The Municipal Services Committee met 08/08/2022. Most of the meeting was taken up by the discussion and vote on a variance request for a driveway extension at a Packard Street residence.
During the last few minutes, however, they reviewed the July 2022 Bird E-Scooter report.
Alderperson Brad Firkus (District 3) started out the discussion by saying that the number of incidents on the reports were pretty low, but based on social media comments and emails from community members, it seemed like there were more incidents than what was reported. That was to be expected, but he felt like people were sort of giving up on reporting incidents. He wondered if that was an accurate impression.
Department of Public Works Deputy Director Ross Beutow agreed that it seemed like they were having fewer citizen contacts. The report was comprised primarily of two sources: any calls made to the city or the Department of Public Works and calls that were sent directly to the Police and Fire departments.
For example, on the July report, of the 6 incidents recorded, only 2 were received by the Department of Public Works. The other 4 came from 911 calls about accidents that involved injuries.
The number of reported incidents was trending downward. He thought that could be partly due to people getting more used to the scooters and more used to the things that had initially frustrated them, such as the scooters being parked on the sidewalk. Those nuisance calls were slowing down, and the reports they were receiving were now primarily more serious ones involving injuries.
Alderperson Firkus asked to confirm that the 4 accidents accounted for 4 of the 6 incidents in July and were recorded in the “Scooters Unsafe” category.
Deputy Director Beutow confirmed that was the case and said it was somewhat difficult to categorize different reports/complaints. Ideally they would have something like 15 different categories instead of just 6. Most of the accidents were put into the “Scooters Are Unsafe” category because that seemed the most fitting.
There were no further questions or comments.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=982992&GUID=7B609413-E21B-4D6E-8FE1-ECC3C0BF1769
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