Electric scooters, bikes, return to Sacramento streets. How are they different this time?
Electric scooters and bikes are making a comeback in Sacramento after being pulled off the streets in March due to concerns about the coronavirus.
Operators are required by the City to sanitize their scooters and bikes twice a day on all high-touch surfaces. Riders are also advised to wear gloves and wipe down surfaces themselves before hopping on.
Mayor Darrell Steinberg welcomed the vehicles back to downtown and the surrounding city neighborhoods, saying they represent an important element of the City’s ongoing effort to become carbon neutral by 2045. The pall of smoke hanging over Sacramento in recent weeks from the fires raging nearby drives home the urgency of acting quickly.
“It’s a clean, easy, fun way to get around, and I think we want to see more of that,” Mayor Steinberg said. “It’s part of the climate change movement too. We’ve got to get people of single-occupancy vehicles.”
Hundreds of electric scooters have returned to Sacramento over the past month, along with dozens of the formerly ubiquitous JUMP bikes.
Riders took about 30,000 trips on the devices in Sacramento in August. That’s up from 3,000 trips in June, when scooters began to return to the streets, but less than a third of the pre-pandemic peak of 97,000 trips per month.
The market has changed significantly in recent months. For one thing, JUMP parent Uber left the business and sold its bikes and scooters to Lime.
Two other players, Bird and Spin, have entered Sacramento.
“They’re all figuring out the market right now,” said Jennifer Donlon Wyant, Transportation Planning Manager for the City of Sacramento.
A total of about 760 scooters and 80 bikes are currently operating in the City of Sacramento, compared with 2,170 prior to the pandemic.
The current operators are not publicly subsidized and set their own rates, but the city requires them all to offer discounted plans for low-income riders. It also requires that they offer service in underserved, high-poverty neighborhoods.
Donlon Wyant said, “Our regulations encourage these businesses to operate in Sacramento and folks to use these climate friendly ways of transportation, while avoiding the chaos seen in other cities.”
Bikes and scooters must be parked at racks or in designated drop zones. (see map). The City compiles detailed data from multiple sources to track where the scooters and bikes end their trips – information that helps determine where new bike racks go in.
The three operators currently have city permits to operate a combined total of 2,170 scooters and bikes.
Shared scooter and bike use had exploded nationwide in the years leading up to 2020 and the disruption of the pandemic, reaching 136 million trips in 2020, up from 35 million in 2017, according to a report from the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
