As officials across the country try to stop electric scooter riders from swerving in between pedestrians on busy sidewalks, one company has come up with what it thinks could be the answer.
Lime — the scooter company with the largest fleet in San Jose — announced Tuesday that it had developed first-of-its-kind technology to detect when riders are traveling on a sidewalk rather than on a street or in a bike lane.
Lime’s technology relies on the basis that sidewalks, unlike roads, consist of evenly-spaced grooves and therefore vibrate differently than when a rider is traveling on a roadway. The company’s software programmed in each scooter uses acceleration and speed data to then detect when a scooter is on a sidewalk with up to 95 percent confidence.
The e-scooter company’s announcement was the result of a collaboration with San Jose, which is allowing scooter companies to test out sidewalk detection technology in its downtown core.
“We want to not only partner with the city on preventing this but also helping provide them with data to build better infrastructure because that’s the number one reason that people ride on the sidewalk is that they don’t feel safe on the street,” said EV Ellington, Lime’s general manager of Northern California and Utah.
Unlike cities that have outright bans or restrictions on the number of scooters or companies authorized to operate in a city, San Jose leaders have taken a different approach.
In December 2018, the San Jose City Council passed legislation that required electric scooter companies that want to deploy their scooters in San Jose to get a permit from the city, pay an annual permit application fee of $2,500 and submit another $124 per device each year. The companies are also required to obtain insurance and protect the city from legal claims.
Since San Jose launched its scooter permit program in February 2019, the city has issued permits to six companies for a total of 5,750 e-scooters — 2,300 of which belong to Lime.
“I believe that we can work with technology companies to find ways to improve quality of life, improve safety, improve equity,” San Jose Mayor Liccardo said Tuesday. “We know that this is something that we will need in our transportation toolbox, so let’s find a way to integrate it into our city and make sure it’s safe, rather than simply declaring war on it.”
As part of the new requirement, the council tasked city staff to work with the permitted companies to figure out a way to keep scooters off of sidewalks — a trend that is very common but actually illegal under California state law — by July of 2019.
Yet seven months after that deadline, Lime is the first company to make any moves toward trying to change the habits of riders.
John Ristow, director of the city’s department of transportation, said that the companies were always on board but that the 7-month delay was due to “bureaucratic and administrative” hangups.
“Unfortunately we had some difficulties, just as new permitting goes and it took us a little longer to get all of the companies under permits and contracts,” Ristow said Tuesday.
Under the technology initiative launched by Lime, riders who spend a significant chunk of their trip on what the company detects are sidewalks will receive a notification that informs them of the illegal activity. The city and e-scooter company do not currently have plans to penalize riders and instead plan to start by focusing on education.
“If we get to a place where the technology is good enough for us to feel as though it’s reliable to issue a ticket and we think it’s a good idea, then we’ll certainly do it,” Liccardo said Tuesday. “But it’s not the case today, frankly, that every street is the safer place to riding a scooter or a bike either.”
As part of the permit requirements, Lime will share the data it collects on sidewalk ridership with the city on a monthly basis. City staff plan to meet with the other five permitted scooter companies — Lyft, Bird, Spin, Razor and Gruv — within the coming weeks to review their technology detection plans.