Using design to solve the scooter problem — a UX case study
Edit: Bird announced today that they are adopting the helmet selfie. I haven’t heard anything from them, but good on ’em. https://www.bird.co/press/bird-offers-helmet-selfie/
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TL;DR — Scooters are a step forward for sustainable urban transportation, but they’re being used poorly. Fundamentally, it’s a design problem. The current proposed solutions are regressive and expensive — decreasing fleet sizes, requiring companies to hand out free helmets, fining riders for improper usage, and even banning scooters altogether. These are all negative, punitive measures. With design, we can encourage proper use in more positive ways — incentivizing proper use with economics, and creating UX to ensure safety for riders. By keeping scooters on the streets, we prompt local governments to make investments in sustainable transportation infrastructure that will move our cities towards a less car-centric future.
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I’m Chris, a designer, bicycle commuter, and Nashville resident. I got rid of my car a couple of months ago as a way to reduce my carbon footprint (11 years, y’all). When I’m not carpooling with my wife, I use a combination of my electric bicycle, dockless scooters, and the occasional ride-share to get around. While many consider scooters toys, I do not. It’s not just fun for me — it’s part of my transportation plan.
In Nashville, as in many other cities, the local government and scooter companies aren’t getting along. So much so that recently Mayor David Briley announced his intention to ban all scooters from the streets of Nashville, and today the metro council is voting on a scooter ban.
I think it’s a big step backwards for our city, but it makes sense why local governments feel this way. In April of this year, we’ve had 43 reported scooter-related injuries. And in May, we had our first scooter-related death. Unfortunately, though, this isn’t just a scooter issue, as pedestrians and cyclists are at risk, too. Last year, 23 pedestrians were killed while walking in Nashville (via Walk Bike Nashville).
Given that the city’s infrastructure isn’t set up to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe, I understand the local government’s uncertainty about whether scooters should join the mix. But I don’t believe the solution is banning scooters — they’re an important class of LEVs (light, electric vehicles) that help urban dwellers like myself make the choice to give up their cars. And I believe that over time, they’ll help urban populations live a more sustainable life.
Banning them isn’t the answer. And honestly, some of the other solutions that have been proposed aren’t much better. Many of these are negative, punitive measures that make it harder for residents to give up their cars. It pits cities against companies, and ultimately someone will lose.
We can design a better way. Here’s a look at the problems that scooters pose, the proposed solutions, and some alternate solutions that use design and economic incentives to solve these problems in a fast, scalable way.
Problem #1:
Dockless scooters are everywhere, and they’re an eyesore.
It’s true. Nashville’s most popular areas are being littered with scooters, many of them mangled and defunct. They are carelessly leaned against walls or tossed in the middle of sidewalks.
Current solutions:
Cap the number of scooters and hire squads of patrollers.
Cities are talking about capping the number of scooters each company is allowed to operate. Scooter companies have in turn pledged to hire scooter stewards to patrol the most popular routes and right the fallen scooters.
These ideas are just not scalable. Capping the number of scooters each company is allowed to operate might temporarily alleviate the congestion, but it isn’t a long term solution to the problem. Scooters serve a real need for urban dwellers — if a city does away with scooters, another class of light, electric vehicles will eventually replace them.
And no matter how many scooter stewards you hire, they will always be outnumbered by the masses of tourists. To put this into perspective, the nation of Japan received 30 million tourists in 2018. The city of Nashville received 15 million. Any proposed solutions to this problem need to scale along with this influx of people.
A better solution:
Create economic incentives for good parking, for riders and companies.
In the past few weeks, scooter “corrals” have started popping up in high traffic areas, like Nashville’s downtown. This is a brilliant idea, and companies like Bird have started offering incentives to their riders to park in these preferred parking areas. Parking in a designated scooter corral will automatically add credit to the rider’s account. If the app displayed the credit incentives of preferred parking on the map itself, it would be even more compelling.
Problem #2:
Casual scooter riders rarely wear helmets.
Everyone has seen it — two people are doubled up on a scooter, screaming down a boozy downtown thoroughfare, taking a selfie. And neither of them have helmets. These are the people that tend to get hurt while riding scooters. But I also know a friend who was riding in broad daylight, sober as a church mouse, but then hit a stray twig in a bike lane, took a tumble, and showed up the next day in a sling. Helmets are important for everyone’s safety, and they should absolutely be worn while riding.
Current solutions:
Require scooter companies to hand out free helmets.
As a response to the safety concerns of the city, several scooter companies are offering free helmets for riders who request them. I signed up for one of these helmets once. It was quite literally the worst helmet I’ve ever worn. Clunky, frumpy, awkward fitting. I thanked it for it’s short service and KonMari’d it into oblivion. And the real tragedy is that I imagine it was expensive for the company in question to produce and deliver this helmet. All for naught.
Some cities are suggesting that scooter companies should operate kiosks where riders can check out scooters and helmets. In my opinion, this defeats the point of dockless scooters. The main value proposition is that they are cheap and fast. Requiring riders to check out scooters from a kiosk would take a long time, especially in busy areas, and the extra cost of real estate and staffing would surely translate into higher fees for riders. At that point, it would make more sense to just take a Lyft, and scooters would truly become “toys for tourists,” as their opponents have portrayed them.
A better solution:
Reward regular riders for using their own helmets.
Similar to the preferred parking incentives, scooter companies could reward riders for supplying their own helmets by crediting their account once a rider validates that they’re wearing a helmet. It would be simple to do this. A scooter app could use the existing photo-verification UI that they use to validate proper parking, and just flip the camera around. When a user submits a quick selfie of themselves wearing a helmet, the same verification process would take place and the user would be credited.
Problem #3:
Sometimes people ride scooters while they’re drunk.
The availability of scooters around party streets like Nashville’s Demonbreun and Broadway make scootering under the influence an easy mistake for an inebriated bargoer to make. Sadly, police confirmed that the man who died from a scooter related accident in April had more than twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system, and was responsible for the crash. The scooter companies are not at fault — the same accident could have happened with a bicycle, a skateboard, or simply on foot. But the scooters companies have a unique opportunity to keep drunk riders off of scooters with better UI and logic in their apps.
Current solutions:
Scooter curfews and wobbly riding detection.
This is actually an area in which scooter companies are being really innovative. Scooter curfews make sense with the data — most injuries occur at night. And some companies, like Lime, are working on technology that detects if a rider isn’t going in a straight line. This idea is smart in concept, but by the time a scooter detects unsteady riding, it could be too late for the rider or the people around them.
A better solution:
Use UX and location data to ensure rider sobriety.
Have you ever used Hotel Tonight? There’s a clever gesture they ask users to complete in order to confirm a booking. Or how about Lumosity? Their brain training games to increase coordination are amazing. What if these scooter apps took some of these UX principles and created micro coordination tests to prove sobriety? Imagine a potential rider has had too much to drink, and wants to unlock a scooter. After scanning the QR code on a scooter, the app would know that the rider was on a street full of bars, and that it was past 8pm on a Saturday. Before unlocking the scooter, the app would present a quick sobriety test in the form of a coordination challenge.
This challenge would be timed, and upon completion, the app would allow the user to unlock the scooter and ride away. If a user fails the challenge, the app (in this case Lyft) would suggest a Lyft ride instead and put a temporary freeze on their scooter access. To unfreeze their account, a user could contact a Lyft representative and explain their situation.
Problem #4:
People sometimes ride scooters on sidewalks.
The rules on this are a little unclear. Sometimes you can ride on a sidewalk, but not in a business district. Specifically, you can’t ride scooters “along a highway within 600 feet of any hotel, bank, office building, public building, train station, etc., that takes up at least 300 feet of the frontage” (via the Tennessean).
This is likely not what I’m thinking about when I’m riding in a high traffic area, and I’m deciding between braving a street full of teenagers driving F-250’s, or using a sidewalk.
Current solutions:
Enforcement blitzes, fines, and “education”.
The reality is that if someone is riding on the sidewalk, it’s probably because they don’t feel safe riding in the street. And because of the lack of protected bike lanes in Nashville (or bike lanes in general), this is very common. I’ve been grazed by a driver who was focusing on a Subway footlong while driving down 8th Ave more than once. I value my life, so if I’m riding down a street without a bike lane, and a sidewalk is empty, I’m absolutely going to use it. If pedestrians are on the sidewalk, I’ll simply hop off my bicycle or scooter and walk alongside it until I have the sidewalk to myself again.
The education efforts of scooter companies will not change that reality. And if you’d like to give me a ticket for using the sidewalk on an otherwise deadly street, that’s fine. Just promise me that the money will go into a city fund for investing in bike lane infrastructure.
A better solution:
Cities getting serious about bike lanes. Until then, in-app route suggestions.
The most immediate solution to this problem is for a city to get serious about its bike lane infrastructure. Particularly protected bike lanes that put a wall of pylons between the commuter and the said teenager in an F-250.
Between now and then, suggesting safe, legal routes is something these apps should be set up to do. Particularly in an app like Uber or Lyft, that already has routing built into it’s UX, this should be easy. When a user is searching for a scooter to ride, the app would offer to map out a safe route that utilizes as many bike lanes as possible and avoids the “No Scooter Zones” in a city. Better yet, the route could suggest ending in one of the nearby preferred parking zones, and would calculate the estimated ride time and compare it to the battery life left in the scooter.
The rider gets there safer, the city keeps its sidewalks uncluttered, and the scooter company consolidates its fleet to make pickup and charging cheaper and faster.
In conclusion:
Let’s figure this out now, for the future of our cities.
This is an important moment for the future of urban transportation. And whether you love scooters or hate them, they aren’t going anywhere. In the words of Mayor David Briley, “I don’t think that in the end we’ll be without electric scooters…but I think the companies are going to have to come up with a regulatory scheme that works.”
I agree. We’ve learned a lot from this experiment, and I hope that these city governments can work closely with scooter companies to come up with scalable, high impact solutions like the ones mentioned above to get these vehicles back on the street.
I believe that electric scooters are the tip of the spear in what I hope will be a worldwide shift in how urban dwellers move through their cities. These types of light electric vehicles lessen our dependence on cars and fossil fuels, and their proliferation through our cities puts pressure on local governments to invest more in their sustainable transportation infrastructure. So to the local governments, technology companies, and urban residents involved in this discussion — let’s lay a foundation for the urban future we want. Figuring out how scooters fit into our cities is a challenge, but it’s one worth solving. Let’s solve it, together.
