In 2023, Eugene, Ore., launched a nine-month pilot program to introduce some 600 electric scooters into the state’s second-largest city and home to the University of Oregon. The initiative included various research components to get a sense of community support and what aspects of e-scooters raised concerns. The latter often revolved around parking and sidewalk clutter.
“This research highlights that it really matters how a pilot is rolled out,” said Anne Brown, an associate professor with the School of Planning, Public Policy and Management at the University of Oregon and one of the authors of the report Pilots and Shifting Public Sentiment: Evidence From e-Scooters in Eugene (OR), published in the January issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association.
“Eugene took a proactive approach to first gather community input before the pilot, integrate public feedback into program design — build trust — and then engage the public in open dialogue including proactively collecting public feedback to inform next steps,” she said via email.
The city could have relied solely on soliciting public engagement and feedback through outreach campaigns, prior to introducing scooters. However, this could have stopped the project before it ever took off, the research concluded — in part because these initiatives often bring out relatively few participants and are disproportionately weighted toward residents who oppose the project.
“People are more likely to engage the planning process when they feel strongly, particularly if they feel strongly negative,” according to the report.
“Some of the key pieces here that are often missing from traditional community engagement include the city proactively and intentionally seeking out broad resident opinions rather than relying passively on comments submitted to city staff, city council, at public meetings, etc.,” Brown said, adding this feedback often comes “from a small subset of residents and may not represent broad consensus.”
Instead, the approach Eugene officials took both introduced the e-scooters and engaged with residents about their experience with the devices. Some 510 respondents completed a pre-launch survey, with 201 people completing a second survey and 162 completing a third.
Ultimately, “both experience and exposure changed attitudes,” Brown said. “In other words, trying them changed minds and just seeing them on streets changed non-riders’ minds as well.”
This process led to “overall support increased, particularly among groups who were most skeptical at the outset,” she said.
The efforts, though, have not led to a robust scooter program in Eugene.
During the pilot project, the scooters were provided by the vendor Superpedestrian, with the program operated by the local nonprofit Cascadia Mobility. Superpedestrian has since left the U.S. market, leaving the city with no e-scooter program.
Indications suggest support for micromobility programs, generally, has moved beyond some of the earlier concerns surrounding parking or sidewalk clutter.
Micromobility has evolved from “being kind of a threat and disruption, to really, adoption and acceptance,” Josh Johnson, senior manager, transit and micromobility policy for Lyft Urban Solutions, the bike- and scooter-share arm of Lyft, said during a panel at the recent CoMotion LA conference. Johnson highlighted some 180 million rides taken annually on Lyft bikes and scooters across 57 systems.
Micromobility is increasingly being worked into city transportation plans and strategies, Johnson said during the November conference, pointing to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in the Bay Area. It invested some $16 million into the Bay Wheels bike-share system, bringing 2,700 new e-bikes into circulation and expanding the number of stations across the city.
“I think that represents the commitment and the kind of acceptance of bike and scooter systems as a meaningful part of city transportation systems, and no longer just something to be wrangled, but more so, harnessed and used toward those broader goals,” he said.
