Portland will soon have more electric scooters on the streets than at any time in 2018.
On Thursday, the transportation agency announced that 655 additional scooters were approved to hit the streets as soon as possible. Bird, one of three companies that operated in Portland last year, is now authorized to bring 525 scooters to town. Portland separately gave two companies – Bolt and Spin – the go-ahead to expand their fleets.
All told, some 655 new scooters could be available to rent via smartphones across town immediately, bringing the total number of scooters across town to 2,630. Last year the city had roughly 2,043 devices.
Scooters are currently permitted for a 12-month period that started this April, and the city said it would give companies that followed specific guidelines (like urging safety, steering riders away from illegal sidewalk riding or ending rides in parks) the ability to expand their fleets over time. Those incentives, if met, could mean Portland would have as many as 9,000 eventually.
Bureau of Transportation officials also released detailed analysis Thursday of a 10-week period documenting how many people were injured in scooter crashes, how many riders were ticketed or fined and how many complaints were submitted to the companies and the city.
Dylan Rivera, a Portland Bureau of Transportation spokesman, said the city believed it had released more data about scooters than any city in the country.
“We announced 10 weeks’ worth of e-scooter injury data, a few weeks after the end of that period,” Rivera said in an email Thursday, “By contrast, ODOT will report summer 2019 traffic injury data for all transportation modes in the summer of 2021 (1.5 years after the end of the calendar year).”
Rivera said the city knew people were interested in how the program was going.
“We’ll continue to share data throughout the one-year pilot program. For now, this is still a pilot program with new technology. The companies and the city are resolving a variety of technology issues to make data usable and transparent,” he said in an email.
The city is receiving monthly reports from individual companies logging the anonymized complaints sent to them. Portland said it is auditing those responses, and their process includes going “a variety of tactics, including filing of secret-shopper style complaints and tracking how they are handled by the companies.
Here are some stats from that 10-week period:
- 307,457: Number of miles logged on scooters during that period.
- 46: Multnomah County health officials estimated roughly it saw that many scooter-related trips to the emergency room, but stipulated those figures also included privately owned scooters in addition to the smartphone-based rental companies.
- 16: Number of e-scooter “collisions” with cars or pedestrians, according to the city
- 903: Complaints reported by the companies, which are in charge of tabulating complaints under this permit process. Those complaints were for parking issues or “poor riding behavior.” The city separately received 371 emails from the public about similar issues.
- 116: Number of tickets issued for illegal riding on sidewalks, totaling $5,800.
- 191: Number of tickets issued for illegal parking, totaling $3,120.
- $15,800: Amount Portland has charged companies for their Right of Way Surcharge (The right of way surcharge ranges 5 cents to 20 cents, depending on the neighborhood. The city said it had not yet invoiced companies for a separate 25 cents-per-trip charge.
Here are other questions we wanted to know, in a question and answer format. Some questions or answers are edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Does Portland collect data on how many scooters are parked in Waterfront Park? If so, what are the figures?
A: “We have not yet analyzed the parking data to that level of detail. We will continue to analyze the data through the pilot program and will be looking at a variety of potential issues including impacts on parks.”
Q: This scooter period was supposed to include a “geofence” to discourage riders from parking their scooters in Waterfront Park and elsewhere. How is that going so far?
A: “We are auditing companies’ compliance with the geofencing rules to ensure they are complying. This includes anonymous road testing of e-scooters. Right now, we believe the companies are following our rules for geofencing. They are notifying their customers when they have entered a restricted area. We are also auditing companies to make sure their scooters cannot end a trip in city parks (not just waterfront park). Anyone who abandons a scooter in a park is paying a premium because the e-scooters consistently do not allow you to end a trip in a park. They keep the meter running: The trip’s charges continue to add up, until it shuts down from several minutes of inactivity. We’ll continue to gather information about the effectiveness of this approach.”
Q: The city previously fined companies for not providing scooters in east Portland, and on Thursday noted that devices weren’t reliably available in some neighborhoods there. Have any companies been fined for not meeting that threshold this time?
A: “This is still a requirement. We have not issued any penalties in 2019 for failing to meet this requirement.”
-- Andrew Theen
503-294-4026
@andrewtheen
Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.