A Long-Term Solution For Scooter Sharing
San Francisco’s scooters are back, and newly regulated. But is regulation enough to make them work in the long term?
On Monday, after the great Scooter Wars of the spring and the hotly contested permitting process of the summer, e-scooters will relaunch in San Francisco. The SF Municipal Transportation Agency blessed two companies—Skip and Scoot—of the 12 that applied for a license with the right to operate a pilot program within the city. Starting now, residents and visitors will get to see what a regulated scooter system looks like.
The rollout will be smaller and more controlled than last time, when the scooters were described as a , , and a piece of a “.” One day, no one had seen a scooter on the sidewalk, and within a couple weeks, everyone had. Bird’s CEO even began imagining . The demand and the backlash accelerated in lockstep.
