Op-Ed:
Boston’s Urban Four Must Lead the Bay State’s Micro-Mobility Revolution
With recent reports that the ride hailing giant Uber is looking to acquire either Bird or Lime and expand into the scooter business, Boston, Somerville, Cambridge and Brookline—the cities I call the Urban Four—must aggressively focus on creating micro-mobility regulations that will work for these dense communities. Otherwise, we risk letting well-funded global giants dictate how new types of personal mobility devices will impact our hometown streets and sidewalks.
Urban mobility is undergoing a revolution. In the past, transportation was fueled by muscle and wind, then coal and eventually oil. Future transportation will be a combination of electricity, internet access and shared ownership. And because of Greater-Boston's combination of wealth, tech savvy residents and density, the future of transportation is here now.
For the most part, the Transportation Revolution is going to be fabulous for urban areas. It will require new thinking, though. New types of vehicle ownership may require special state legislation to modify municipal parking programs. Ubiquitous dockless systems may require new city-wide zoning. Keeping sidewalks clear and safe for pedestrians will require re-allocating on-street parking spots from automobiles to scooters, e-bikes and more. Some of these changes, especially those impacting on-street parking, will be challenging to implement but, ultimately, they will be good for urban areas because the high occupancy rates of smaller one and two rider vehicles is the only way to mitigate the traffic congestion that chokes us with near-empty five-seat cars.
Unfortunately, creating regulations to ensure these new transportation systems are safe while also helping them thrive is very difficult. No one knows exactly what form this revolution will take. How will self-driving vehicles transform transportation? What will be the impact of changing demographics? Will we use delivery drones and sidewalk droids instead of trucks? All of these options, and more, are possible and each will shape our joint transportation future in its own way. In the face of this uncertainty, the natural instinct is for regulators to move slowly. Perhaps this scooter and e-bike craze is just a repeat of, for example, the temporary Segway craze of years past.
Perhaps, but probably not. The hundreds of millions of dollars already invested in micro-mobility platforms like Lime and Bird, advances in battery technology led by Elon Musk’s Tesla, self-balancing improvements found in one-wheels and the ever-cheaper price of personal mobility devices make it almost certain that these new transportation systems are not just here to stay, they’re here to take over.
As happened when Uber entered ride-sharing and AirBnB entered home-sharing, Uber’s entry into the vaguely regulated micro-mobility space would have a very disruptive and unpredictable impact on existing transportation programs, infrastructure and communal norms, quite possibly with very dangerous results. We have been down this road before and it is not a fun trip. The Ubers and Lyfts of the world, disruptive technologies that were supposed to solve many of our transportation woes, are actually leading to more urban congestion, not less. In Cambridge, there were almost 7 million individual ride hailing pickups in 2017 alone. With drop offs, that’s roughly 14 million essentially untrained drivers in indistinguishable cars suddenly pulling to the side of the road to pick up or drop off passengers every year. To other road users, especially cyclists, the level of chaos Uber and Lyft create on our streets is a very real danger. Unfortunately, in part because municipalities were not aggressive enough in proposing their own rules, the regulatory power over TNCs lies with the state’s Department of Public Utilities, not with the local municipalities who are experiencing this chaos.
The Urban Four need to make sure that regulating micro-mobility platforms like scooters and e-bikes is more successful than what happened when regulating TNCs like Uber and Lyft. We need to provide model legislation to the state that would allow us to govern these new uses in ways that will allow them to thrive while also ensuring our streets and sidewalks stay as safe as possible for all users. And given the immediate challenges posed by this rapidly expanding industry, we need to create these regulatory models soon or someone else will do it for us.