Category: scooter-share

bike and scooter share back in Davis

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

The City of Davis and UC California Davis have created a new bike and scooter share program with vendor Spin (Spin E-Bikes and E-Scooters Launching in Davis This Fall). I was in Davis yesterday, and did not see any of the bikes or scooters, but I was not looking for them. There is going to be a slow roll-out, and I don’t know how many are on the street yet.

Davis was previously part of the JUMP/Uber bike-share regional system, but dropped out when JUMP pulled out of the area. JUMP/Uber was bought, in part, by Lime and Lime now operates with former JUMP bikes in Sacramento and West Sacramento.

Davis is requiring that devices be parked correctly, with economic consequences for not parking properly, in order to meet one of the main concerns about earlier programs. Spin will make adaptive devices available on request, which were not available in the earlier programs.

Spin Access offers lower prices for people who qualify based on CalFresh or similar low-income programs. Note that Davis is not yet listed as a city option, but it should be soon.

Spin – Shared Micromobility (City of Davis)

Spin Shared Micromobility Program (UC Davis)

fixed bike/scooter corral

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

A bike/scooter corral was installed on R Street in a parking space, next to the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op. Though for a while drivers respected the set-aside, marked for bikes and scooters, drivers came to use the space as regular parking, with a car parked there almost all day long, preventing the intended use as a bike and scooter parking area. I reported this illegal parking to the city a number of times, but to my knowledge, no one was ever ticketed. It should be noted that parking is not short on the streets around the co-op, and there is a parking garage adjacent to the co-op, which I have never seen full. So drivers were using the spot for personal convenience.

The city recently installed vertical delineators (flex posts) in the spot and repainted the while line that signifies are bike parking area. So far it is working, I’ve not seen anyone run over the posts in order to park there.

The majority of the bike/scooter corrals in the city have been placed on wide sidewalks, where they don’t interfere with walking. The in-street corrals are mostly being respected; this is the only one I am aware of that was routinely violated.

These corrals are designed to solve two issues: 1) provide parking where traditional bike racks are not present or insufficient; and 2) to keep scooters (mostly rental scooters from the scooter-share companies) from filling up the regular bike racks and preventing their use by the public.

photo: R St micromobility corral with posts
Sac_R-St-corral-with-posts

Scooters filling bike racks

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

Here is another antique post that was not posted, but more recent, from 2021. As an update, this is slightly less of a problem today than it was. The city has enforced the requirement that only permit holder Lime (bikes and scooters) can deploy to the racks that were installed by JUMP for the JUMP Bike program. The photo below shows one of those racks. There are also many more scooter and bike parking areas (outlined in white, with symbols, but without racks). With this, I’ve cleaned out my drafts folder.

Rentable scooters, called shared rideables by the city, are thick as flies in Sacramento central city. They are being deployed to bike rack areas, completely filling the racks and leaving no space for bikes. The photo shows a rack with each space occupied by a scooter, no spaces available. It also illustrates a JUMP rack at which other companies are deploying their scooters. These JUMP racks, and the trapezoidal racks, were purchased for the original SoBi and later JUMP systems, and so ‘belong’ to the JUMP/Lime system.

Individuals are free to part their own bike or scooter, or any bike scooter they rent, at these racks, but the other companies are prohibited from deploying to them.

And there are simply too many scooters in some areas, particularly Old Sacramento and R Street. Lime, Bird, Spin, and Razor, are deploying more scooters to high demand areas than can possibly be rented in a day. I assume that they are trying to drive each other out of business so they can dominate and raise prices, which is the business model for all app-based companies. In some ways, a fallout would be good, but in the meanwhile, the huge number of scooters is occupying public space, the sidewalks, and reducing livability.