E-scooter diary: Brookline should set the standard for safety

BROOKLINE, MA — The first week of Brookline’s seven-month trial run of e-scooters has made one thing clear: The town cannot afford to wait that long to get serious about safety. I say this as a Brookline resident who doesn’t own a car and who supports whatever the town can do to help free us from an automobile culture fouling our air and monopolizing too much public space. I began the week as a scooter booster and still welcome the test.

Since Monday’s launch, I’ve ridden both Bird and Lime scooters and have watched what’s happening with other riders. From 3 to 4 p.m. Sunday, I conducted a mini-census around Coolidge Corner and observed:

• Ten people riding Limes and one on a Bird, five of them on the sidewalk, two of them streaming through stop signs, none of them wearing helmets
• By way of comparison, 50 people riding bikes, only one on the sidewalk, 23 of them wearing helmets
• No scooters available to ride, with four reserved and eight with low battery. (By contrast, on Tuesday morning I counted 20 scooters at Beacon and Harvard Streets, though I didn’t check to see how many were actually ready to roll.)

My tiny Sunday sample lined up with what I saw during the week, though I did spot some helmeted scooter riders earlier. Although many riders looked comfortable, others had the worried gaze of first-time drivers handed the keys with no more training than a glance at tips on a smartphone. During last Monday’s launch of the trial, a 62 year-old resident, wearing a helmet, tumbled off a scooter and was carted off in an ambulance for treatment of minor injuries.

Rather than wait for a serious injury, the town should act immediately to:

• Enforce its existing helmet requirement for e-scooters. How difficult would it be to assign a bike-riding police officer to issue warnings and then tickets to riders without a helmet?
• Require vendors to offer more of the intro-to-scooters sessions that Lime ran Saturday
• Regulate e-scooters as it does most other motorized vehicles: Bar them from walkways.

Longer term, the town should:

• Improve bike lanes to better separate bicycles and e-scooters from bigger vehicles
• Develop a transportation strategy with more preferential treatment for vehicles that are already safer for the environment and must become safer for riders.

Brookline's e-scooter trial got started just as e-scooter use is viewed, increasingly, as an issue of public health as well as transportation. The Centers for Disease Control is conducting a study of e-scooter injuries in Austin, Tx. at the request of local officials concerned about risks to both riders and pedestrians.

“This is kind of like a disease outbreak investigation — the disease in this case being injuries associated with dockless electric scooters,” Jeff Taylor, manager of the Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance Unit at Austin Public Health, told the Washington Post. Taylor is overseeing the study with the CDC.

The public health considerations range well beyond injuries, of course, since the battery-operated scooters are billed as a potentially significant alternative to pollution-spewing vehicles that rely on fossil fuels.

As the first municipality in Massachusetts to launch a pilot program for shared electric scooters, Brookline has an unusual opportunity to set the standard for how the motorized devices should be integrated into the ways state residents get around, especially the so-called “last mile” between transit and home or home and a close-in destination.

If they're smart, Lime and Bird will work with the town far more assertively than they have so far to enhance the safety of their riders. Lime distributed dozens of free helmets to participants (including me) in its Coolidge Corner event Saturday. Both companies should provide dozens more to Brookline police to hand out to any bareheaded riders they spot on a Birds or Limes around town.

In kicking off the trial run, Select Board member Heather Hamilton said: “...If we are to make a dent in the carbon emissions reduction, we need to make a change in transportation behavior away from the single occupancy vehicle.”

She’s right. But without a car -- and with none of my errands distant enough to justify a rideshare -- I had to own up to the same sorry irony highlighted last year by the Los Angeles Times: My scooter riding replaced an even more environmentally friendly transit mode: walking!

Speaking of walking, the experience of Santa Monica, Ca. suggests that pedestrians best watch out. Santa Monica introduced 2,000 scooters and 1,000 non-dockable e-bikes last year. There have been a number of accidents there.

Growing up in the 1950s, I rode bikes not scooters. So I felt uneasy pushing my Bird off into traffic for the first time. But the thumb throttle was easy to use and I felt reasonably safe (especially with my bike helmet firmly in place) as I stopped for a red light and then accelerated up the hill in the bike lane.

I was surprised to discover later that I’d been charged 29 cents a minute -- nearly twice the per-minute rate that preview coverage of the trial had listed. Lime costs 15 cents per minute plus same the dollar up front charged by Bird.

On Tuesday, I hoped to ride a Lime to return books to the library a half mile away. But the Bird parked in front of my building was too convenient to ignore.

Riding up School Street, I saw no traffic in either direction and veered across the street. I couldn’t negotiate a subsequent sharp right turn, though, and barely escaped a face plant when I jumped off the scooter to avoid the curb. Put me down as one lucky, momentarily reckless rider.

At the library, I didn’t want to run up charges while I was inside but neither did I want someone to make off with my ride. So I left the Bird clock ticking until I rode home. The charge for my 16 minutes: $5.99.

I was determined, the next day, to finally ride a Lime. I had my eye on one just as a young woman with a shopping bag beat me to it. She had the look of a first-time rider, with no helmet, and I held my breath as she teetered out into busy traffic.

I eventually secured a Lime and found it similar to Bird, though slightly enhanced with a digital speedometer. Something I noticed with both: It’s a lot trickier bumping over manhole covers on a scooter than a bike.

After crossing Beacon and heading down Harvard, I did my best to make a cautious left turn into Stop & Shop. Based on my experience, the lack of brake lights and directional blinkers that has blocked widespread adoption of scooters in Massachusetts is a valid concern.

Just after putting down the kickstand outside the store, I looked up to see a blind woman approaching, probing with her cane for obstacles. I got the scooter out of her way, but it was a good reminder that not everyone makes the same use of sidewalks.

On Facebook last week, someone posted a photo of a tipped over scooter with the caption, “Ugh!!” Among more than 100 comments was the reminder that cars double-parked in front of Starbucks at Washington Square represent their own kind of hazard.

That got me thinking about how disrupting old ways is never entirely orderly or safe. Imagine the scene 120 years ago when cars first displaced horses at Coolidge Corner. The trick -- which I’m hopeful town officials have in mind -- is navigating the environmentally necessary disruption of our automobile culture with helmets strapped on tight and eyes wide open.