The city of Eugene is one step closer to getting electric scooters on the streets after the City Council voted to authorize a pilot program on Feb. 26. The program could start as soon as this summer.
E-scooters and “micro-mobility devices” emerged in 2017 as a new form of transportation in the United States. E-scooters have become popular in cities across the country, especially in cities  like Portland.

Lime is one of those companies, and it’s looking to gain a contract to operate in Eugene. Jonathan Hopkins, director of strategic development for the San Francisco-based company, said Eugene was already the optimal city to bring the company into.

“We’ve been able to analyze the different types of cities this can be successful in. The places that are the most successful already have a culture of not having to use your car for everything. They already have infrastructure that provides safe pathways for people to ride bikes,” Hopkins said.

Additionally, Hopkins said an incentive to come to Eugene was the city’s commitment to going green. The city’s Climate Recovery Ordinance is a set of goals for Eugene to hit in terms of reducing emissions. One of these goals is to reduce community fossil fuel use by 50% of 2010 levels by 2030, according to the city website.

“We have city goals around reducing greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles,” said Rob Inerfeld, transportation planning manager for the city of Eugene, “and one of the main ways to do that is to get people to drive less. And in other cities, in particular Portland and Spokane, surveys of riders have shown that a significant number of people who rode a scooter — in a range of 30 to 40% — otherwise would have taken a car.”

And scooters are, at least during rides, much greener. Hopkins said that the impact of their scooters can be likened to electric cars but with significantly less congestion.

“For somebody riding a scooter, it doesn’t have emissions during the course of the ride. When we recharge a scooter at night, it takes about 25 cents in electricity and gives people 25 miles in mobility the following day,” he said.

While e-scooters have a low carbon impact, it isn’t the impact many are looking out for. Fiona Wilcox, co-director of the University of Oregon AccessAbility Student Union, said that from her experience both as a person with a disability and as a former resident of Portland, she isn’t looking forward to e-scooters coming to Eugene.
“I have to say I don’t see these scooters having a positive impact for folks with disabilities,” Wilcox said. “What I’ve seen, I have to say, really only validates my opinion of the scooters as perhaps fun, yet implicating real risk for the riders themselves and those around them. I’ve nearly tripped over scooters left prone on the sidewalk, seen dozens of riders without helmets — which on any such object, including bikes, is a major danger — and even some people e-scooting on the same roadways as cars.”
Inerfeld has been looking for ways to make e-scooters safer since the beginning of the project. Two possible ideas he mentioned were creating corrals on sidewalks that would function as pseudo-parking lots for scooters, with a penalty for those who park elsewhere, and not allowing people to end their rides near the river, decreasing the chance of them being thrown in.

Hopkins said that Lime focused on educating its customers to be better riders. 

“Our behavior for parking cars used to be a lot different too. We’d park haphazardly in people’s yards, now we park parallel on the street. The reason is because we’ve developed norms around it, and the same sort of thing happens with scooters. A large part of it is education and awareness,” he said.
Hopkins said that learning to ride e-scooters would take time for many, but Lime hopes to help make streets safer and pump the brakes on emissions.
“We hope to be able to help by giving people other alternatives that give streets back to people, not to huge hunks of metal,” he said.