “a safe, equitable and accountable scooter share service.” Once Scoot Networks began operating, however, it put no-parking restrictions in place in Tenderloin and Chinatown – two of the seven “communities of concern” that the company had promised to serve as part of its original application to the city.
“For communities who have experienced historic disinvestment and marginalisation, e-scooters provide timely intracommunity connectivity.”
Compounding the negative impacts of an investment strategy rooted in intentional erasure is the fact that e-scooters could actually serve as very good mobility solutions for low-income communities and neighbourhoods with limited existing transportation options. For communities who have experienced historic disinvestment and marginalisation, e-scooters provide timely intracommunity connectivity; they also improve access to transit, often eliminating an entire leg of route layovers. A 2019 pilot scheme in low-income neighbourhoods in Chicago revealed that there is a roughly one-month window of opportunity for obtaining buy-in and trust from communities that have traditionally been under-funded and unseen. This means that companies have to get things right early, and then maintain the level of service and access over a long period of time in order to establish a permanent relationship with these communities. According to a 2019 Baltimore e-scooter equity program, once that trust is built, e-scooters fit beautifully into the pre-existing nexus of travel established during our formative years. To test this hypothesis, the City of Baltimore conducted a study on “Equity Zones” – areas defined by the city as “historically underserved neighborhoods which have been subject to housing and transportation discrimination[...] result[ing] in limited access to private vehicles and reliance on first/last mile connections to transit.” What Baltimore officials found was that even in the midst of a global pandemic, when all micromobility ridership was trending downward, “rides originating from Equity Zones have declined less than overall rides.” The study added that “by improving multi-modal infrastructure, you’re creating space for vulnerable roadway users, which can then lead to bike and scooter usage taking off in those areas.”
In late-2018, when municipal governments and e-scooter startups realised that end-users were self-innovating and investing in things like access for food delivery workers, not all service providers responded with access programmes. Instead, companies such as Bird introduced a series of reactive regulations, and enforcement efforts followed. These responses including bans on the use of scooters on sidewalks and outright bans on e-scooters in cities such as New York. What was once a whimsical and unrestricted travel option now became a criminalising surveillance mechanism in low-income communities and a capitalistic travel demand dataset for the tech industry. In Los Angeles, Lime and Bird can store user data for an indeterminate amount of time, while Councilman Paul Koretz has recommended pulling permits for e-scooter companies refusing to cooperate in criminal investigations. The desire to place restrictions on where users go and how they anchor the use of scooters to their productivity in the gig economy, coupled with inequitable enforcement, has everything to do with who the end user is. It was only when tech companies were on the chopping block and facing the possibility of having to pull e-scooters out of commission that they began to argue that e-scooters were essential to first and last-mile connectivity and met the needs of marginalised communities – which they do, but why wasn’t this the basis of the rollout to begin with?
“E-scooter companies only deem Black and Brown people, and people in low-income neighbourhoods, to be a viable source of labour for maintaining, re-deploying, and charging e-scooters”
Today, deployment maps in major US cities still indicate a reluctance to actually meet the needs of underserved communities through e-scooters. What this effectively means is that, under the guise of equity, e-scooter companies only deem Black and Brown people, and people in low-income neighbourhoods, to be a viable source of labour for maintaining, re-deploying, and charging e-scooters. These jobs are structured as gig-economy employment, which defines workers as independent contractors. A 2018 study by Edison Research found that 55 per cent of Black gig economy workers said that such work provided their primary source of income. “Part of the idea behind the independent contractor/employee distinction is that independent contractors can take care of themselves in the market[…],” explained Charlotte Garden, an associate law professor at the University of Seattle when asked in 2019 by Vice about the e-scooter industry’s involvement with the gig economy. “But the persistence of objectively terrible labor conditions inside and outside the platform economy shows how that principle doesn’t always hold; sometimes people are dependent on the companies they work for and relatively powerless to either demand better or walk away.”
The jury is still out on whether or not it’s too late for the tech companies to get it right. But in places such as the UK, whose Department of Transport is currently trialling e-scooter rental schemes, there are several steps that can be taken to improve the rollout. Existing methods for analysing transit ridership and latent travel demand, for instance, miss the mark on micro-analysis. The longstanding issue with transportation planning is that it is based on methods and analyses that start and end at blanket assumptions regarding mobility behaviours. E-scooter strategies should include a comprehensive assessment of who is missing from this current discourse, as well as mapping exercises and datasets pertaining to mobility options. Think about the hyper-criminalisation and vigilantism Black people are faced with in the built environment and how, without policy-based protections, e-scooter deployment will exacerbate those dangers. Consider the possibility of e-scooters evolving into other e-vehicles that facilitate assisted mobility needs for people who would otherwise not have access to motorised travel (wheelchairs, seated scooters, cargo carriers, etc.). Imagine the reduction in bus reliance and the savings school districts would make if they could incorporate an e-scooter mode into their pickup and drop-off protocol. Pricing models and parking options ought to be structured in ways that enable users to have multiple stops along one trip – a common travel pattern for low-income users. Find the invisible among us, those beneath the maps, and plan for them.
“As with most investments in underserved communities, the deployment model for this business line needs policies that ensure protections and sustainability.”
In areas experiencing rapid gentrification, transformative transportation investments and amenities could spur housing speculation and displacement in vulnerable neighbourhoods – this may be why e-scooter companies initially focused deployment in areas where displacement and homelessness are less common. In these areas, communities would benefit from a cooperative model (or a low-cost franchise option) which could afford an extra layer of protection against speculation and predatory redevelopment in low-income communities. As with most investments in underserved communities, the deployment model for this business line needs policies that ensure protections and sustainability. The rollout of electric scooters in the United States revealed the likelihood that end-users – those for whom scooters fill a gap – will be long-term partners and essential to the sustainability of the service.
We don’t actually live in two separate worlds. What is above ground is all we have and, more often than not, it prioritises those who are most visible and most resourced. This industry and the municipalities that regulate it have punished the very creativity that is now being sold to the people who’ve been punished. E-scooters are an evolution in connectivity that has the potential to improve a lot of lives – if we engage the unseen. As Ralph Ellison wrote: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Words Destiny Thomas
This article was originally published in Disegno #27. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.