Letter To The Editor: Brookline E-Scooters Are Lose-Lose

BROOKLINE, MA — This letter to the editor was submitted by Craig Bolon to the Brookline Patch:

The Select Board of Brookline, has been pursuing a lose-lose-lose proposition with rental electric scooters. Renting the lightly built vehicles in an impulse-driven market has proven unsustainable as a business, harmful to the environment and acutely hazardous for both customers and bystanders. It’s hardly surprising to see business for rental electric scooters entering free-fall. Last year Verge reported industry experience that “scooters don’t bring in enough money to cover their cost.”

Surveys found typical lifetimes of U.S. rental scooters only several months. Operating costs remain high. Every night staff collect scooters, charge them and return them near streets. Considering the trucks and vans used and the short operating lives, total air pollution per mile of rental electric scooter use ranks higher than automobiles.

Venture capital staked near $2 billion on U.S. rental scooters—the lion’s share in 2018—but business plans never passed “smell tests.” Finances for rental scooters skirt the extremes of the U.S. ride share business, including Uber and Lyft, with no firm in the entire sector reporting a profit. Local operations for Lime and Bird have had large layoffs and have abandoned host communities. Some firms still in business are nearing collapse as their cash burns through.

Unlike automobiles, electric scooters are not very costly or hard to keep. Most riders who find them useful can afford a few hundred dollars to buy one and can find places to keep it. Rental firms often can expect only a few rides before a customer either quits riding or buys a scooter. Rental scooters survive mainly as novelties, appealing to young visitors—unfamiliar with vehicles and locales—who incur most of the rising deaths and injuries

Death and injury rates per passenger-mile for rental electric scooters are hundreds of times those for public transit. The rising incident counts appear small only because U.S. passenger-miles per year are vastly lower for rental electric scooters than for public transit and for private automobiles.

The bottom fell out last year. Venture firms stopped funding rental scooters or stiffened their terms. There are no more Lime or Bird bonanzas like those of 2018. Many host communities, facing complaints from elderly and disabled people put at risk, boosted insurance requirements and limited scooter operations. Lime just pulled out of Atlanta, once a major market—following Jump, Lyft and Gotcha—unwilling to observe city rules and post bonded insurance to benefit injured riders and bystanders.

Here in Brookline, so far our Select Board largely neglects risks and costs. Contracts last year with rental firms indemnified the town but failed to protect riders and bystanders against rising risks and costs. When Brookline, like Atlanta, bans riding motorized scooters on sidewalks by law—so police can enforce the ban—and requires rental firms to post bonded insurance to benefit injured riders and bystanders, the board will start moving from neglect toward responsibility.

- Craig Bolon has lived on Fuller St. in Brookline nearly 50 years with his wife, where they brought up a family with two sons--both graduates of Brookline schools. Bolon have been involved in town government over nearly all that span of years: former chair of the Advisory Committee, member of the former Redevelopment Authority and Rent Control Board plus several Moderator's and Select Board's committees, and an elected town meeting member for a total of 21 years.