Bloomington suspends e-scooter contract renewals, continues to look at safety

A little over a month since the new restriction was enacted, city officials are still measuring whether rising safety concerns about electric scooters outweigh their speedy convenience.

Since mid-October, people haven't been able to ride an e-scooter between the hours of 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. in Bloomington. Though this is just a trial run to see if reported injuries decline, it could become permanent. This uncertainty is part of the reason why the city has delayed contract renewals with the three e-scooter companies currently operating in Bloomington.

"We have now suspended renewing licenses until we can get some visibility because we don't want to renew a set of licenses under a certain rule set and then change the rules on the operators," said Alex Crowley, director of the city's economic and sustainable development department.

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Crowley said in retrospect, it felt like e-scooters appeared in Bloomington overnight. With companies such as Lime or Bird launching in cities across the nation, Bloomington was just one of many to be outfitted with speedy motorized scooters. Soon, riders were weaving around pedestrians on sidewalks and shuffling alongside cars in streets.

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After the first fleet of e-scooters crossed city limits in 2018, a conversation over their safety followed. When e-scooters were introduced in the city, Crowley helped work on the first interim operating agreements with outside companies. Officials later passed an ordinance dictating what rules the e-scooters should abide by. Since his early work on the guidelines, he's remained part of the city's e-scooter team, which manages the overall relationship with service providers and weighs in on local parameters for safety.

As early as October of 2018, a 20-year-old IU student was transported by ambulance to IU Health Bloomington Hospital with a serious head injury after crashing a motorized scooter. The following month, a 23-year-old man was arrested on a preliminary charge of drunken driving after crashing a motorized scooter.

In the years since, injuries have persisted — scraped knees, head contusions and broken bones. When an incoming Indiana University freshman from Minneapolis crashed a scooter on campus and died from his injuries in August this year, the city decided to take a more formal approach to safety surveillance. Now in its pilot stage, e-scooters can no longer be ridden late at night or early in the morning.

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“The urgency of putting that in place was a combination of us realizing that there was a kind of growing problem in town related to safety of ridership and IU also was interested in seeing something happen," Crowley said.

Scooter users' reaction to the restriction has been mixed. While some have applauded the city for taking time to re-evaluate scooter use, others have noted the off-hours have left them scrambling to find another cheap, dependable mode of travel for obligations such as appointments or work.

"Whether or not it's exactly right, we need to kind of revisit that, but I think it was a stopgap that can help us at least in the short term,” Crowley said.

Crowley said this was the perfect time to test an off-hours ban since e-scooter use in winter months is naturally down due to cold temperatures. The limitation is expected to remain in place until March 2023. By next spring, when scooter use rises again, the city's scooter group should have a slate of recommendations for city officials.

In the meantime, Crowley and other stakeholders are collecting as much data as they can. The city has hired temporary employees to go around the city and document scooter parking trends and violations.

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“If a scooter is laying across a sidewalk and someone trips on it, then that becomes a safety issue. It's not just a parking issue. It overlaps," Crowley said.

The city also offers a system for people to self-report any injury sustained on an e-scooter. While it has gotten some responses, it won't ever give a full picture because many people don't report their injuries. The city is working with IU Health and IU's Health Center on campus to figure out a way to tally injury reports. Crowley hopes the city will be able to get some raw, anonymized data on people who have sought medical treatment after an e-scooter crash. While this still leaves some injuries that weren't severe enough for medical attention out of the analysis, city officials hope it will be enough to see whether an hour reduction has improved safety.

While waiting to receive that data, the city has delayed contract renewals with e-scooter providers Lime, Bird and Vevo. Each contract has been year-to-year and is typically renewed sometime in late November.

"We basically said to them, 'We are not going to renew you right now. We're not going to require you to pull your scooters. You can kind of ride your previous renewal, but when we come back to you and push you through on a renewal review, we will have a new set of rules potentially,” Crowley explained.

Right now, off-hours operation are managed voluntarily by e-scooter providers.

Other potential solutions: mandatory parking space, dead zones

In addition to measuring the effectiveness of these off-hours, the city is also looking at other ways to raise safety such as mandatory parking corrals and geo-fencing. Crowley noted other cities frequently restrict where a scooter can be ridden or parked.

Even though e-scooter parking is regulated by the current ordinance, the user can still end their ride anywhere. This has led to e-scooters being splayed across sidewalks or leaned against buildings. But with a software change, the user's ride will not end until it is parked in a corral, adding a big financial incentive to parked correctly. If this were to be implemented in Bloomington, Crowley said many of the corrals would be in highly congested areas such as downtown.

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Another possible change is certain areas being geo-fenced, which means that e-scooters will simply stop working in certain locations.

"That can be done permanently or it can be done temporarily," Crowley explained. "For example, let's say on game day at the stadium, you can channel scooter ridership into limited access points. Or permanently, you can say you can only ride on the 7-Line to go east or west. You can't ride on Sixth Street or something like that."

These possibilities are still being discussed with no decision made to either implement or test them out.

As many internal discussions are still well underway, Crowley projects the team's formal slate of recommendations to be released to city officials by next March.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bloomington e-scooter contract: Officials looking at safety concerns