On 08/09/2021 the Municipal Services Committee received the July report for the Bird E-Scooter pilot program.
The report was included in the agenda packet. Director of Public Works Paula Vandehey told the committee that the total rides since the pilot program started was just over 10,300 and those rides equated to just over 14,000 miles.
She keeps a log of the complaints that the city receives, but she doesn’t have a good way of sharing the anecdotal stories they get from people. She wanted to let the committee know that there is a counterbalance to the complaints where people are real expressing appreciation for the scooters as a mode of transportation or just as a fun way to go from one place to another.
She said that one of the most frequent complaints was improperly parked scooters, but one of the city’s traffic engineers had shared a video of a Bird scooter parked appropriately and a couple kids came by on a bike and knocked it over. So people may see a scooter lying on its side and complain about it not being parked correctly, but in this case, it was bikers who knocked it over and gave the scooters a bad name.
There was a survey posted at the bottom of the report. As the pilot program gets further along and it’s closer to when the committee and the Common Council will decide whether or not to continue it, they will conduct a public survey to try to get feedback which will help get feedback across the spectrum.
Alderperson Fenton (District 6) said there had been some back and forth regarding the cost per minute for a scooter ride. The website had looked like it said one thing, but people were being charged another. BIRD had told her they were going to move the price down to $0.39 per minute. She wanted to know where they were on the pricing of the scooters.
Director Vandehey thought that they had changed the rate, but would confirm that and get back to the committee.
Alderperson Joe Prohaska (District 14) asked how they could tell the age of the riders because he was seeing a lot of kids who were not 18 driving them. How does Bird track that? The only problem he had with the program going beyond the pilot period was how to keep the young kids stay off of them.
Director Vandehey said they talked about that with Bird. The only way to really document that would be to show a drivers license, but the problem is that not everyone has a drivers license, and there was a concern that they might be preventing people who may want or even need to use Bird scooters as a form of transportation from doing so. Her understanding was that riders were self reporting instead of having to provide documentation. She had seen adults misuse the scooters and young kids using them appropriately, so for her, it was less about age and more about whether they were using them appropriately, although she acknowledged riders were supposed to be at least 18.
Alderperson Brad Firkus (District 3) pointed out that Bird may have this restriction, but there is no age restriction on riding an electric scooter in general. For all intents and purposes, electrict scooters are classified as bicycles, just an electric version of one, so he thought the age restriction was a business decision. If the city created an ordinance, it would have to be something along the lines of a person cannot rent anything unless they’re at least 18. They probably couldnt be so detailed they could ban people under 18 from riding electrict scooters.
Alderperson Prohaska thought that if the city decided to allow Bird scooters on a permanent basis, they would need to educate residents because residents were currently under the impression that kids are not supposed to be riding the scooters–that was what the city had said when the pilot first started.
Alderperson Chad Doran (District 15) asked if they felt they had an accurate sense of usage based on the number of scooters available. Have they found out if more people were looking for scooters than there were available scooters? Were there options to increase the number of scooters being used in the pilot program to see if they got more usage from that?
Director Vandehey said that Bird had hoped that the pilot would include a larger area with more scooters. It ended up being smaller because Appleton told them smaller was better for a pilot. If the city decides to move forward with Bird beyond the pilot period, they would have to talk about that because there probably aren’t enough scooters currently in the system. At any given point there are scooters out of the system receiving maintenance and being charged. Bird also moves them around the city based on their usage data. If some scooters are not getting used much in a particular location then they move them elsewhere. She said they would be looking at more scooters if they moved forward with the program.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) asked what the plan was to receive public input while they review the pilot to determine if they were going to move forward or not. He also wanted to know if they had received any significant incident reports ssuch as accidents on sidewalks or that sort of thing. He also mentioned that there’s an opportu an opportunity to do a group ride when a user launches a Bird nity to do a group ride when a user launches a Bird twhich allows one user to pay for multiple scooters at a time. I maybe he has 5 or 6 people with him, and it could be his kids just logging those scooters in as a group ride. So there’s probably even less of an opportunity there to verify everyone in the group is of age, but I guess I would agree with the comment that scooters are ubiquitous and kids are riding scooters and skateboards and all manner of objects around and if we need to clarify when we get to that point that it’s allowed if that’s a discussion that we need to have.
Director Vandehey said the report listed one accident, which happened in June. That didn’t mean that there weren’t other accidents that people hadn’t reported. Regarding public input, they would definitely be working with Communications Specialist Sheng Reichers on social media to try to get that input. The Police Department had also talked about wanting to do in-person, one-on-one discussion with people, with the idea that not everyone was going to fill out a survey on social media. So the city was going to try to use several different means to get that input.
She also stated that a representative from Bird wanted to come and do a presentation in either October or November to share their feedback on the City of Appleton and whether they felt it was a success or not and what they would recommend if the city decided to move forward with Bird.
She finished by saying, in response to Alderperson Doran’s earlier question, that she would work with Bird on getting their data on the number of times a person wanted a ride but couldn’t find a scooter in a walkable area.
A woman whose name was not given pointed out in response to the earlier concerns about age of riders that when a person utilizes a Bird scooter, they enter into a contractual agreement with Bird and to legal enter into a contract you need to be at least 18 which may be the driving force behind the 18-year-old threshold. She didn’t believe it was a requirement on the city’s end but was rather a business decision by Bird.
Alderperson Firkus asked, regarding the parking complaints, if they had any information on the location where the parking complaints were coming from so they could get an idea of if they were more clustered downtown or more spread out.
Director Vandehey said she could into look that. They don’t have a heat map of where complaints were from because the complaints in the report were those called into the Police Department and Public Works. Her feeling was there were probably more complaints about inappropriate parking in the residential areas because people may not want to have a Bird scooter parked out on their terrace. Some of the complaints that she had listed as bad parking were situations where the scooter was probably parked appropriately but a homeowner didn’t want it in front of their house. [I have seen Birds parked in residential neighborhoods and thought to myself that I wouldn’t be pleased if it were my house they were put in front of, but I suppose a homeowner could easily move them a few feet to be parked on the street or further down the sidewalk.]
Alderperson Prohaska asked jokingly if the scavenging resolution went through could he take a Bird scooter from the boulevard. There were some chuckles.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=859288&GUID=33364E56-1C21-43B6-AA51-D8BDAAD69CB8&Options=info|&Search=
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