Which of these e-scooters is parked correctly?
See how well you know what good micromobility parking looks like with this quiz
Let’s start with a quiz: for each of the 10 scenarios depicted below, can tell you which show shared e-scooters parked correctly?
If you thought ‘wait, how are we defining parked correctly’ or ‘I guess it depends on where these scooters are and what the local parking regulations there are’—congrats! You have grasped the essence of the e-scooter parking problem, as outlined in a recent paper from researchers at Cornell University, the University of Oregon, and e-scooter firm Lime.
“Clutter and Compliance: Scooter Parking Interventions and Perceptions,” published Monday in a special micromobility edition of Active Travel Studies, uses data from field experiments conducted in Washington, D.C., and Auckland, New Zealand, in 2021 to investigate shared e-scooter parking. The study is concerned with: 1) how well parking complies with local rules, 2) how people **perceive** it to comply with the rules, and 3) what interventions might work to improve both actual and perceived parking compliance for shared e-scooters. Lime funded the research assistants, trial interventions, and survey incentives used in the study; none of the study authors were paid by Lime (except, I would hope, the author who is a Lime employee).
As part of the study, researchers surveyed passersby on their perceptions of scooter parking in both cities, including by showing them some of the parking scenarios depicted above and asking 1) “Does this scooter comply with the parking rules in [city]” and 2) “In your view, does this scooter clutter the street?” (There are technically correct answers to the first question and I will give them to you at the end of this newsletter.) Two hundred fifteen people started the survey across both cities and 183 completed it, the vast majority of whom lived or worked locally, and 60% of whom had never taken a trip on a shared e-scooter.
From the surveys, the researchers found that:
People tended to overestimate the share of scooters that were parked noncompliantly, compared to observational data researchers collected on scooter parking in their case cities
What technically counts as ‘compliant’ or ‘correct’ parking per regulations is different from what people perceive to be proper parking, which they judge largely in terms of tidiness/clutter
The authors summarize it like this: “Given their unfamiliarity with scooter parking regulations, respondents use pedestrian accessibility and tidiness as heuristics to determine what counts as proper scooter parking.” They propose using the phrases “noncompliant parking” to describe parking that breaks local regulations, and “improper parking” for what people perceive as noncompliant parking. This I think is a helpful distinction, and one I’ll adopt for the remainder of this discussion. It’s helpful especially to consider that you can have different combinations of the two, so a scooter could be parked improperly but compliantly, noncompliantly but “properly,” or both or neither.
When shown the “tidy,” “bike rack,” and “corral” scenarios from Figure 6, for instance, 85-90% of respondents assessed the scooters as parked properly. For the most part those scenarios were also compliant, except for in Auckland where e-scooters can’t be parked in bike racks. Shown the “messy” option, on the other hand, which is identical to “tidy” except that the scooters are placed at angles rather than parallel to one another, more than 75% of people said the scooters were parked noncompliantly, when in reality that scenario was permitted in both cities.
The other part of the study involved testing out different ‘interventions’ to see what might improve compliant scooter parking over an observational baseline recorded in each city by the researchers. They tried:
Different messages in the Lime app encouraging riders to park their scooters correctly
Installing temporary sidewalk decals (basically a big sticker on the pavement) directing riders to an appropriate scooter parking spot
Equipping scooters with locks and requiring them to lock the device to a bike rack or other piece of street furniture (called a ‘lock-to’ requirement). This last intervention was a happy accident for the researchers, as D.C. began requiring all shared scooters to have locking mechanisms from Oct. 1, 2021, which also happened to be when field work was being done in D.C.
Research assistants collected data for each of the first two interventions over three days by walking an assigned route and making note of how scooters were parked, and for two weeks for the third. They also took baseline data on those routes before the interventions. A couple days of observational data on how people respond to things like in-app messaging and sidewalk decals doesn’t seem super compelling to me—I feel like it would take me at least a week to even register a new sidewalk decal—but I am not a professional social scientist so will leave that assessment to the experts. (“Researchers always want to collect more data,” said Anne Brown, an author on the study, when asked about this.)
How did the interventions do? Researchers observed a “weak response” to in-app messaging in Auckland and a somewhat better response in D.C. Sidewalk decals “did not lead to a statistically different rate of noncompliant parking or impeding pedestrian access in either city.” The most robust measure seemed to be D.C.’s lock-to rule, which corresponded to a drop in the rate of noncompliant scooter parking and parking impeding pedestrian access, and a big increase in bike rack use (permitted for e-scooters in D.C.!).
With all necessary caveats about small sample sizes and nongenerizeability, I think there are a couple interesting points to consider here. First, that as the authors note, people for the most part don’t know what shared e-scooter parking rules are. This is partly due to scooters still being a relatively new mode of urban transport, partly to the patchwork of rules and regulations that exists from one city and town to another, and partly to a failure of companies and local transport agencies to communicate the rules to scooter users. A related question is whose responsibility that should be: is it on the city, or the company, or both to ensure that people using a shared scooter service know and follow the parking rules?
Second, what counts as bad parking and what people think of as bad parking can be different things. This is again partly about people not knowing the rules, but more broadly about how we perceive and value our urban spaces. Scooters are a new addition to the urban landscape and so when they lean scattered on a sidewalk or claim precious space from pedestrians, even if technically allowed, they stick out like a sore thumb. Scooter firms in my opinion also shot themselves in the foot in their early years by indiscriminately flooding cities with devices and antagonizing a lot of residents in the process. It’s much easier to convince people your new micromobility service deserves to be a part of the cityscape if residents don’t experience it as a clutter and nuisance from the outset.
Finally, the idea that lock-to requirements may be the best path forward for shared scooters marks a somewhat ironic reversal from the original promise of dockless micromobility services, which aimed to free users from the tyranny of docked bike-share and the city planners who decided where stations went. Lock-to provides more flexibility in that the locking sites are more varied than a network of bike racks, but it also suggests that given the choice, urbanites prefer a little less freedom and a little more order, especially if it improves the aesthetics of their environment. If only we could get New Yorkers to feel the same about the garbage.
Outtake:
I had to laugh at these lines in the paper, from the “limitations” section:
It is possible that Lime riders differ from users of other shared scooter services. However, scooter companies generally charge similar prices and offer comparable vehicle models, leading to relatively small differentiation. Likewise, riders tend to choose which scooter they will ride based on availability rather than strong brand preference. We therefore suggest that differences in behavior across different shared scooter companies are likely to be minimal.
What?? Scooter companies “generally charge similar prices and offer comparable vehicle models, leading to relatively small differentiation”? Riders “tend to choose which scooter they will ride based on availability rather than strong brand preference”?! Shoot, don’t tell Lime, it would be really awkward if they found out that a paper co-authored by one of their own declared scooter services a commodity rather than a highly unique and differentiated offering.
How well do you know e-scooter parking rules?
