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HomeMy WebLinkAbout06-30-19 Public Comment - R. Meis - Electric ScootersFrom:rmeis To:Agenda Subject:The death of the sidewalk - electric scooters Date:Sunday, June 30, 2019 7:11:09 PM Howdy Cyndy, Chris, Jeff, I-Ho and Terry, A little birdie told me that the City is considering electric scooters. I remember the City of Bozeman being very adamant - and passing an ordinance to such effect - about not being able to ride your bicycle on the sidewalks in town. You had to walk yourbike on sidewalks. Thus, if the City is going to allow scooters, they should have to be walked, not ridden. Having walked the sidewalks of cities that allow them, I feel strongly that they are truly a nuisance to pedestrians as too many people ride them like drunken sailors and show zerorespect, also, by leaving them scattered hither and yon, yes, even just laying in the middle of a sidewalk. Rick Meis, property owner and taxpayer in Bozeman The death of the sidewalk https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-death-of-the- sidewalk/2019/06/28/b89c9bb2-9900-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html? utm_term=.c311705302d5&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1 By Avi SelkJune 30 at 9:00 AM On a summer afternoon in 1894, William Barkalow had a drink or three and got on his horse.He rode it down the central sidewalk of Long Branch, N.J, where horses were, even in those primordial days of traffic regulation, definitely not supposed to go. Barkalow rode among the foot traffic like an electric scooter before its time. The next day’s New York Times reported that he paid no heed to a police officer’s shouts, nor the billy clubflung at him. And while Barkalow didn’t trample anyone, his breach of sidewalk etiquette proved so intolerable that the officer finally shot him between the shoulder blades. The turn of the century was a rough time in the history of the sidewalk. Ubiquitous strips of not-street were squeezed thinner and thinner to make way for horses, trolleys and eventuallylanes of automobiles. The footed masses fought with vendors and construction crews for the leftover pavement as if it were some Mesopotamian riverbed. “The pedestrians now, asformerly, must spend their time in a hurdle race over skids, climb platforms, dodge moving boxes or else run the risk of being crushed under horses’ hoofs in the street,” the Timescomplained in 1896, as part of its newly launched “crusade against the sidewalk grabbers.” There’s a new kind of sidewalk-grabber today — more agile than Barkalow’s horse, poppingseemingly from nowhere at 10, 15, 20 mph into the paths of pedestrians. Thousands of rentable electric scooters have taken over pavement from Washington to Santa Monica, Calif.,and Austin to Chicago. They clog narrow sidewalks, startle us from our ambulatory texting sessions and lay strewn in the middle of crosswalks. It’s hard to recall a time in living memorywhen it was this nerve-racking to attempt a stroll. The physical injuries are one thing: A 75-year-old man tripped over an abandoned scooterin San Diego and shattered his knee. A 7-year-old boy near Los Angeles reportedly had his teeth knocked out by a scooter rider. A 44-year-old woman was hit by a Bird scooter in aCincinnati intersection. The assailant's Bird account was suspended, while the woman got a $1,000 medical bill. And on the other side of the gutter, car-on-scooter fatalities are becomingalmost commonplace. But for every broken tooth, there are countless jostled states of mind, as pedestrians discoverthe placid streams by which they travel have been invaded en masse by machines with names like Bird and Jump and Spin and Skip. Jacob Hege, 22, has walked to work a bit more cautiously since he emerged from a crosswalk on 16th Street NW in Washington and felt something thwack him from behind. He turned tosee a woman on a Bird scooter, which like several other brands in the District can be found on almost any block and rented for a few dollars. “We both got knocked to the side,” Hege said. “She had AirPods in, and she looked at me with such anger and said, ‘Move!’ and scooted away. And I stood looking at her like, ‘What?’ ” Once again, there’s a people’s crusade to restore the sanctity of the sidewalk, with anti-scooter vigilantes appearing wherever the machines do. Scooters are piled into dumpsters, chuckedinto rivers, thrown through windshields, set on fire and hung from bridge posts like apparatchiks of a deposed regime. In Hoboken, N.J. — the state’s first major beachhead for scooters — an anonymous Twitter documentarian records riders buzzing by strollers and smashing into each other. In Atlanta, aman in a wheelchair who calls himself John Plantaseed has taken to knocking down rows of scooters like chains of dominoes, yelling triumphant obscenities as they clatter to thepavement. Cities are trying to mitigate the backlash. Washington will begin experimenting with solar-powered charging docks, hoping to break riders’ habit of dumping the scooters wherever they happen to stop. But sometimes no balance can be found. Nashville’s mayor is seeking to evictscooters from the streets. We could use some perspective, because this is not the first sidewalk war by any means. The first known sidewalks were laid in central Anatolia around 2000 B.C. — a millennium or two after the invention of the wheel, according to the book “Sidewalks: Conflict andNegotiation over Public Space.” They remained rare luxuries in most of the world until the 19th century, when big cities like London and Paris built hundreds of miles of the stuff. But it took decades of social conditioning before “walk” became the operative syllable in sidewalk. For most of human history, vehicles, pedestrians, vendors, musicians, drinkers andstrolling lovers all mingled in the same amorphous muck of the avenue. It’s only in the last century or so that those corridors have been divided up, stratified, painted with lines and regulated in the name of more efficient movement. Jaywalkers — a word that did not exist until the early 20th century — were shamed and fined for straying into the street. Non-walkers were similarly penalized for clogging up the precioussidewalks. “City after city started issuing ordinances prohibiting or regulating a number of sidewalkactivities from street vending to political and commercial speech, from the display of wares on the sidewalk to loitering, panhandling, and prostitution,” reads the book. Detroit went so far asto paint “huge yellow footsteps” on its sidewalks in the 1920s, lest any pedestrian fail to get the message. This social order worked fine, except when it didn’t. Bicycles, newspaper boxes, mass homelessness, plodding iPhone gazers — all these things disturbed the fiction of a streetneatly divided into walkers and cars. Cities simply invented regulations and lanes to restore the peace, which worked until the next disruption came along, and here we are today inscooter hell. But is it a hell made by scooters, or just made apparent by them? “I see this conflict more as an outcome of bad decisions and bad design,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, co-author of “Sidewalks” and an urban planning professor at the scooter-saturated campus of the University of California at Los Angeles. “Cities kept widening the streets and narrowing the sidewalks, and downgrading activities to accommodate onlywalking. . . . I don’t mean to say sometimes scooter drivers are not obnoxious. But I’d say it’s a less obnoxious use than cars.” Loukaitou-Sideris expects cities will find a way out of this jam, whether by restricting scooters or squeezing yet more lanes into the finite space between buildings. Sidewalk disputes always resolve one way or the other. Just ask William Barkalow.