HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PUBLIC HEARING HARRISBURG, PA ROOM G-50 PRESENTATION … · 2019. 5....
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COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE PUBLIC HEARING STATE CAPITOL HARRISBURG, PA IRVIS OFFICE BUILDING ROOM G-50 THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2019 10:05 A.M. PRESENTATION ON H.B. 631, TO DEFINE LOW-SPEED SCOOTERS BEFORE: HONORABLE TIM HENNESSEY, MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HONORABLE MINDY FEE HONORABLE GREG ROTHMAN HONORABLE MARTINA A. WHITE HONORABLE MIKE CARROLL, DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN HONORABLE SARA INNAMORATO HONORABLE STEPHEN KINSEY HONORABLE ED NEILSON Pennsylvania House of Representatives Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Transcript of HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PUBLIC HEARING HARRISBURG, PA ROOM G-50 PRESENTATION … · 2019. 5....
COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE PUBLIC HEARING
STATE CAPITOL HARRISBURG, PA
IRVIS OFFICE BUILDING ROOM G-50
THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2 019 10:05 A.M.
PRESENTATION ON H.B. 631, TO DEFINE LOW-SPEED SCOOTERS
BEFORE:HONORABLE TIM HENNESSEY, MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HONORABLE MINDY FEE HONORABLE GREG ROTHMAN HONORABLE MARTINA A. WHITEHONORABLE MIKE CARROLL, DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN HONORABLE SARA INNAMORATO HONORABLE STEPHEN KINSEY HONORABLE ED NEILSON
Pennsylvania House of Representatives Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
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COMMITTEE STAFF PRESENT:ERIC BUGAILE
MAJORITY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR ELIZABETH SICKLER
MAJORITY RESEARCH ANALYST MATTHEW RUCCI
MAJORITY RESEARCH ANALYST MICHELLE WHITMYER
MAJORITY ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
MEREDITH BIGGICADEMOCRATIC EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
KYLE WAGONSELLERDEMOCRATIC RESEARCH ANALYST
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I N D E X
TESTIFIERS* * *
NAME PAGE
REPRESENTATIVE GREG ROTHMANCO-PRIME SPONSOR OF H.B. 631................. .....7
REPRESENTATIVE STEPHEN KINSEYCO-PRIME SPONSOR OF H.B. 631.................. ..... 9
NGANI NDIMBIEEXECUTIVE POLICY SPECIALIST,PENNDOT...................................... ....14
DONALD HANNONTRANSPORTATION POLICY CONSULTANT,COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENTS-EASTERN REGION ....30
DOUGLAS SHINKLETRANSPORTATION PROGRAM DIRECTOR,NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF STATE LEGISLATURES.... ....37
SAM MARSHALLPRESIDENT AND CEO,INSURANCE FEDERATION OF PENNSYLVANIA..........ACCOMPANIED BY:
JONATHAN GREERVICE PRESIDENT,PA INSURANCE FEDERATION
....65
MEGAN RYERSONTRANSPORTATION CHAIR AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR,UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.................... ....88
MATTHEW KOPKODIRECTOR OF POLICY,BIRD RIDES INC................................ ....94
SHARI SHAPIRO DIRECTOR,MIDATLANTIC GOVERNMENT RELATIONS,LIME.......................................... ....99
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I N D E X
TESTIFIERS(CONT'D)* * *
NAME PAGE
WAYNE S. MARTINCITY ENGINEER,CITY OF HARRISBURG................................117
GEOFFREY KNIGHTPLANNING DIRECTOR,CITY OF HARRISBURG................................122
SCOTT PETRIEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,PHILADELPHIA PARKING AUTHORITY....................125
DAN MULVENNAOFF-STREET SUPPORT COORDINATOR,PHILADELPHIA PARKING AUTHORITY....................128
DEREK WHITESELEXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,HARRISBURG YOUNG PROFESSIONALS....................137
(See submitted written testimony and handouts online.)
SUBMITTED WRITTEN TESTIMONY* * *
(See submitted written testimony and ha1
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P R O C E E D I N G S* * *
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Good morning,
everyone. My name is Tim Hennessey. I'm the Republican
Chairman of the House Transportation Committee, and I want
to welcome you to this informational meeting of our
Committee dealing with legislative inroads so to speak for
the use of electric scooters across the country. We're
going to hear from a number of people that'll give us that
national perspective and maybe even an international
perspective, but I think that it's important for us as a
Committee and as legislators to learn about what the future
might be at least in a portion of our transportation
network.
I will remind everyone we are on PCN and we're
trying to work out some of the technical kinks so that some
of the PowerPoint presentations may actually show up on all
the screens and also on PCN.
But with that, I'm going to ask Mike Carroll, my
Democratic Co-Chair of the Committee, if he has any
introductory comments, and then we'll call on Greg Rothman
and Steve Kinsey, both who have interest and are prime
sponsors of this bill.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Thank you,
Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate everybody's attendance this
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morning on this important subject, and I'm eager to hear
the sponsors of the bill provide us their background and
their thought process related to the subject and then the
rest of the testifiers, so thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Before you get
started, Greg, I guess you're going to go first?
REPRESENTATIVE ROTHMAN: Yes. Yes, Mr. Chairman.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Why don't we
just go around the table or the desks up here and introduce
ourselves? Again, I'm Tim Hennessey, the Republican Chair
of the Committee. I come from the southeastern part of
Pennsylvania about an hour outside of Philadelphia.
Mike?
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: And I'm Mike
Carroll from the Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Lackawanna,
Luzerne County region.
REPRESENTATIVE INNAMORATO: Hi, I'm
Representative Sara Innamorato. I represent the 21st
District, which is Pittsburgh and northern Allegheny
County.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Good morning. I'm State
Representative Martina White from northeast Philadelphia.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: And I'm Mindy Fee from
northern Lancaster County. Good morning.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: I'm State Rep. Ed
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Neilson. I am from northeast Philadelphia as well here to
hear from our colleague from Germantown.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Go ahead.
MR. WAGONSELLER: I'm Kyle Wagonseller, Research
Analyst for the Transportation Committee.
MR. RUCCI: Matt Rucci, also Research Analyst for
the Transportation Committee.
MR. BUGAILE: I'm Eric Bugaile. I'm the
Executive Director of the Transportation Committee for the
Republicans.
MS. BIGGICA: And I'm Meredith Biggica. I'm the
Executive Director for Chairman Mike Carroll.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay, thank you.
But that as a kickoff, we'll hear from House Bill 631, one
of the prime sponsors, Representative Greg Rothman from the
87th Legislative District I think right across the
Susquehanna from us, right?
REPRESENTATIVE ROTHMAN: Just a scooter ride
away.
Mr. Chairman, I -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Do you have a
dedicated lane for that? Never mind. We'll hear about
that as you go on.
REPRESENTATIVE ROTHMAN: Thank you, Chairman
Hennessey, Chairman Carroll, and my colleagues. I want to
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first start by -- I'm Greg Rothman from the 87th District
in Cumberland County, the co-prime sponsor of this bill
with Representative Kinsey. Between the two of us, we each
have four daughters, and his daughter Myla is here today to
join us. She's a fifth-grader, 11 years old.
And this legislation is about the next generation
and making Pennsylvania friendly to millennials. And we
know through studies that millennials don't use cars the
way that our generations use cars. They understand that
cars are only used about 4 percent of the day, they're
expensive, the cost to insure them and rising cost of
gasoline and parking, all these are factors in why we need
to come up with alternative forms of modes of
transportation. And we call it micro-mobility. The
scooters are low-speed electric, good for the environment,
and provide, as I said, an alternative mode of
transportation.
So I look over to hearing from the testifiers
today, and I've seen the scooters, I've ridden on the
scooters in other parts of the country. My son lives in
Santa Monica; they're everywhere. And I'm grateful for the
support of my good friend Steve Kinsey, and he's going to
talk a little bit about the bill, too, so thank you very
much.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. Steve,
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before you start, would you introduce your daughter again
for us all?
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Sure. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman. In fact, as Representative Rothman
mentioned, she's in fifth grade, she's 11 years old, so I'm
going to have her introduce herself.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MS. KINSEY: Hello. My name is Myla Kinsey.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: What school?
MS. KINSEY: I go to Valley Christian School.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Valley Christian School
is actually in Representative Tom Murt's district. So
Myla -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: And you're going to
keep your dad on track as he testifies before the
Committee? You brought her in today.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Mr. Chairman, actually,
my daughter is actually on spring vacation, and she's been
up here a few times. Her class will be coming up here in
fact next month. But she watches PCN. And I recognize
that, you know, fifth-graders don't normally watch PCN, but
she's very interested in regards to the work we do here at
the Capitol, so what better way than to bring her up here
today as we talk about the House Bill 631. So thank you
for allowing me to bring her here.
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MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Sure.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks for joining me also, Myla.
I just have to watch her hand because her hand is
towards the side where my wallet is, and when you have
those fifth-graders, you know, they tend to just sort of
think that your money is their money and that's how it
goes.
But, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you, Chairman
Hennessey, Chairman Carroll, my colleagues on the
Transportation Committee, for allowing me to share my
perspectives on House Bill 631.
As you know, this proposed legislation is co
sponsored by my good friend Greg Rothman and myself. As
co-sponsors, our legislation would allow for the use of
electric low-speed scooters or e-scooters on Pennsylvania
roadways and sidewalks just as we do now with bicycles and
electric-assist bicycles. These e-scooters are small
electric or human-powered vehicles with two or three
wheels, handlebars, and a full board that can be stood upon
while riding. Most weigh less than 100 pounds and go no
more than 2 0 miles per hour on ground level. And when I
bring up the 20 miles per hour on ground level, Mr.
Chairman, I want to be clear about that because a bicycle,
a pedal bicycle can travel up to 25 miles per hour.
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These scooters can provide an innovative,
flexible, and low-cost transportation service to millions
of Pennsylvanians. They can help to relieve traffic
congestion while reducing population and stress by reducing
car trips and increase access to public transit.
Because these devices travel at low speeds and
weigh less than 100 pounds, States across the country have
incorporated e-scooters into their motor vehicle code by
regulating them like bicycles. However, in my opinion,
Pennsylvania is quickly falling behind our neighboring
States that have already embraced this next generation of
transportation.
On March 16th I participated in a demonstration
of these scooters, along with Rep. Rothman and others, who
are able to ride them right outside the Capitol. And even
though it was the first time since I was a child that I
rode a scooter, I have to admit it was like I've been
riding a scooter all my life.
I want to be clear. I recognize that each of us
have certain skill levels and that it may not be as easy
for others. I also do not want to downplay the fact that
traveling by any means in and of itself has its challenges.
And I'm sure that others will speak to that point. But
I've come to believe that these e-scooters could bring
about a wealth of benefits to Pennsylvanians, especially
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those struggling with cost-effective and convenient
transportation needs.
Other benefits, as I previously mentioned,
include decreased road congestion, decreased population,
and cheaper transportation alternatives. E-scooters are
ideal for college students, tourists, and commuters,
especially those who have to travel a short distance. I
believe that citizens are better off having this option
available to them and the freedom to choose what mode of
transportation they wish to use.
I would urge city administrators in Pennsylvania
to look at other cities for examples of how overregulation
can get out of control and work together to find a balance
to ensure safety and access.
And for those with safety concerns, note that a
recent Washington Post report on the first recorded scooter
death in D.C. was at the same time as 25 other
transportation fatalities in the same year. This included
nine pedestrian on foot, five motorists, three bicyclists,
and seven car passengers, my point being these are just as
safe if not safer than any other mode of transportation
currently used on our roadways. Most importantly, the
government should not decide how we get to work or how we
get to visit our families. Pennsylvanians deserve the
freedom to choose any mode of transportation they believe
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in.
With that being said, Mr. Chairman, I just want
to thank again the Committee for allowing us to testify. I
also want to keep in mind that there are over 8 million
registered drivers in the State of Pennsylvania. It's a
slight increase from last year. If I'm not mistaken, I
believe that for 2019 we're going to see a slight uptick
with more individuals registering to get their driver's
license. So I just think that, again, the important part
here is that we're looking at this as another alternative
option, simply an option.
Thank you very much.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. Thanks
for your testimony. And also both of you guys and anybody
else who's testifying today, I'll invite you to send
Internet links on the use of e-scooters across the States
and around the world. I mean, Eric has been keeping me
abreast on some of these things with regard to -- I think
he sent me one in Paris where they were all piled up on one
part of the sidewalk. It didn't look particularly
appealing to me, but I'm looking at it from a different set
of eyes than some of the younger generation who'd probably
much more prone to hop on the scooter than I would.
But I think it's part of our future, and we have
to learn about it, and so I invite you if you have any
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Internet links that would school us even further beyond
your testimony and the other testimony we'll here today,
please feel free to get that to us and we'll get it
disseminated to our Members so that we have a better idea
of, you know, all the different aspects and perspectives
that we're going to have to deal with as we deal with this
bill. Okay?
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Great. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you very
much.
Myla, thanks for coming up and keeping your dad
on track.
Our next testifier is -- let me see if I get this
-- here from PennDOT. She's an Executive Policy
Specialist, and her name's Ngani Ndimbie. Did I get that
right?
MS. NDIMBIE: Pretty close. Pretty close.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Okay. Begin
whenever you're ready.
MS. NDIMBIE: Thank you. All right. Thank you,
Chairpersons Hennessey and Carroll and Members of the
Committee, for inviting me to speak today. My name is
Ngani Ndimbie, and I'm a Policy Specialist specializing in
low-speed and shared modes of transportation. Together,
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Roy Gothie, the Statewide Bike and Pedestrian Coordinator,
and I have led the Department's conversation on electric
scooters and have been diligently keeping tabs on the
national conversation. My testimony is the product of
multiple conversations with department staff,
representatives from our largest municipalities, and with
officials from other States and cities.
PennDOT's mission is to build a safe, high-
quality, sustainable transportation system, and we support
this effort to define and allow the use of low-speed
electric scooters. These devices are a low-cost, flexible,
low-emissions transportation device with the potential to
reduce car trips and increase access to public transit,
especially for citizens without access to a motor vehicle.
However, an amendment to the bill language is
needed to best enable a safe and rational integration of
electric scooters into our transportation ecosystem for use
by both renters and private owner-operators.
Our research into public deployments in cities
across the country indicates that electric scooters have
the potential to be a flexible mobility tool for urban
areas. Benefits of electric scooters include their
usefulness as a connection to transit and as a car trip
substitute. Another advantage of electric scooters is
their affordability, often priced at 15 cents per minute
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after an initial $1 fee. Electric scooters also provide a
transportation option for people in a wide variety of
clothing, including dresses and heels, a level of
flexibility above that of a bicycle. A recent survey of
75,000 scooter users in Portland, Oregon, found that
shared, dockless electric scooter users represent a swath
of incomes and ages.
Challenges faced by local governments when
allowing the deployment of electric scooters have included
the enforcement of rules, safety concerns, education, and
creating appropriate permitting. The safety of the devices
has been called into question by many news outlets that
have reported increases in emergency room visits following
large-scale electric scooter deployments. While studies
are expected to come out over the next few months, there
aren't that many available reports measuring the safety of
the devices, which is a concern.
Issues have also been raised about electric
scooters conflicting with the needs of the disability
community and other pedestrians. This bill will allow
local government to regulate scooter parking and sidewalk
use in response to these concerns.
If legalized, the electric scooter user would
become a new vulnerable roadway user alongside bicyclists,
pedestrians, horse and buggy users, and disabled persons.
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In recent years, PennDOT has engaged in many efforts to
increase safety for vulnerable roadway users that would
also benefit scooter users. Our obligation here is to
balance the two sides of our mission by preserving safety
while expanding mobility and access.
The amendment we offered is based on three
elements of analysis: One, device characteristics and
capabilities; two, considerations about current and private
use; and three, concerns raised by municipalities. A
method of understanding these devices is by the operating
characteristics such as maximum speed, braking, and turning
characteristics, along with the width, length, and weight
of the device. The electric low-speed scooter bill will
authorize scooters that are less than 100 pounds, have two
or three wheels. And electric scooter fleets deployed by
companies have top speeds generally in the 11-to-20-mile
per-hour range.
Handling characteristics involving braking and
turning vary depending upon the design. This is a device
that has significantly different operational
characteristics than other devices on the roadway, which
makes it so that our current infrastructure design and
maintenance standards may not adequately accommodate them.
By permitting these devices within the public right-of-way
the Department will potentially increase exposure to
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liability issues related to design, operations, and
maintenance.
The portions of our amendment that are in direct
response to the device characteristics are limiting scooter
use to roadways with a posted speed limit of 30 miles per
hour or less except when an operator is riding on an
available shoulder or bike lane; prohibiting the attachment
of a child carrier; requiring a rear light after dusk given
the low floorboard of the device; and enumerating a braking
distance.
While electric scooters have been made popular in
the last two years by micro-mobility companies, they have
been commercially available for many years; first marketed
to children and now to adults. Yet this bill would make it
illegal for a child to ride an electric scooter purchased
by a parent. We encourage additional thoughtful
conversations around the age restriction. Also, based on
current use and availability, we recommend changing the
definition of a low-speed electric scooter to include a
device with a seat, as similar devices with seats are
commercially available.
Department Representatives have spoken to our
counterparts in city and State Departments of
Transportation across the country to understand the
challenges posed by electric scooter use. We have also
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hosted calls to hear the concerns of our major cities and
MPOs. Municipalities have requested the ability to define
the use of electric scooters to meet their specific
mobility needs of their residents and to allow for sensible
enforcement.
Our amendment language makes 15 miles per hour
both the maximum speed for the device definition and the
maximum speed at which it can be operated. Making these
two speeds the same will allow for easier education and
enforcement efforts.
From multiple conversations with States and
municipalities that have deployed electric scooters, the
resounding refrain is that protected infrastructure and
tools like parking-protected bike lanes give cities the
necessary ability to provide safe places to ride and allow
for the devices to best benefit the public.
Our final concern is that this bill does not
adequately address the substantial range of personal
mobility devices, beyond electric low-speed scooters. We
hope that we can create a broader definition as soon as
possible to encompass the full range of low-speed personal
transportation devices.
Thank you for considering our testimony.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you, Ngani.
I just have one question real quickly, and that's you said
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in the bottom of page 2 of your testimony the current
infrastructure design and maintenance standards may not
adequately accommodate these kind of scooters. What kind
of infrastructure improvements will we need, at what cost,
and are they critical that we should do that before we
allow the widespread use of scooters on highways or
roadways that are not considered to be up to standard?
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes. So we anticipate that these
will be most -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Could you get
closer to the mic, please?
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes, that these will be most
desired as a tool in larger municipalities. They are there
already generally bicycle users, and there are some of the
similar concerns. But when we consider this as a
department internally, we discussed issues like sweeping
road debris with the small wheels so there's a really -
typical electric scooters have small wheel diameter, and so
they're more susceptible to things like road debris like -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: After a storm, any
kind of limbs that have fallen, things like that.
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes, those types of things are a
little bit more dangerous for a scooter, given their
general handling characteristics, than they are for a
bicycle, and so it's generally something that we are aware
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of and will expect to be able to be flexible. But our
Bureau of Maintenance and Operations can offer some more
thoughts on that, and I can bring those back to you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: And what -
MS. NDIMBIE: As we discussed, there weren't any
specific numbers given what we think what cost would come
to the Department if this bill were to become law.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: And then one other
comment I would make about your testimony is you said the
municipalities are requesting the ability to define
scooters in their own words, and it seems to me we'll have
2,500 or 2,600 different definitions in Pennsylvania alone
if we allow all the municipalities to do it, but -
MS. NDIMBIE: Oh, no, just -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- I think you're
talking about getting information from all these people and
then finding an adequate definition that covers the high
points of all the -
MS. NDIMBIE: I more mean in permitting and
regulations, so they'll make sure that the way that
scooters are used within their municipality meet the needs
of their residents. That is to say that they will set the
max number of devices that can be used -- that can be
deployed within the city if they are to allow scooter
fleets in the first place, and so, yes, those types of
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things.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you
very much.
Mike, do you have any questions?
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: I'll pass.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Representative
white, Martina White?
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My question to you is in Philadelphia the Mayor
has proposed a congestion tax because of the sheer volume
of vehicles we have flowing at particular times of the day.
Have you come across any studies that indicate this could
increase our congestion issues in the city, these devices?
MS. NDIMBIE: They're generally small. None of
the research that I've come across would suggest that there
would be an increase in congestion. It's a smaller device,
so it takes up less space. Congestion is like a
geometrical -- it's a space issue, right? So smaller
devices of people traveling in a smaller device rather than
a larger device would generally lead to less congestion.
And we also saw that in Portland their scooter survey
suggested that I think 34 percent of users replaced a car
trip, a trip that they would've otherwise taken in a car, a
personal vehicle or an Uber or a Lyft and opted for a
scooter instead, so that would suggest that this has the
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potential to reduce congestion.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: And briefly, could you
just describe some of the safety concerns that would be at
issue with regards to these devices?
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes, so there is some emerging
analysis of the types of dangers that have come with
scooter use. UCLA's study found that most people who had
crashes were people who had fallen or collided with an
object or struck by a vehicle, but most of them hadn't been
struck by vehicles. Then there are some incidents that
were pedestrians who had collided with scooters or tripped
over them, so those seem to be the numbers, though most
cities that have analyzed the incidents have also found
that they think that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Baltimore most recently or relatively recently published
their study, and they found that, while doing a very
careful analysis of injuries, they found that there were
also some benefits.
And, as Representative Kinsey mentioned, our
streets have been pretty dangerous for all vulnerable road
users, so they're kind of looking at the challenges that
electric scooter users have faced in sort of the broader
context of vulnerable road users, and it seems to be in
line with those.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Okay. Thank you very
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much.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you.
Representative Neilson?
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you for your testimony here today.
I want to follow up on the safety aspect of it.
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: You brought up in your
testimony YOU talked about breaks. In the legislation it
doesn't call for these vehicles to be inspected or anything
like that.
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Brake failure is one of
them. We talked about the UCLA study -- I have that right
in front of me -- on the injuries. Do you think they
should be registered and we should know whose scooter is
what laying on the ground? I mean it seems like a concern
because I'm from the city of Philadelphia, and, you know, I
could have potentially 100,000 of these laying on the
sidewalk throughout the city. I mean, they're all over.
My kids in my shed, all right, I've had these. I
have them. I can say that I have electric skateboards, I
have electric pocket rocket bikes they call them, the
little, you know -- and they only go 20 miles an hour, and
I get that, but I make my kids wear helmets and there's
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nothing in here about any of that. Do you have anything,
studies or information, that you can share with the
Committee on that?
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes. So I think the first part -
so on helmet use this bill has it consistent with what we
have for a bicycle, and bicycle, including an electric-
assist bicycle in the State of Pennsylvania currently you
don't have to use a helmet unless you're under -- well, I
guess you can't use an electric-assist bicycle until you're
16, and you don't have to use a helmet unless you're under
12 if you use a bicycle, so those are our current rules.
One of the reasons I would assume that this bill
doesn't address helmet use is because it sets the age
restriction at 16, and we don't require helmet use for
bicycles at 16 and above, so it's consistent with bicycles.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: All right. I'm just
looking around the State because of some of the stuff I
did, some of them are requiring it, California tried to,
they stopped it. I mean, I'm looking at your information.
You have statewide information. I'm sure we'll hear from
NCLS. They'll give us -
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: -- a little bit more on
it, but -
MS. NDIMBIE: I mean, yes, I think that --
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REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Yes.
MS. NDIMBIE: -- for example, Oregon, I think
they have a bill to get rid of their helmet requirement,
but they do currently -- in their law it says that you have
to have a helmet. The only place that I've ever ridden an
electric scooter is in Portland, Oregon, and I didn't see a
single helmet user the whole time I was there. I think
that it's more reasonable to suggest that people use it and
recommend that people use it, which both the scooter
companies and the city does, but then recognize that, you
know, the way that people are actually using it. We as the
Department would obviously recommend helmet use, as we do
all the time with bicycle use, while not requiring it.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
Representative Fee?
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just have two questions really. One is in the
bill it talks about the age requirement must be sufficient
age to operate an automobile -
MS. NDIMBIE: Yes.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: -- and in your testimony you
talk about you encourage additional thoughtful
conversation. Does that mean you would like to see them
younger than the age of 16 or --
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MS. NDIMBIE: We're just highly aware that people
like your colleague have them, have scooters, electric
scooters today, and that kids are riding them today, and
recognize that this is an opportunity, if you so choose, to
define how they should be used by younger users of the same
technology and to sort of think through that if we, you
know, choose not to take that opportunity to define what we
think that reasonable use should look like for a younger
user.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: Okay. And then my second
question, which wasn't highlighted in your testimony, is
about insurance. But just out of curiosity, I mean, what
if I'm riding a scooter and I, you know, rear-end a car and
there's damage? How does that work?
MS. NDIMBIE: That would be similar to a bike
incident, a bike-car incident and/or, if, you know, you're
a pedestrian carrying a, I don't know, blunt object, I
don't know. Yes, so it would mostly fall on -- you know,
I'm not insured for walking per se. I'm not insured for
riding my bicycle, so in those same situations, it would
fall to the personal responsibility of the scooter user.
I'm not -- and, I mean, and also the insurance of the car
user, though I'm no expert in insurance, but just to say
that it's comparable to an incident that would occur
between a bicyclist and --
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REPRESENTATIVE FEE: Okay. Well, good. Well,
they're -
MS. NDIMBIE: --a car.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: -- I just saw the Insurance
Federation's testimony. Okay. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MS. NDIMBIE: Oh, and then also the scooter fleet
companies have insurance, and I'm sure they could also
answer some questions about -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MS. NDIMBIE: -- how that would be handled.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Ngani, thank you
very much for your testimony. Like I said, I think there's
a wave of the future whether it's coming whether some of us
want it or not. And it's probably going to be -- I would
think it's mainly in cities at the beginning. I was even
thinking if we were going to do a pilot program, we could
do it on college campuses for kids who are much more likely
to opt for this kind of transportation and also probably be
able to handle it better at least, you know, starting from
scratch, although I think somebody said -- was it Steve
said that it's like falling off a bicycle. You get back on
your scooter and ride it like you did when you were a kid.
I'll invite you again, on behalf of PennDOT, if
you have Internet links that would help us learn more about
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this, please get them to us and we'll get them
disseminated, okay?
MS. NDIMBIE: Absolutely. Yes.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you very much
for your testimony.
Our next testifier, it looks like we've gotten in
the technical problems worked out, so Doug Shinkle is
Transportation Program Director for the National Conference
of State Legislatures, which I think is meeting in
Nashville this year in August?
MR. SHINKLE: Correct, Chairman.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. We have Don
Hannon, also Transportation Policy Consultant for the
Council of State Governments in the Eastern Region. And I
think the Council of State Governments is meeting in
Pittsburgh in late July.
MR. HANNON: Yes.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you both for
being here. Begin -- all of a sudden we've lost -- get
those IT guys back here so they can figure out which button
we should -- do you want to wait and we'll see if we can
call somebody back and -- I mean, you've worked out most of
the kinks already, so it was probably just a -
MR. SHINKLE: I can certainly give the
presentation without the slides, but I think the slides are
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going to be a benefit to you all in terms of your
understanding of the issue.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Why don't we just
have Don go first then, and can we see if we can get the IT
people back?
MR. SHINKLE: And if it doesn't work at that
point, that's totally fine.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Go ahead.
Thanks.
MR. HANNON: Chairman Hennessey, Chairman
Carroll, and distinguished Members of the House
Transportation Committee, thank you for the opportunity to
speak on the pending e-scooter legislation. I'm Don
Hannon, and I serve as a Transportation Policy Consultant
with Council of State Governments-Eastern Regional
Conference. We provide research and analysis to State
policymakers across all three branches of government in the
11 Northeastern States from Maine to Maryland, including
Pennsylvania.
I was asked to speak on what actions neighboring
States have taken or have planned for e-scooters and also
to report on what's happening on city-level pilot programs.
Pennsylvania is not alone in the Northeast or
even across the Nation and looking to address e-scooters.
States are actively enacting legislation paving the way for
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local governments to consider the introduction of e-
scooters. Pennsylvania's deliberate actions have given
city officials the opportunity to examine the experiences
of other cities to learn from the best practices and also
from their not-so-successful practices.
First to the 10 States in our region, three of
the most Northern States -- Maine, New Hampshire, and
Vermont -- have seen little legislative activities in these
largely rural States. Maine's largest city is Portland
with 8,000 residents, less than in the city of Bethlehem.
New Hampshire's largest city, Manchester, has just under
110,000 citizens, making it about the same size as Erie,
while Vermont's largest city, Burlington, have 8,000 less
people than here in Harrisburg. In Delaware, similar to
Pennsylvania's law, e-scooters are not allowed anywhere.
Unlike Pennsylvania, there is no pending enabling
legislation in the State.
I'd like to focus more attention on the six
remaining States in the Northeast. Rhode Island may be
small in geographic size, but it does have the third-
largest city in New England. The city of Providence would
rank third in Pennsylvania behind Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh much closer in population size to Allentown.
Providence has an ongoing pilot program which allows
e-scooters almost everywhere, including sidewalks.
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However, city officials are considering limiting their
usage on sidewalks due to perceived e-scooter pedestrian
conflict.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Don, excuse me.
Can I interrupt you and just ask how long has the pilot
program been in existence up there in Providence?
MR. HANNON: Since last year, 2018. All of these
places have just started in this past year.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you.
Sorry for the interruption.
MR. HANNON: That's okay. The current
Massachusetts State law treats e-scooters the same as
mopeds, requiring them to have brake lights and turn
signals. However, the State is looking to change that, and
the bill closely matching the parameters that this
Committee is considering is moving forward. The
legislation is expected to be signed by Governor Baker
shortly.
Less than two weeks ago, the Connecticut House
Transportation Committee favorably reported out a bill that
amends State law to treat e-scooters like bicycles. It
would allow municipalities to issue local ordinances that
bars them from sidewalks.
As for New Jersey, both the State Assembly and
Senate passed legislation that would enable e-scooters to
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operate in streets and paved bypaths. Additionally, it
sets a maximum speed of 19 miles per hour. The bill awaits
New Jersey Governor Murphy's signature.
In Maryland earlier this month, the legislature
approved a bill that, when signed into law, allows local
governments the ability to regulate e-scooters similar to
bicycles.
E-scooters are not legal for operation across New
York State. An attempt last month to make them legal
failed. As part of Governor Cuomo's budget submission, he
proposed forbidding localities to authorize them. However,
the legislation didn't make it into the April 1st approved
State budget. One reason given was that legalization of
e-scooters didn't have any State fiscal impact and could
instead be considered outside of the budget process. The
current New York legislative session continues, so
legislation could get advanced and approved in the coming
months.
Clearly, there are similarities between
Pennsylvania's e-scooter legislation and the regional
States. What is not in Pennsylvania's legislation but is
found in some other States is a requirement that e-scooter
companies carry insurance coverage for their e-scooters.
However, where States have not set any insurance
requirements, cities have included clauses in their
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agreements to indemnify the cities from liability claims
and requires e-scooter providers to carry insurance
policies.
By the latest count, 39 of America's 100 largest
cities have e-scooter rental services, and of those 39
cities, 32 have some local oversight in place. Cities must
balance how e-scooters can operate while ensuring both
safety and public access to them. To help encourage the
equitable distribution and usage, many cities have
stipulations in their agreements requiring the companies to
make them available across all neighborhoods.
Of course, challenges have been found in the
pilot programs, including riders illegal operating them on
sidewalks, concerns over improper ridership and the lack of
enforcement of the rules, and e-scooters being improperly
parked, adversely affecting pedestrian movement and ADA
access.
I'd like now to focus on three cities, Baltimore,
New York City, and beyond our region, Portland, Oregon. In
the view of many, including its city officials, Baltimore's
pilot program has proven to be a success. Last week,
Baltimore City Council gave preliminary approval to
legislation that makes the program permanent. The
legislation would give Baltimore the ability to issue
permits to e-scooter companies, impose fines on both the
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companies and users, collect taxes on each ride, and let
riders under the age of 16 use them as long as they wear a
helmet. Additionally, penalties could be placed upon the
companies for violations such as having more scooters than
allowed or failing to provide equitable access. Baltimore
officials see the fiscal benefits and estimate that the
renewed program could bring in over $1 million in revenue
from fees, fines, and taxes.
As I noted earlier, e-scooters are still
considered illegal in New York State. However, New York
City officials are gearing up to launch a pilot program.
America's largest city presents unique opportunities for
both the traveling public and e-scooter companies. In
Austin, Texas, there are over 15,000 e-scooter permits.
Austin has a population of just under 1 million people and
is slightly larger in size than New York City. However,
New York City's population is over eight times greater than
Austin's. If we were to apply Austin's scooter-to-citizen
ratio to New York City, we could see nearly 125,000
e-scooters in the city. While that seems somewhat
unlikely, you can imagine the desire of e-scooter companies
to enter this untapped market.
I'd like to conclude my city-level comments
highlighting the city of Portland, Oregon. E-scooters were
introduced in Portland last summer, and in a recent
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citywide poll, 1/3 of Portland is said that they use them
in place of driving or ridesharing. Portland's pilot
program ended last November, but it's set to return next
week with a few new conditions, including that users wear
helmets and new harsher penalties for those that abuse that
program. Portland's pilot study also highlights e-scooter
safety. Portland found that the injury rate for e-scooters
was comparable to the rate of bicycle injuries.
In summary, we see many city programs expanded or
renewed often with tweaks to the agreements to reflect
lessons learned such as using geo-fencing technology to
restrict vehicle speeds in designated areas. Additionally,
cities are issuing regulations requiring a set operating
fee on each scooter, annual fees, caps on fleet sizes, and
that a portion of the fees collected go to improving roads
and bikeway infrastructure.
We also know that there are places where local
governments have banned e-scooters. These include Seattle,
Washington; Asheville, North Carolina; and South Carolina's
capital city of Columbia. There are many reasons for the
bans, but most have cited safety concerns over blocked
sidewalks, the breaking of traffic laws, incidences of
accidents, and the need for cities to first develop
regulations.
Finally, the legislation before the Committee, if
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enacted, would enable local governments to weigh the pros
and cons of e-scooters. The challenge for Pennsylvania
cities and towns will be to strike a balance between not
holding back on the micro-mobility opportunities for
e-scooter users and imposing order to ensure the safety of
all.
On behalf of the Council of State Governments-
Eastern Regional Conference, I'd like to thank you for the
opportunity to speak on House Bill 631, and I look forward
to any questions you may have.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you, Don.
I'm going to ask you to be just -- we'll keep the questions
till later if you would.
MR. HANNON: Sure.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: The technology is
working now. We'll have Doug Shinkle give his
presentation. And if we have to, we'll call the IT people
back once again.
MR. SHINKLE: I think I can just wing it from
here at this point. I appreciate it.
First of all, thank you very much for having me.
This is my first time at the Pennsylvania State Capitol.
Thank you, Chairman Hennessey and Minority Chair Carroll.
Thanks, Representative Rothman and Representative Kinsey,
for your opening remarks.
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I worked a lot with the Pennsylvania House
Transportation Committee over the years, especially Eric
Bugaile, who's been very involved in a lot of our efforts,
so happy to be here.
So I'm just going to give an overview of kind of
what I see in terms of State legislative trends for the
electric scooters, and that's pretty much a trend that's
just this year, although I will comment on a few bills from
last year. And I try to mostly stay away from talking
about the New England States and leave that to Don, so I
will kind of note them in a few places.
But, just quickly, NCSL is a membership
organization that all legislators and legislative staff are
members of. And, as you noted, we are holding our annual
legislative summit in Nashville the summer, August 5th to
8th, and we will actually have a scooter tour there. I was
in Nashville a few weeks ago kind of checking out the route
and making sure it's safe, and so the opportunity will be
available for some of you all if you attend. This is just
an overview of all the things that NCSL's transportation
program covers.
I do want to note that NCSL has a cooperative
agreement with NHTSA that we've had for 23 years now, and
that enables to do things like travel here from Denver to
do this. And I want to note that we have this traffic
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safety database that has traffic safety bills going all the
way back to 2007. I am tracking electric scooters in this
database. They are under the slow- and medium-speed
vehicle category, so if you look in there, you should be
able to find all the ones I'm going to talk about here.
So to back up, and I think the two speakers
before me did a good job of kind of talking about like why
are we talking about this. It's because, you know, you go
to certain places, you go to Austin, you go to Santa
Monica, and they do seem like they're everywhere, and there
are pretty big fleets in those cities.
So there's actually an exciting piece of research
that just came out I believe yesterday. I don't know if
it's actually been officially released yet by the National
Association of City Transportation Officials, and they're
really a group that's good at thinking about the nitty-
gritty granular on-the-ground operations, some of the
pieces that the States may kind of allow municipalities to
put in place. But they came up with this great report
yesterday, so this map right here shows you the State -
basically the different shared micro-mobility programs
throughout the country. So the yellow dots in this map
indicate cities with both scooter-share and bike-share
programs. The orange-only dots mark cities with only
scooter share provided the fleet is above 150 scooters.
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So this is just kind of fascinating. So NACTO
has been kind of tracking these numbers and this data since
around 2 010, and what you see is of course that, you know,
scooter share isn't even on there until last year because
that's basically when it started to be unveiled in places
like California basically first and some other markets like
Austin, Texas and what have you. So they essentially went
from zero shared scooter trips in 2017 to 38.5 million in
2018. And that's the overall amount of shared trips is
noted on there is 84 million. So they're already almost
half.
And some of what the other research shows you is
that the adoption of these vehicles is much higher than it
is for bike share or electric bikes. There is something
about these vehicles, devices that is more just to the kind
of novice beginner, which is more attractive or they want
to use them, and so basically the rate at which they're
being adopted or people are trying them out is much higher
than these other shared services. And I think that speaks
to, you know, the kind of -- their stunning popularity and
kind of the fact that they are, you know, a legitimate
transportation option.
So this map kind of gives you an overview of 2019
State e-scooter legislation. So 31 States and D.C. have
considered or enacted nearly 80 bills related to electric
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scooters in 2019. States in blue are currently considering
bills. The two yellow States are States, New Mexico and
Mississippi, that considered bills but didn't end up
enacting them in their sessions. And then Utah, Kentucky,
and Virginia are the three States that have bills signed by
the Governor. Also note that Arkansas and Maryland
currently have bills that are on the Governor's desk, and
from what it sounds like, they're likely going to get
signed by the Governor as well.
So I'm going to focus my remarks on the common
aspects I'm seeing in these bills, and so we're going to
talk about the definitions a little bit, the speed, both
the maximum design speed and the operating speed, the
minimum operator age, the helmet requirements, sidewalk and
road operation, and State-versus-local control.
So in Kentucky, defined as an electric low-speed
scooter; Utah, a motor-assisted scooter; Virginia, a
motorized scooter. I think the more important is that are
they basically relatively consistent in the kind of vehicle
they're describing? Mostly so. Kentucky and Virginia
further define these vehicles by stating they must weigh
less than 100 pounds. Utah's law is silent on this
attribute. I found that most States did -- because most of
these are pending, right, most of them did have that 100
pounds in there. I did notice that Connecticut's was 65
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pounds, and I thought that was kind of interesting.
And they typically mostly have, you know, you
must be able to break on dry pavement and most of them but
not all of them require that you have some sort of head and
rear lights and those other kind of attributes.
Virginia notably -- and the PennDOT
Representative was talking about that there's perhaps an
opportunity in the future. You know, this isn't going to
be the last micro-mobility kind of option out there. There
are things like motorized skateboards and other things that
are going to probably maybe become part of shared services,
and so at some point it might behoove States to develop
kind of a standard definition for all of these different
kind of devices, but that's kind of hard to do when you
don't know what they are.
Virginia did also define motorized skateboards as
part of their new law with the same operating requirements
and weight standards.
I will note that most States have similar
language disallowing the parking of a scooter in a manner
that impedes the reasonable movement of pedestrians or any
other traffic, and there's a lot more I could go into and
very happy to provide a lot of other supporting
information.
So speed, I think when you think about the safety
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of these things is the thing that's kind of utmost in
people's minds is people have alluded to, you know, the
speed capabilities or maybe not much different than a
bicycle. Of course, these aren't motorized. There are
electric bicycles, though, that are semi-motorized but you
still have to use human power.
So here's the kind of trends of where we're at.
So the majority of States have a 20-mile-per-hour maximum
kind of design speed of the electric scooter and the
operating speed. However, there are a good amount of
States -- you'll see the ones in the middle -- where the
design speed being 20 miles per hour but the operator is
not allowed to exceed 15 miles an hour. And you'll see
that includes Utah, one of the States who have enacted
their legislation, and of course the legislation here in
Pennsylvania. And then there's two States with 15 miles an
hour just for the design speed and operation speed.
And I can't necessarily speak to -- you know,
some of these bills are pretty far through the process, but
it's kind of hard to know, you know, which ones are going
to get enacted. And when I was looking yesterday, some of
them have been amended and changed since I looked at the
presentation last week. I did notice that Oklahoma had a
25-mile-per-hour, which kind of struck me because that was
definitely an outlier there.
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So the other key piece I think is the scooter
operator minimum age, and so what I've found is the most
common was 16. Note that Texas -- and I'll talk about this
a little bit more. Texas and a few States maybe go in a
little more detail about things that localities maybe
reserve the right to further regulate themselves.
There's a few States that reference motor vehicle
driver age, including Pennsylvania's law. A few States
with 15; one with 14, Virginia, one of the enacted States;
Utah with eight, which I was a little bit surprised by, but
then there are a number of States that don't even mention
an age in theirs. And, you know, like I said, who knows if
that will -- I think it will be very interesting at the end
of this year because I have no doubt things will change,
but this gives you kind of a snapshot in time.
Helmet requirements, not very many of them thus
far, so I should note that California, kind of maybe
unsurprisingly was, you know, ahead of the curve on this
because they were the first State -- this is where a lot of
these companies are from, and this is where these vehicles
were first deployed, so they did pass a bill last year, and
they made some changes, and I'll talk about a few more of
those changes. But they do require helmets for riders
under 18, as would Hawaii's pending bill. Louisiana has a
couple different bills, but one of them would be under 17
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would require helmets. And then as I reference in Texas,
they reserve the right for a locality to require the
operator to wear a safety helmet.
And on the safety part, I'm really glad that Don
brought up the Portland study because there is a lot of
anecdotal discussion of how safe these vehicles are, but
it's really hard to get a sense of vis-a-vis how safe are
they compared to being in a motor vehicle or walking or
being a bicyclist.
I will note that the Centers for Disease Control
is doing a study of I think 200 or 300 or so crashes that
involve scooters in the city of Austin over a two- or
three-month period in late 2018, and they're doing that
analysis now on kind of what led to those, the severity of
those and what have you, and obviously CDC is a very
important organization in terms of the rigor that they
bring to that kind of thing. I don't know what the
expected timeline is for that, but I'm hopeful to see that
soon and other studies like the one that Don mentioned
because I do think that's an important part of the
conversation.
So sidewalk and road operation, and this really
goes with -- you know, this is difficult because, as the
PennDOT Representative said, if you don't have good kind of
road systems that are amenable for bicyclists and scooters,
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you're probably going to lead to more sidewalk riding than
you want, and that creates a whole set of other problems.
But people are making that choice to ride on the sidewalks
probably because they feel unsafe themselves, not because
they want to make conditions unsafe for other people. So
that's something States have really been grappling with.
So States are typically treating e-scooters like
bikes in these bills, and many States are just straight up
saying that an e-scooter is kind of a subclassification
under a bicycle. It has the same rights and
responsibilities as a bicyclist. And motorists'
interactions with e-scooters are similar as they would be
with bikes. And Pennsylvania's law is basically along
those lines, so I list out some of those other States that
have those kind of attributes.
And then another interesting, you know, dynamic,
I didn't see this in a lot of bills, is States giving a top
posted speed basically above a scooter may not be able to
operate on. So Iowa, Oklahoma currently proposing 35 miles
an hour, Texas 30 miles an hour, Louisiana 25 miles an
hour. California it starts to get a little more
complicated. Basically if there's no bike lanes, you could
operate on a road up to 25 miles an hour. My reading of it
basically is like if there's a road that's 55 miles an hour
but as long as it has a bike lane, you could ride it on
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there. But it does allow a locality to authorize operation
on roads up to 35 miles an hour.
I did see a few examples of making it clear that
you can cross a roadway that's a higher top speed because,
you know, you have to be thoughtful about this. You want
to be safe, you want to provide a transportation option,
and if you're limiting the roadways that are available,
then you're, you know, limiting the reach of these vehicles
basically.
And in Wisconsin as another example with
basically they say that municipalities could keep operation
to streets less than 25 miles an hour. And that's a pretty
common trend that just States are -- some of them are not
even getting in the local control part, but some of them
are definitely ceding some of these and saying the
localities can go further.
And that's kind of the last piece here is that,
and then I have kind of a few other remarks. But you're
seeing many States not really weigh in on the State-local
control piece at all but some are trying to create some
common standards, especially when it comes to scooter share
because we have to remember that -- and I don't have
numbers and I wonder if someone does, but, you know, a lot
of people own these scooters, as Representative Neilson
alluded to. They individually own them. But really what
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we're largely talking about here is scooter-share
operators.
So one good example is Utah put in place a number
of kind of just common standards that municipalities have
to use when they're regulating at the local level so they
can authorize their operation on sidewalks and designate a
maximum speed on sidewalks, but the regulation must be
consistent with the regulation of bicycles. And penalties
for any moving or parking violation would also have to be
consistent with a violation for a bicycle.
Localities may -- and this is something I saw in
a decent amount of States. Localities may require fees
from the scooter-share operator, reasonable fees, you know,
for basically access to a right-of-way and what have you.
They may designate locations where scooter-share operators
may not stage shared scooters, and this is the Utah
example, provided that at least one location shall be
permitted on each side of each city block in commercial
zones and business districts. So they went definitely into
a little more detail.
And this is something, an important piece, is
require scooter-share operators to provide anonymous fleet
and ride activity data for completed trips starting or
ended within the jurisdiction because how are you going to
know how this is really playing into the overall
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transportation system if you don't have the data?
It is important that they have privacy safeguards
built in. I know the scooter-share companies have some
concerns about how that information is conveyed and that it
doesn't give away any business trademarks, you know, or any
identifying information of the individuals. And, as I
mentioned, Texas, their bill as now would really give a lot
of power to the localities to further restrict the location
a person may operate a motor-assisted scooter, increase the
minimum age for the operator, restrict the parking
locations, require a safety helmet, and a number of other
things.
And that's all I have. I'm happy to say
questions, and thanks a lot for having me.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you, Doug. I
appreciate it. Thank you for the testimony from both of
you.
Doug, let me just ask, in States that are
considering amending their vehicle codes to allow for
e-scooters, you know, do you have any information on
whether the States are saying they're going to allow it in
cities of the first class or the second class? Are they
limiting it to population areas where more people might
choose to use the scooters? How are they handling it?
Because we've heard from Don that there are a number of
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cities that are doing pilot programs.
MR. SHINKLE: I -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Tell us what's
happening there.
MR. SHINKLE: I saw one or two references to kind
of allowing a pilot program to be developed, but I actually
did not see -- and, like I said, I didn't look as closely
at the Northeast States, so I'm wondering if he might know.
But I saw no examples of any such restriction like you're
stating. They were basically all enabling them to be used
-- and, once again, we're talking about -- in some
instances some aspects of these bills, they're very much -
and they make it clear sometimes that they're talking about
scooter share. But really most of the time they're talking
just about scooters, and that may be individually owned.
So only the pieces of the bill that really get into scooter
share, and that really has to do about the kind of
relationship between the municipality and the scooter-share
operator in the State setting these overall rules. But to
answer your question, Chairman, I didn't actually see any
examples of any restriction or saying you can only be in
this size city or anything like that. I didn't see any of
that in the bills I looked at.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. And one
other thing that struck me, I think you said the city of
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Austin in Texas was examining 300 crashes in two to three
months?
MR. SHINKLE: Yes, I think it was -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Maybe we'll hear
more from Jonathan Greer from the insurance concerns that
that might raise, but this seems to me, you know, that's a
lot of crashes for a relatively short period of time.
MR. SHINKLE: Yes. And I can't speak too much to
the details. I mean, of course, whether -- the severity of
the crash is a question. You do have to keep in mind the
fleet size. I went to Austin about four or five months
ago, and, you know, I'm based in Denver, and Denver has a
scooter fleet of about 2,000 currently, which is a good
amount, but, you know, Denver is a pretty big city. It
doesn't seem overwhelming. But then I went to Austin and I
was like, wow, there's a lot of scooters here. And so
afterwards I looked it up and they have like 9,000. I
think they have even more now.
And so when you start thinking about it in those
numbers, maybe it's not, but I do think that at the end of
the day it needs to be carefully considered. Are they
really as safe as riding a bicycle, which is probably the
closest equivalent? I think it's probably too early to
really tell that with certitude. And I think probably some
of that has to do with, you know, just encouraging
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responsible riding and maybe having some targeted
enforcement that's not really focused maybe on citations as
much as just educating people on -- because you see a lot
of -- and I hate to get into the anecdotal, but you see a
lot of the I'm on the sidewalk, I'm on the street, I'm on
the sidewalk, and that's just confusing and hard for people
to interact with. But once again, that may be a response
to people just feeling I don't feel safe on the street, I'm
going to get on the sidewalk.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Yes. Okay.
Chairman?
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Thank you so much.
And I'm going to follow up. The liability question is one
that I have questions related to. I thought I heard, Doug,
you mention that in some of the States the State law passed
along the ability to impose liability requirements on the
local governments, and then in other States there was a
State standard that was applied. And whether the community
will be on that, I'm not sure. How can you best
characterize which is more prevalent? Is there any data
that would suggest which has provided more protections for
those that might find themselves in that sort of scenario?
MR. SHINKLE: Thank you for the question. And
I'll preface the same thing. I am not an insurance expert,
but I saw mostly examples of States -- and Utah comes to
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mind, which I might actually have the info back on this
slide if I can -- that mostly did -- most of the States
didn't even mention insurance. Some of these bills are
very much like just defining a scooter and some basic
operation standards about it. But the ones that did tended
to be more -- Utah was an example that I don't have there
that they basically come up with a common standard for what
a scooter-share operator, the kind of liability they would
have to cover. And I can certainly provide that
information to you.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Okay.
MR. HANNON: In our investigation we did find
that Washington State's legislature did require e-scooter
operators to carry commercial liability coverage with a
limit of at least $1 million for each occurrence and $5
million in the aggregate. Automobile insurance coverage
with a combined single limit of $1 million and if a local
authority authorizes e-scooter operation by individuals
under the age of 16, the local authority may require the
e-scooter operator to carry insurance at a greater amount
negotiated between the operator and the local authority.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Okay. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Representative
Martina White.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Thank you again, Doug, for
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being here today. I was curious along the lines of the
collections of the fines and if you had any information in
regards to what the municipalities are doing when it comes
to these scooter-share operators. Do they collect the
fines on behalf of the municipality? And also, are there
zones that are selected by a municipality in coordination
with these scooter-share operators to say, you know,
obviously we prefer that these things be parked in a
certain area and therefore it gets more expensive the
further away you go from those areas? Can you talk a
little bit more about that?
MR. SHINKLE: I can, and I imagine of course the
scooter-share operators would be more able to speak to
that. Just knowing from riding these and what have you,
they're typically geo-fenced because, like you said, you
want to have them in an area where they're most going to be
used. And the more they get to the periphery, that's
harder for the operators to bring back and they're also
less likely to be ridden.
Your question was asking about where the fines
that may be assessed by a municipality, like who's doing
that, first of all? From the instances I know -- and
that's probably not as much of that now, but there were
some instances -- and I can't think of the city -- whereas
from Denver where they started fining the companies for not
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redistributing scooters to agreed-upon locations, for them
cluttering the public way, for things like being thrown
into rivers which, you know, is unfortunate and not really
the fault of the scooter-share operating company. And I
don't think there's any good numbers in terms of
violations.
It sounds like you're talking maybe about like
the overall operations. There's not good information about
individuals speeding or, you know, riding these drunks,
although there was one -- someone prosecuted in Los Angeles
for that after hitting someone, but, you know, yes, to put
it in that perspective of how many people drive a motor
vehicle every day. But I don't really get a great sense of
where that money is necessarily going either, but really I
think the focus of the cities -- and there's other folks
that can talk to those better, but the focus of the cities
is on making sure that the right-of-way is clear and that
people are staying safe and that the operators are in a
good-faith kind of operating agreement with the city.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: And I guess just along
those lines, are the municipalities coordinating with these
operators, the companies to identify those areas that the
city prefers these bicycles be placed or the scooters be
placed?
MR. SHINKLE: I think largely so -- and, Don, you
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might have thoughts on this, too. But from what I know
very much -- and once again I'll use the example of the
local city that I'm in, Denver. They actually -- and
they're actually starting to move away from this a little
bit, but they prescribed that scooters had to be kind of
repositioned to certain areas near bus stops and transit
areas so they were kind of more in like little nodes rather
than spread out.
But I think what's been found from what I've
heard kind of anecdotally but also through an official
report from Denver is that, you know, people might ride a
scooter up right to their house at 10:00 at night, and they
might want it there the next morning and it's going to make
it more likely -- now, someone else may take it, but I
think they're finding that may be as long as it's within
kind of just a general zone that it might not make as much
sense to do that sort of kind of prescription that it needs
to be in a certain place.
I think when you start getting into kind of a
dense downtown environment and there's a lot of different
uses and activities and a lot of pedestrians, and somewhere
like New York City certainly comes to mind where, I mean,
sidewalks are already too full to begin with, that you
would then maybe look to what -- like the example that from
Utah where they said maybe in these central districts you
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have a prescribed area where you actually have parked on
the street, you know, either bike racks or little painted
areas, which some cities do have now, and those often can
be bike-share parking as well.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Okay. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you.
Representative Neilson?
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: I'd like to follow up
with Representative White because the enforcement issue
isn't the problem. I mean, we're from the city of the
first class, and like New York City, we have a lot of
people on our sidewalks. I've never seen a person in my
lifetime get pulled over on a bicycle because by the time
you get any kind of enforcement, they're gone. Yes,
there's yelling, screaming, ba, ba, ba, ba, pushing people,
but just going, that's -- how can you enforce it? Have we
seen any kind of -- I mean, there has to be some kind of
data on enforcement because we're sitting here saying it's
safe to ride on sidewalks, but how can we -- logistics-
wise, it just doesn't work. Bike lanes it works in the
street and stuff like that but just not -
MR. HANNON: You know, this is really a new
phenomenon, too. This is, you know, a year and a half that
this has started. I think that if you look to the city of
Baltimore, they're the ones that had a pilot project and
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now the city itself is really putting in a lot of new
regulations about enforcement and giving the power to
the -- well, of course to the city police but also to the
city Department of Public Works, the ability to go in and,
you know, find the companies if they find out that the
e-scooters are not being parked appropriately. They are
looking at implementing a lot higher fines on both the
users and on the companies, and I think it's from lessons
learned.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: So both of you spoke in
your testimony, and I thank you for that today, about the
local government creating regs. And like just like take
like speeding, we know that scooters can go a little faster
than allowed. Would that be something you feel that we
should regulate those companies to monitor and send out
fines to those users? I mean, because how does an officer
look at somebody and say, hey, look, I think he's going 17
miles an hour, he should only go 15. And I know there's
regs on these products because, like I said, I've owned a
couple and there's little stuff you can do to regulate
them, but how should we as legislators address that issue?
If you have any opinion, I'd love to hear it. And that's
all I have, Chairman. Thank you. I'll wait for your
answers.
MR. SHINKLE: Most if not all of the scooter-
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share scooters like this one here to my understanding are
governed so that they cannot go faster than 15 miles per
hour. Now, if you're going downhill, of course, you might
be able to go faster than 15 miles per hour, but generally,
that helps possibly solve that. I think to your questions
when you get further in the process it might be really
helpful to have the National Association of City
Transportation Officials, that NACTO group, because they
can really get in to talking more about the nitty-gritty
operation granular things.
I think the other thing to your point about how
do you enforce this is that many States and cities -- and
I'm sure PennDOT and the Office of Highway Safety here,
which I'm not sure if it resides in PennDOT or where here
in the State -- but typically they receive dollars from the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to do target
enforcement on a number of different things. And this
happens in Denver where I am, and I can give you an
example.
I don't know if you know what an Idaho stop is
where you're on a bicycle and you're supposed to stop at a
stop sign but, you know, if you see most people on a bike,
you don't really actually really stop. And I know that you
get tickets for it because I got one. And it was at an
intersection where they deemed to be a problem, and so I
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think that's what you do is you look to certain places.
And I don't want to be flippant by giving that, but I'm
giving you an actual example of like where they kind of
identified an intersection where they felt like they needed
to make kind of an example of people, and I was one of
those examples of the $90 ticket for going 10 miles per
hour through a stop sign. And I'm not complaining about it
because I broke the law, but you focus on some
intersections and some problem areas.
I personally don't think the citing part is
really necessary as much as just making sure that people
understand that this is, you know, a shared system and
everyone has their responsibilities. And that's probably
the best way to approach that and involving local law
enforcement, but there's a lot of money available federally
and state-wise to do that kind of targeted enforcement.
It's typically done in the May, June, July time periods.
There's actually some preordained times of year that, you
know, of course correspond when lots of people are walking,
biking, and doing things like taking scooter share.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you.
Representative Innamorato, did I get that right?
REPRESENTATIVE INNAMORATO: Thank you.
Innamorato, but very close.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
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REPRESENTATIVE INNAMORATO: Thank you for your
testimony. And thank you for speaking to the trends in
permitting fees and fines. But I was hoping that you could
speak a little bit to taxes imposed on the individual user
by localities and what you've seen there and how you've -
if they have -- I know Baltimore has, but if these cities
or municipalities have imposed taxes, how those funds have
been used.
MR. HANNON: Well, in Baltimore they're looking
to use it to improve the bike paths and also the
infrastructure. It's an agreement between the companies
and the localities. That's signed up pretty much up front
as to how much funds will it be in order to use it, $1 to
unlock it, 15 cents per minute.
But the one thing that is very new is so much
information is going to be available, so much data. When
you go to get on an e-scooter, the only way you're going to
unlock it is with your app, and it's going to say that Don
Hannon is unlocking this and Don Hannon is going to be
having it for the -- you know, I have it for the next 10
minutes. And if I go and I throw it in somebody's front
yard, the police come, they are going to be able to say,
well, let's go talk to Lime and see who was the last person
that had that. Well, that was Don Hannon.
So this amount of data that's available now is
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going to be something -- that scenario that's going to be
new to the cities and to everyone really. And, you know,
it will be interesting seeing what happens with it.
MR. SHINKLE: And I think that NACTO group once
again that probably would have a very -- they would
probably actually have a catalog of exactly what those fees
are, and I'm happy to see if I can find that for you. I
think you generally covered like the general dynamics of
the situation well.
The other thing to keep in mind is that you want
to -- I think there's an exciting opportunity because I
know that maybe like the bicycling advocacy world sees this
as a way as like, hey, now there's more people that are
wanting to use bike lanes. This is a way to help us
advocate for more of that, and that's interesting.
What you see -- and this is another example from
Denver from the report I read is that you have to keep in
mind, I mean, if you're going to charge a fee, you want to
be thoughtful about how much that fee is because the
average trip length for these -- and it depends by city of
course, but it's typically less than a mile. So if you
start adding on a fee, then it might adjust people's like
likelihood to use it, so I guess that's just something to,
you know, keep in mind. But I'm happy to look in and see
if NACTO has that information because I think that they
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probably do.
REPRESENTATIVE INNAMORATO: Okay. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Gentlemen, thank
you very much for your testimony today. I don't see
anybody else asking questions of you. Doug, I'd be remiss
if I didn't tell you, since this is your first visit to
Harrisburg, you should take some time and visit our State
Capitol. In 1908 President Teddy Roosevelt said this was
the handsomest State Capitol in the entire country. Most
people today, what is it, 111 years later, still agree it's
the prettiest State Capitol in the entire United States,
not quite as grand and voluminous as the National Capitol,
but frankly much more vibrant in terms of its colors. And
it's well worth taking an hour or two, and we have tours
all the time that you can latch onto and learn about this
beautiful building.
So thank you very much -
MR. SHINKLE: Thank you for that.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- for being here.
Thanks for making the trip to be here to lend us expertise
in this.
Our next group will be -- or testifiers -- I'm
sorry, we only have one testifier, Jonathan Greer on behalf
of the insurance industry -- and Sam Marshall? Oh, wait a
second, last-minute substitution here. Okay. Sam Marshall
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from the Insurance Federation. And also we have a
submission hear from Ted Leonard, who can't be here today,
from the American Automobile Association, the Pennsylvania
Federation, so we'll pass around his testimony.
MR. MARSHALL: Thanks.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Jonathan is going
to join you here?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. Yes.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. That's good.
MR. MARSHALL: We're here. He can be Ted
Leonard.
But thank you for the chance to be here. Sam
Marshall, joined with Jonathan Greer with the Insurance
Federation.
And we appreciate the appeal of the scooters.
Going up to 20 miles an hour, I'm not sure that quite
qualifies as low-speed. That would be a pretty fast
sidewalk pace to a person like me. But, you know, we
appreciate how popular they are. It doesn't surprise me at
all.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Sam, can you get a
little closer to the mic?
MR. MARSHALL: Sure.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thanks.
MR. MARSHALL: It doesn't surprise me at all
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that, you know, people -- I mean, it's a lot more fun than
a bicycle because, you see, you have to pump a bicycle.
You just hop on one of these and it moves. That doesn't
surprise me that the take-up rate would be a little
quicker.
You know, we don't mean to be wet blankets on
this, but we do have some safety and liability concerns
that we think should be addressed in the bill and in your
own deliberations.
You know, the bill says that these you know,
should be regulated consistent with bicycles, pedal cycles,
or whatever the technical term is. Everybody would have to
be of legal driving age, but other than that, the
regulation of bikes would be about the same. You don't
need a license, you know, no training, no helmet
requirement, and we're insurance people, no insurance.
You know, and also, you know, it says, okay,
localities, you can regulate them on your own, but only to
the extent you do so consistent with bicycles. You know,
we think that raises, first and foremost, some safety
concerns. We hear that these are as safe as bicycles. I'm
not exactly sure of that. I think you want to check that
out. And there was reference by the last panel to some of
the studies going on. Our experience is that when you have
something with wheels and then you put a motor on it, it's
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a lot different than if you have to, you know, power it by
hand or foot.
You know, we've seen -- you know, we were
impressed by the demonstration of it that you had a couple
of weeks ago out in front of the Capitol. It's a good-
looking scooter, you know, wide handlebars which I think is
important, you know, for the balance, a substantial
floorboard, and again, that's important in terms of the
standards that you have in the regulation on these. It was
also being ridden on a beautiful day with no traffic. You
know, but I think that some of the standards you may want
to consider in terms of how you define an e-scooter having
a higher standard for that safety. There's a big
difference between substantial handlebars and something
like we all had when we were little kids and, you know,
very narrow just in terms of the balance of it, same thing
with the floorboard.
You know, as to their impact, you know, whether
it's on roads, sidewalks, or bike paths, I'm not sure these
are really the same as bicycles, you know, certainly from a
safety perspective. I think it makes sense to allow a
locality to have different rules of the road in that
situation. There are some localities that have bike paths,
bike lanes, some localities with sidewalk concerns.
You know, I think, as we've heard from the past
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testifiers, it's very early in the advent of these
e-scooters. You know, right now, we envision that they'll
all be on a sharing arrangement, not an ownership
arrangement. Who knows in four years how that will be
true? I don't know. That's why you need to have some
flexibility as you do this. You know, frequently, you have
something like this, they end up being used in ways that
none of us today are going to be able to imagine.
You know, I do think -- and localities obviously
have their own different traffic concerns, their own
different, you know, capabilities. I mean, you know,
certain areas have sidewalks that are, you know, wide and
plentiful. Other places have sidewalks that -- I mean, I'm
a Philadelphian. Our sidewalks are pretty narrow and
already congested. You know, you're bombing along at 20
miles an hour and something that can, you know, really
weave in and out, that's a real concern there.
You know, on an insurance -- you know, and I'd
ask -- I'll just put this in because I am a Philadelphian
and there are a lot of Philadelphians up here. You know,
to say that they're the same as bicycles, we have them in
Philadelphia and I think it's the same in a lot of places,
but we have a great bike path in the city called Forbidden
Drive, and, you know, I suspect everybody from Philadelphia
has been on that. I mean, it's even older than the
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Capitol. It goes back that far. It's called Forbidden
Drive, and it's probably the most beautiful spot in
Philadelphia. It's called Forbidden Drive because
motorized vehicles are forbidden from driving there.
And you go out on a Saturday or Sunday in the
morning and, you know, there are people out walking dogs,
there are people going for a jog, there are people on
bicycles. But the one thing there isn't in this, you know,
little jewel inside of, you know, Fairmount Park in
Philadelphia, there aren't any motorized vehicles, you
know, no electric-powered bikes. I mean, it's all -- you
know, if you're out there, you're on foot, you know, it's a
very quiet moment.
If you're going to call these e-scooters
bicycles, I mean, I guess I'm not sure how Forbidden Drive
and places like that are going to hang out. You know, bike
paths, you know, I think that's where localities would want
the ability to maybe have different regulations than what
they might have for bicycles, and I'd use Philadelphia and
I'd use Forbidden Drive as an example of that.
On the insurance concerns, you know, there's a
question. And Representative Fee started to go into that,
as did Representative Carroll. You know, these are going
to be rented, and that seems to be the way, you know, that
most of them are going to be used. And the question is
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what happens in the event of an accident? You know, is
there any insurance on it? The answer to that is going to
be no. I mean, not from the person who's doing the -- you
know, maybe the -- not from the individual's perspective.
You know, there have been other States, you know,
Utah, you know, being an example, and I sent yesterday to
Eric, you know, and Representative Rothman -- I shared the
Utah law, and as the past testifiers said, you know, the
Utah law is pretty extensive on what the insurance
requirements would be for these, you know, because there
will be accidents. You know, Chairman Hennessey, as you
noted, you know, here in Austin, you know, they've had a
bunch. It is not surprising, I mean, there are going to be
accidents. What's the insurance? You know, there is a
danger.
One thing from -- Representative fee asked, you
know, what about insurance? And it's actually a
recommendation that we would make in the bill. You may
want to say that for Title 75 purposes these things are
going to be treated, you know, from now and henceforth
evermore as if they're bicycles, you know, but then we
would want a clarification that they're not going to be -
you know, that -- for purposes of insurance they're not the
same as bicycles.
We have in insurance policies if you're riding a
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bike and you get in an accident, your homeowner policy will
cover that, cover the damage you do. You know, I didn't
know it myself, but in most auto policies, you know, if you
have an auto policy and you're riding a bike, it will cover
your first-party medical damages if you get in an accident.
Those are things that companies do with bicycles.
Electric scooters, I mean, again, it goes -- our
experience is that the minute you put a motor on something,
it's an entirely different type of use, you know, when it's
used, who uses it, how it's used, and, you know, it no
longer is a means of exercise as well as transit. It's a
means of transit. That makes a difference.
You know, we are -- you know, we share the goal
to ease congestion on roads. You know, that's an insurance
concern as much as a broader societal concern particularly
in urban areas. You know, and we see the value of these
scooters in that. You know, there's -- you know, but we
talked about what kind of roads and you might want these
moving around, again, as in Philadelphia, you might want
them going from West Philadelphia to Center City for all
the kids at Penn or Drexel or whatever. You don't want
them on Roosevelt Boulevard, you know, just a totally
different deal. You know, you don't want them on the
expressway in the morning, you know, so just exactly where
you can have them, you know, that's something that has to
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be, I think, cleared up as you do it.
And, I think, you know, we'd echo some of the
points that others have raised, how you monitor these, how
you enforce any laws on this, you know, what you're going
to do on that safety end. You know, I'm a proponent of
helmets. You know, these aren't going to be -- and
everybody says, well, you don't have it for a bike, why
would you have it for here? As you all know, on the
motorcycle end, we differ from the General Assembly on
that. We were in favor of the helmet law. We didn't
support its repeal.
But, you know, it becomes a much different deal
if these are going to be primarily shared things for
somebody just, you know, spur of the moment gets one.
That's a lot different than a bicycle where you're leaving
your home, you have to lock up the bike at the end. I
mean, it's your bike. You have sort of an equity stake in
that and you're removed from -- easier to have a helmet,
easier -- you know, I mean you -- and speaking as a person
who does a fair amount of bike riding, people generally
have helmets, and because they're going from home, it's
easy. You just put it on as you're there. You know, when
you're coming out of class at school, it may be not so
easy. You know, if you're leaving a bar at night, not so
common. It's just I think the way these will be used is
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going to be, you know, much different.
And actually that graph that sort of showed,
okay, here's the rise in how bicycles are used in these,
you know, shared bicycle deals and all of a sudden
e-scooters come along and, you know, in one year's time,
you know, they match with bicycles are. It doesn't
surprise me. I mean, we understand the appeal of it.
But I think, you know, if you're going -- in that
sense, if you're going to provide for their regulation and
their oversight whether on a State level or on a local
level, you have to acknowledge that they're really not
quite the same as bicycles and you may want to adjust to
that. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you.
Jonathan, do you want to testify at all?
MR. GREER: Sam had covered our testimony.
I wanted to respond to something that I think
Representative Neilson brought up earlier, which is the
inspection of these I'll call them vehicles -- scooters.
And there is a connection to insurance. Given the nature
of the relationship between the renter and the scooter,
it's like if you rent a car, you're probably not quite as
careful with that car as you are with your own.
You have no idea when you rent one of these how
well it was used by the prior user, and you don't know if
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the brakes are working properly, you don't know if the
wheels are attached properly, and given the nature of the
transaction -- and again, we're talking about situations -
it's a platform situation where you're picking one up where
someone left it off. You have no idea how that was
previously used by the prior user or the 10 before that.
And I don't know -- you may hear from some of the
purveyors of these scooters later today how they address
it, but that's an interesting question in terms of their
ongoing safety, in terms of their reliability, their
mechanical reliability. Initially, that may be very
different than when it is 50 times removed after it's been
used.
And I don't know how frequently they're examined
to make sure that they're in proper operating, you know,
function. And that's not something that we contemplate.
That's a good point.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you.
You guys, seem to me, are in a pretty good position,
probably better than the rest of us, for accumulating
information from insurance companies in other States. Some
of them might be affiliated with Pennsylvania insurers,
whatever, but if you could provide any information of how
some of these States where seems to be growing like topsy,
the use of these electronic scooters. Portland, Oregon,
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we've heard about California, we've heard about -- if you
could find out any -- how the insurance industry is dealing
with those issues and get that to us, we'll get it to our
Members.
MR. MARSHALL: And I know -- I mean, now I know,
as an industry, the Utah law for instance is one where the
insurance requirements in that we would endorse.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: I'm sorry, the
insurance -
MR. MARSHALL: The insurance requirements in the
Utah law, and I forwarded -- I'd just gotten it yesterday,
and that -- you know, and it's a detailed insurance
requirement at a State level, and we would endorse
something like that.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. I'm not so
much interested in what the, you know, initial requirement
for carrying what coverage levels are. I'm interested in
how the insurance industry is handling and what experience
they have in terms of the claims that are coming in because
three years ago you probably had no claims for this kind of
stuff and now you might have -- well, we heard, you know,
300 accidents in two months in one city seems like
something that you guys would be tearing your hair out
about.
MR. MARSHALL: And I understand, but it goes to
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my point about generally insurance policies. We may cover
bikes and we'll cover mopeds if it's registered. These,
you know, depending on how you're going to classify these,
they aren't covered in your standard auto policy or
homeowner policy, you know, so we, you know -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Let me just
-- I thought you said that, you know, if we had an accident
in today's world here in Pennsylvania it would be covered
by your homeowner's policy, not so much -
MR. MARSHALL: A bicycle. A bicycle would, not a
bicycle with a motor on it. And our concern with this
legislation is, you know, these say -- for purposes of
Title 75, these say that e-scooters would be bicycles. For
purposes of insurance, we don't think that e-scooters are
bicycles because they are motorized.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MR. MARSHALL: Your homeowner policy may cover
you for a bike. It specifically excludes in your standard
homeowner policy. It would specifically exclude a
motorized deal.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you.
I get the distinction now. Thank you.
Chairman Carroll?
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: And that is exactly
what I was going to drive towards. So, today, a homeowner
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with a homeowner policy and a private-owned scooter, does
this policy specifically prevent a claim against that
policy with a privately owned scooter?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. An e-scooter we'll call it,
I mean, if it's a -
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: All right. What
we're describing today.
MR. MARSHALL: -- you know, a motorized scooter,
yes, that would be exempt.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Okay. And then if
this were to go forward as currently suggested that we
equate these scooters with bicycles, there'd be no need to
amend homeowner's policies as a result because the policy
then -- which supersedes which? Does the policy supersede
Title 75 or does Title 75 supersede the policy?
MR. MARSHALL: And that's why law schools crank
them out by the bushels, you know, and that's why we would
want there to be a clarification. We would say, no, you
know, this bill applies purely for PennDOT, you know, for
Title 75 purposes, but, you know, there are a lot of
lawyers out there, and somebody would say, you know what,
the General Assembly just said that these are the same
thing as bicycles. Therefore, for insurance purposes, even
though you made the distinction, it's no longer valid.
And, you know, that's a clarification that we would want.
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I mean, we would say, no, no, we think these are distinct.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Okay. And I guess
then the hypothetical scenario where you have your wish and
we draw that distinction and then somebody's on one of the
rideshare scooters and they cause $1,000 worth of damage to
a motor vehicle, what happens in that scenario then?
MR. MARSHALL: And in that scenario, you know,
the -- you know, the vehicle that they damage, that
person's insurance is going to have to pick up the tab.
But the concern that we would have -- and, you know, we do
that now. I mean, if you're driving along somebody, I
mean, it's going to be an added risk. You know, we would
say that these probably should come, therefore, with their
own insurance coverage on it, and that's what Utah did.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Okay. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thanks. Sam, just
to follow up on that, if somebody hits my car, you know, my
insurance company will go after that person who was
operating the scooter. Would they not subrogate it?
MR. MARSHALL: Pay -- you mean go after -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: After I pay my
deductible they'd pay me and then they'd go after the rider
of the scooter I would think.
MR. MARSHALL: And the experience is that going
after individuals is, you know, frankly generally more cost
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than it produces.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Got you.
MR. MARSHALL: And these are going to be used on
college -- I mean, you know, I'm not sure that anybody's
going to say let's go sue a lot of college kids.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you.
Representative Kinsey.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think Mr. Marshall answered the question. I was a little
bit confused. Initially, I was going to ask about the
electric bicycles or I guess the mopeds that are pedaled
and then just to get started, but I think you did answer.
They are insured under homeowner's insurance?
MR. MARSHALL: You know what, to the -- I mean
we've, frankly, never seen a claim come up on one of those.
To the extent that they are those motor-assisted, you know,
bikes, you know, if you pedal it and you're -
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Yes.
MR. MARSHALL: -- you know, you're going way
uphill and the hill gets a little bit steep for you and all
of a sudden an engine kicks in, those -- in your homeowner
policy I'd still regard that as motor-assisted. We've just
never seen claims coming up on those.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Okay.
MR. MARSHALL: Now, that'd be -- you know, so I
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can't -- you know, and that's -- and what I'm talking about
is in the standard form. But, no, those would be motor-
assisted and therefore excluded.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Excluded?
MR. MARSHALL: A general rule.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Okay. Well, listen, I
just want to say I appreciate your testimonies, you and Mr.
Greer. I think that, as Representative Rothman and I
talked, we do talk about the safety issue and, you know,
we're going to have greater discussion on that as well. I
guess I still have a lot to learn. You know, I'm still
learning -- like I said, I didn't recognize that mopeds
were under the homeowner's insurance policy. I just did
not realize that, so it sort of creates -
MR. MARSHALL: Well, now, a moped, I mean, if
you're talking about like a Vespa scooter, that's its own
vehicle and subject to registration and, I mean, you know,
those get -- you know, mopeds -- people, you know, that's a
pretty common form of transit in the city. You know, the
weather gets warm, you see a lot of mopeds out in Center
City. Those are licensed and have their own insurance
requirements.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Are they allowed on
Forbidden Drive? I'm from Philly also, but -
MR. MARSHALL: No.
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REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Okay.
MR. MARSHALL: They're not at all. You know, I
mean, Forbidden is as the name suggests. I mean -
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Well, I've only -
listen, you know, I ride my bicycle there. I'm just -- I
wasn't sure about that because, again, I'm thinking about a
bicycle, but then there's -- I've seen bicycles that also
have -- that are powered but folks are still pedaling it;
they're just not using the power. So -
MR. MARSHALL: You're right. I mean, as I
understand this now, two guys who have both ridden on
Forbidden Drive, you don't see those on Forbidden Drive,
you know, I mean there it's just truly, you know, bikes and
people out -
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Just -- okay.
MR. MARSHALL: -- you know, jogging and walking.
But, you know -- and frankly those -- I mean, you know,
that's not a very -- you know, those motor-assist, you
know, pedals, you know, pedal bicycles, that's not a big
market. I mean, they're not -
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: I got you.
MR. MARSHALL: -- common.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Okay.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, I mean, that's a very
niche deal. You know, these -- you know, these scooters, I
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mean, the appeal of the scooter is, guess what, you don't
have to do any pumping. You know, there's no aerobic value
in these. There's a great transit value.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Right.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, they're not -- that
engine isn't assisting you as you do most of the work.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Right.
MR. MARSHALL: It does all the work for you.
REPRESENTATIVE KINSEY: Right. Right, I
appreciate that. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Ed? Ed.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Yes.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: May I follow up with a quick
question -
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Yes, go.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: -- while we're on that
subject?
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Go ahead.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Yes, go ahead.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: Sorry.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Please.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: I'm interrupting, but I'm
sorry.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Yes.
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REPRESENTATIVE FEE: I just want to be clear on
something so I understand it. In Utah, the ones who carry
the insurance are the rideshare companies, not the
individual. Is that what you said?
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. You know, and I'll get
you -- or Eric has, you know, the copy of that law. And,
you know, we just got it ourselves. I mean, it was just
enacted.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: Okay.
MR. MARSHALL: You know, and I don't normally
follow Utah law. You know, but that is the scooter-share
operator is the way they refer to it there. And I -
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: For the company, not the -
MR. MARSHALL: And I believe that means the
company.
REPRESENTATIVE FEE: Yes. Okay. Thank you.
Sorry about that.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: [inaudible].
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: No, Mindy just stole it.
I appreciate that, though, Chairman. Being a gentleman
sometimes costs you the good questions.
However, hopefully later on on the liability end
on the working of the equipment itself I hope maybe that
one of the companies can address that because that might be
addressed in the wrap, so we're all trying to learn that
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here today. And the liability both for the person, as we
know, Sam, going down, getting run over by one of these
might happen. There's only 11 cases in the last year that
Santa Monica had because there was a case study done there,
which I read last night.
But there are also class-action lawsuits because
they're fighting over liability, both the individual who
did the damage, who hurt the person or vice versa. There's
a whole bunch of lawsuits out there for that. And it looks
like everybody's fighting, whether my health insurance
should cover it, why should I have to have my health
insurance pay? You hurt me. I was walking, minding my own
business and stuff like that. So it's curious to see.
So if you can talk your colleagues nationally
because I know you're part of a large organization. Maybe
they have some studies on this as well. That would be
great.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes. And we'll look at -- and,
you know, I mean, I'll be fascinated to see the Austin
study that the panel before talked about.
REPRESENTATIVE NEILSON: Thank you, Chairman.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Are there any -- thank
you, Chairman. Are there any aspects of the Utah law that
you felt were extremely important or anything that you feel
should be added to that here in Pennsylvania?
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MR. MARSHALL: You know -- and I'm -- you know,
and I'm not familiar that much with the deliberations that
went into Utah. I mean, you know, it did fascinate me. I
mean, you know, and this whole issue is fascinating to see,
and I'm impressed by the thoroughness and the concern for
safety. You know, we were joking with, you know, some of
your colleagues from the Senate side, you know, there's a
lot more concern about the safety of these than sometimes
there seems to be about testing autonomous vehicles on
public roads. You know, it amazes me, you know, because I
think that you are on that.
In the Utah law they had more definitions, you
know, and tighter definitions on what qualifies as an
e-scooter. You know, we saw I guess the demonstration was
with a Lime scooter. I was impressed. You know, it goes
to Jonathan's point how often they're inspected and, you
know, and make sure that they're just as good on the
hundredth ride as they are on the first, you know, that's a
good question. But, you know, you may want to have those
types of standards, and I think Utah is an example that did
that and, you know, some of the other States.
But I haven't seen, going to the point that we
were talking about here and Jonathan makes, I'm not sure
that there have been any sort of, you know, inspection and,
you know, maintenance type deals, and that -- you know,
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particularly given that these are rented, it's not unlike
when you rent a car and you turn it in, somebody is
checking to see if you had any dings and, you know, they
then get it ready for the next guy. You know, these are
just the next person picks it up.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Do you think that these
types of scooters being present, say, in the city of
Philadelphia -- we obviously have higher insurance rates in
comparison to other areas. Do you feel that these could
potentially cause -- you know, if there are a significant
number of accidents that occur in part due to these
scooters being on the roadways, do you think that could
cause insurance rate increases potentially?
MR. MARSHALL: Oh, yes, you know, because just
the way life works. I mean, if an e-scooter is hit by a
car, you know, we can all argue about who's at fault, you
know, but generally the insurance company of the auto
driver is going to have to pay. And that goes into, you
know, where I'd say that the -- you know, you want to allow
the city of Philadelphia to have some autonomy on rules of
the road, you know, where these can be used.
I mean, frankly, you know, you worry about it on
the roadways but, you know, I'm speaking more as a
pedestrian when I'm in the city. I'd worry about it more
on sidewalks. So you get into the whole bike path, you
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know, keeping them in bike lanes and, you know, there in
Center City. But you start going into the neighborhoods.
That's a tougher question. And that's where I think you're
going to want the city to be able to step in and say, you
know, we have some unique concerns. These aren't quite the
same as bikes, you know, because they're motorized.
They're just different than bikes.
REPRESENTATIVE WHITE: Well, thank you for your
time.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Sam, just as I've
been thinking about this, motorcycles and bicycles, you
know, aside from -- you know, they seem more similar than
scooters and bicycles, especially if I'm standing on a
platform that the rear wheels are a foot, two feet, three
feet apart. It would seem to me that that scooter would be
more stable. But if you did lose your balance, it would
almost be impossible to recover your balance like you might
on a motorcycle or a bicycle.
I share your concerns about -- you know, I don't
know if you should rush headlong into saying that these are
the same as bicycles because I think your ability as a
rider on a two-wheeled vehicle to recover your balance is
probably a lot better, and harder to lose your balance on a
scooter with wide wheels in the rear but maybe harder to
recover the balance if you do lose -- and once you do lose
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your balance so -
MR. MARSHALL: Yes, I guess, you know, I think
the handlebars on the Lime one were not quite as wide as on
a standard bicycle, but, you know, they were wide and the
platform was fairly substantial. But, you know, from an
insurance perspective, it's putting a motor on it that
makes it different.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Right.
MR. MARSHALL: I mean, a motorcycle and a
bicycle, from an insurance perspective, entirely different
because a motorcycle -- again, and the reason is one says
motor, you know, and that from -- you know, I think from a
liability perspective is that motorized aspect that's going
to be the concern where it's going to be different.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. The
comparison I was trying to draw is that we used to have
motorcycles and we all knew them as the two-wheeled bikes
and now we have these -- the three-wheelers, sometimes the
two wheels are in the front -
MR. MARSHALL: Yes.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- and one rear
wheel drive I guess, and sometimes it's reversed, the
single wheel on the front. But, you know, we should be
able to find something in terms of the stability,
comparative stability between two-wheelers and three-
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wheelers by looking at that experience. And maybe you guys
-- you know, your insurance industry could help us with
that as well.
MR. MARSHALL: Yes.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you
very much -
MR. MARSHALL: Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- for your
testimony, both of you. Where's the list here?
Our next testifiers we have Dr. Megan Ryerson,
the Transportation Chair and Associate Professor at
University of Pennsylvania; Matthew Kopko, the Director of
policy from Bird Rides Incorporated; and Shari Shapiro,
who's here on behalf of the Lime company.
Okay. So now we've been talking in terms of
theoretics, and now suddenly we're going to have people who
actually can talk to us about the practical aspects of, you
know, this new form of transportation.
So, Doctor, are you going to lead off?
DR. RYERSON: Great. Absolutely. And thank you
so much for the opportunity to speak today.
I'm Professor Megan Ryerson. I'm the UPS
Foundation Chair of transportation at the University of
Pennsylvania, and I'm a Professor of Transportation,
Engineering, and Urban Planning. My expertise is in
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studying how travelers, you and I, choose our mode of
transportation for each trip and how these choices affect
the economy, how they affect pollution, how they affect
congestion, and how they affect quality of life.
So from my expertise and from my position as a
professor and a researcher, not as an advocate of any
particular mode, I'm here to speak in support of a
transportation system that includes e-scooters, helping
people get from A to B while promoting a vibrant
transportation system and economy.
Scooters will be a new choice that some but not
all will choose for getting around. Across the U.S. -- and
we've talked about these studies throughout the morning -
we've seen the demand for driving and rideshare drop when
scooters are introduced. Now, this is great news for many
of us. This is great news for all of us, but it's also
great news for people who want to keep driving. Fewer cars
on the road means less congestion and less scrambling for
parking.
And I'd like to just note that I disagree that
there's no aerobic benefit to scooters. People could scoot
to transit and then walk on the other end. Scooters are a
piece of the transportation puzzle that we're all solving
throughout the day that enables us to make choices that are
more active.
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These new scooter riders will create a safety-in-
numbers effect for others. When you and I see more people
out walking, biking, and scooting, we feel drawn to do the
same. So safety in numbers gets more people out biking,
walking, and scooting, which brings an increased demand for
these separated transportation facilities, these
multipurpose lanes, bike lanes in some places that we've
been talking about throughout the morning.
Across Pennsylvania, separated lanes for slower
vehicles and having the faster vehicles in another lane
have made people safer and keep everyone behaving, another
topic that we've talked about throughout the morning.
Drivers pay more attention, cyclists don't bike on the
sidewalk, and pedestrians wait for crossing times when we
have safe transportation systems.
Now, we certainly need more safety. In
Pennsylvania last year in our transportation system without
scooters there were over 1,100 fatalities and 81,000
injuries on the roads. My city of Philadelphia has the
dubious distinction of having the highest rate of traffic
deaths per capita. Nearly half of those deaths are
pedestrians and cyclists. Ten percent are children.
We have a transportation safety crisis today, and
we cannot just rely on expensive enforcement. The only way
to address this crisis is through design, which is at the
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core of what I do in my work: infrastructure that slows
down traffic at intersections, makes pedestrians and
cyclists more visible, and physically separates fast cars
and slower bikes, scooters, and pedestrians.
So again, I have to mention, with all due
respect, I would rather have a few scooters on Forbidden
Drive and safe transportation infrastructure so we can all
walk our children to school without feeling like we're
taking our lives in our hands, which is currently how I
certainly feel in Philadelphia.
Building safe infrastructure and giving people
new modes like electric scooters will have a positive
ripple effect across the economy, congestion, and quality
of life. Very recently, researchers at the University of
Missouri just discovered that if Kansas City implemented
safe protected infrastructure, local businesses would
benefit from $500 million in increased spending and more
than 700 lives would be saved over the next 20 years. Why?
In short, safer transportation infrastructure effectively
brings businesses, people, and opportunities closer
together by making it easier to get from A to B.
Let's forget scooters, any sort of mode of
transportation except for walking just for a second, and I
want you to imagine that the sidewalk between the Capitol
and the Amtrak station was not there. Very, very few of us
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would walk between the Capitol and the Amtrak station, like
I had the pleasure of doing this morning. Those of us who
did walk would slow down traffic significantly, causing
congestion and so much weaving as vehicles tried to get
around us. We would certainly also be putting ourselves in
an unsafe situation. People would stop walking in
Harrisburg because they would feel alone out there. There
are no eyes on the street. Many of us would take a taxi,
causing needless congestion. But build a sidewalk and
people will walk, shop, and experience the city, which
reduces congestion, pollution, and increases the vibrancy
of a place. Build safe infrastructure, and people will use
it.
I would like to take a minute to encourage the
Committee to consider the inequity of prohibiting
e-scooters while not restricting other forms of automotive
mobility, namely, to bring it back to my own city of
Philadelphia, the rideshare vehicles stopped in almost
every crosswalk when I'm trying to cross the street. And
we talked about the Idaho stop, how cyclists often don't
stop at stop signs. Well, in Philly, we have something
called the Philly slide, which is cars not stopping at stop
signs which, very sadly, took a child's life this past
year.
And I feel like I'd be remiss if I did not
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mention that, with all due respect, we didn't ban cars
because people might drive after going to a bar. And we
didn't ban Uber because a driver might misbehave. We
should not ban a mode of transportation because of a few
possible bad effects. We should plan for them, we should
study them, and we should implement policies and
regulations to make sure they don't happen, while promoting
mobility.
So for these reasons I really believe that
scooters are an ally in safe transportation mobility and in
building economically vibrant places. I encourage the
Committee to allow for electric scooters to put protections
in place to ensure that scooters themselves are safe and
well-maintained and operated safely and to encourage the
cities to work with the scooter companies to invest and
design safe transportation infrastructure to build a
vibrant Pennsylvania. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you, Doctor.
I think we're all on the same page. That's where we want
to be. We want to get to a point where all forms of
transportation are safe, especially, you know, in our
cities.
But frankly, where I come from we roll up the
sidewalks at 10 o'clock at night, you know, so we just
don't have those available. I'm just joking but, you know,
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we're all on the same page. We all want to get as safe as
possible transportation options for our citizens.
So who's next? Matt, you want to -
MR. KOPKO: Sure.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- testify?
MR. KOPKO: So, hello. My name is Matthew Kopko.
I'm the Director of Public Policy for Bird Rides, and I'm
very glad to be here to testify in support of House Bill
631 today.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Get a little closer
to the mic if you could. Thanks.
MR. KOPKO: So, first of all, thank you, Chairmen
Hennessey and Carroll, and I'd also like to thank our
sponsors Rothman and I'd also like to thank Member Kinsey
and more than the 20 sponsors we already have on the
legislation.
I'm very excited to be here for the opportunity
to discuss how Pennsylvania can promote innovation, clean
and affordable transportation, and the fundamental right of
mobility. This legislation is very modest in nature, the
one here before in Pennsylvania, and it simply cleans up
the code by defining a new vehicle type, the electric low-
speed scooter, and leaves the choice to local governments
where it belongs belongs in our view as to whether and how
to allow shared electric scooters.
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I imagine in some Q&A we'll probably get into
more on that, you know, with the insurance questions
raised, and I hope Sam would be happy to hear that our
company alone -- and I imagine Shari's as well -- is paying
millions of dollars in insurance premiums to cover in every
city where we operate.
So Birds are electric scooters that are designed
to share the road safely, to reduce congestion and carbon
emissions, and to be easy and above all fun to ride. Birds
are low-power and low-speed. They operate at a speed on
par with if not less than the maximum speed of bicycles, as
was mentioned earlier, and, as also noted, they are
phenomenally popular.
Since our founding just a year ago, I mean, if
you think about this in 2017 scooter sharing wasn't even
really a thing, and now we're in over 100 cities, on three
continents, and we're serving up over tens of millions of
rides on a regular basis. And I think that chart that was
raised from NACTO earlier where essentially in a matter of
just one year we have cumulatively as an industry created
as many rides for people as the entire docked and dockless
bike-share industry has after a decade of growth just shows
how popular this new mode is and how attractive it is and I
think also the opportunity of this new industry.
So since we've been founded in 2017 we gained
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valuable experience in how to serve the needs of travelers
while working with local communities to ensure their goals
are met, and we're excited to bring this here to
Pennsylvania.
We go the extra mile at Bird to advance the
highest industry safety standards, and we offer a number of
proactive solutions to manage sidewalk clutter. Dockless
electric scooter sharing systems have been implemented
successfully and safely in hundreds of cities and not just
in the U.S. but around the globe, and including a bunch of
Philadelphia's peer cities, as previously discussed,
Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Atlanta, and many others.
Also, as was raised, was the example of Portland,
and they concluded there in Portland after a lot of data
that scooters do not pose a disproportionate risk in terms
of safety. The general numbers we're talking about is a
fatality approximately every 10 million miles traveled,
which is almost exactly, from an order-of-magnitude
standpoint, where we are with bicycles. So the general
level of mortality and exposure from a rider basis is now
showing from the tens of millions, soon to be hundreds of
millions of miles traveled on scooters to be bearing out to
be about consistent with bicycles. So we have increasingly
robust data on that safety point, and it's very
encouraging.
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So in our view, again, the scooters are no more
dangerous than bicycles and, in fact, could pose a benefit
to be even safer in the long run given the advances in
hardware.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Matt, I'm
sorry, just so I got it right, one fatality per 10 million
miles -
MR. KOPKO: Ten million, yes.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- ridden? Okay.
MR. KOPKO: Roughly.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thanks.
MR. KOPKO: Robust data is also showing, as
mentioned, that we have found a really exciting way to
actually finally replace car trips, too, and that has an
impact on congestion in our cities across the board, so as
was mentioned, about one in three if not more scooter trips
is actively replacing a car trip. And when we think about
the fact that almost half of all car trips are under three
miles, this is going to be concentrated in these shorter-
mile trips, so this is a huge opportunity to have a much
more efficient transportation system. To go one mile on a
scooter is about 1/100 the amount of energy as it takes to
move a car that same mile, so whether it's energy
efficiency or sustainability or just, you know, using the
right amount of power and hardware to get someone
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somewhere, this is a much more efficient and nimble future
here in the 21st century we're super excited about.
So we know that even small reductions in car
trips can have a big impact on traffic and air quality.
Bird alone in our first year of operations which, again, in
January of 2018 we were operating in only a couple of
cities and we ramped pretty quickly, but, you know, this
was our first year of operations. It was the equivalent of
taking about 12 million pounds of carbon out of the sky.
That's taking 1,200 cars off the road for an entire year,
and that's just year one from one company in this brand-new
industry. It's really an exciting future in terms of this
micro-mobility revolution.
So Bird is also very excited to be bringing
economic opportunity and jobs to local communities where we
operate. For any community that has 10,000 Birds in
operation or across localities 10,000 Birds in operation,
that's 3,000 employment opportunities and, on an annual
basis, approximately $25 million in take-home pay to local
community members because we use people at our local
community, all of our companies do, for charging and
repairing our scooters.
So scooters on top of that are also an affordable
option for people, typically about anywhere from a half to
a quarter of the price of an Uber ride, and that means more
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money in your pocket.
So together we are very confident that we think
we can make Pennsylvania a more innovative and more
environmentally friendly State than ever before, and we'll
be able to open a very new and exciting industry for
Pennsylvanians, so, for that reason, we really hope that
you join us in this mission and swiftly pass H.B. 631.
Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. Shari?
MS. SHAPIRO: Thank you, Chairmen, and thank you,
Representative Rothman.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Why don't you
introduce yourself and give your -
MS. SHAPIRO: I will.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: It's hard for me to
read that far -
MS. SHAPIRO: I will.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- the name tag
there.
MS. SHAPIRO: I'm Shari Shapiro. I'm the
Director of Mid-Atlantic Government Affairs for Lime.
Lime is a company that offers shared
transportation options like electric bikes and scooters,
and we do all of it at no charge to communities, no charge
to taxpayers, and that is really an important fact to think
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about when we're trying to bring new types of mobility on
the roads. And, as you know, as we're looking at the whole
transportation funding situation, how can we do that, use
our infrastructure better to reduce the cost of
transportation and offer more options here?
But I don't want to talk about what Lime wants or
what Bird wants. I have a letter here from a constituent
in your district, Chairman Hennessey -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Oh, really?
MS. SHAPIRO: -- and he puts it like this -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Is my son writing
to your company? Is that what he's doing?
MS. SHAPIRO: I'm sorry?
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: I said is my son
writing to your company?
MS. SHAPIRO: Yes, I have to admit it.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MS. SHAPIRO: "I would love to have Lime scooters
available as an affordable, reliable, and equitable
transportation option in Pennsylvania. I recently heard
about H.B. 631 being introduced, and I hope you'll show
your support for innovative transportation methods." It's
a letter to you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MS. SHAPIRO: "We need to make sure that
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Pennsylvania is on the forefront of technological change
and enhancements and not left behind due to outdated laws.
The world is moving forward with or without Pennsylvania,
and we don't want to be left behind. We need to make sure
all of Pennsylvania communities have equal access to
environmentally friendly and affordable transportation,"
from J.M. who lives on Olive Lane in Pottstown.
It's true that "providing access to scooters
would provide Pennsylvanians with an environmentally
friendly, cheap, and fast way to get from A to B," as E.C.
from Carlisle notes, and would "relieve a lot of stress
with transportation around the city," which is K.B. from
Mooresville.
Cities that have evaluated scooter programs have
also found that they increase access to transportation,
public transportation that is. A Philadelphia resident
explained how this would work. "I live one mile away from
the closest Metro stop. It's not practical for me to walk
there. Therefore, I drive. The last mile commute feature
is an unmet need in public transportation in Philadelphia.
I hope Philly continues to be a model of public transit and
allows a line to come to the city very soon."
So we're talking about making life more
convenient, we're talking about making mobility easier, but
we also need to be looking at it from an economic and
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competitive standpoint for Pennsylvania. Fundamentally, we
are competing for young residents, and it's very true that
the enrollments in our State colleges are going down and
that we're having trouble retaining residents after
graduation.
As you rightly said, Representative Hennessey,
about 50 percent of our riders are under the age of 37, so
an average rider is 37, and we need to be thinking about
what we have to offer these young people. Are we going to
offer what Baltimore has? Are we going to offer what
Washington, D.C., has? Are we going to offer what every
major city has except for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
Chicago, and New York? And that's access to electric
scooters.
I think that we do. I hope that we do. And I
hope that we can do it between now and June. And there's a
very simple reason why: winter. If you do not pass this
legislation by the time that summer break comes, then it
will be in the fall when it's taken up again, which of
course will put any deployment that we would do in
November, December, January, which is not a time when
there's likely to be as much utilization, which means that
we wouldn't have electric scooters on the ground in
Pennsylvania for another full year.
This is a very small bill, and it enables
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scooters to be on the ground. And then it requires the
cities to do what 90 communities in the United States have
done so far, which is to put together what I'll call the
rules of the road, what are the insurance requirements,
where can they park, where can they not part, what are
those requirements? And then to be able to tweak those in
a way that a statute wouldn't be as easy to change
depending on the outcomes of the pilots that are run.
So Lime and Bird and all of the scooter companies
that would like to serve Pennsylvania are asking you to
enable us to have scooters on the road, provide the
benefits to Pennsylvania, increase our competitiveness, and
to do it in this expedited manner. If we have to come back
and change something fundamental after we've seen it roll
out here, we're more than happy to work with you on that.
Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. I don't
know whether we can meet your time frame. We'll take a
look at it and see. It seems rather ambitious, and we'll
see. There's been a lot of other issues that were raised
today that we've got to get answers to.
MS. SHAPIRO: I would -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: You guys, you're
talking about dockless scooters. You know, I'm more
familiar with the idea -- you know, you rent a car from
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Hertz or Avis or Nationwide or whatever, National. You
know, at the end of the day or the end of whatever time
period you have it for, you take it back to National, it's
off the road. You know, as I understand, these dockless
scooters I can drive to, you know, 1412 Walnut Street
anywhere and just, you know, decide here's where I want to
get off and I leave it on the sidewalk, leave it somewhere.
You know, my wife and I shop at Aldi sometimes.
You put a quarter in, you get their shopping cart. In
order to get your quarter back, you have to take the cart
back.
And I've seen some videos on the Internet that
indicate, you know, you might be -- the thing was in Paris.
This thing you sent me was from Paris I think where, you
know, 50 or 60 or 70 scooters were just left laying piled
on top of each other. It almost looked like they were on a
junk heap, you know, not to be disparaging, but it looked
like they had almost been thrown away waiting for a trash
truck to come along and pick them up. And those were the
operable scooters the people just left in the right-of-way,
the sidewalks or the street -- I think it was sidewalks
what I was looking at or in parking lots someplace.
You know, it would seem to me it's fair to say if
you're going to create this plethora of vehicles being let
loose in a city, you ought to have some control over how do
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you pick them up, you know, and do you -- if I do just
leave it someplace, do I just -- you know, instead of
bringing it to, say, a turn-in point, do I keep getting
penalized, you know, for how long I keep in a sense -- I've
given up possession by leaving it in the pile in the
street, but, you know, am I still penalized for that
because I haven't returned it or, you know, do I get away
scot-free by just, you know, adding to the pile of other
scooters on the sidewalk?
MS. SHAPIRO: So when you drive your car, you
drive it from the place that you have it even if it's a
rental car to a parking spot near where you want to arrive
at.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Right.
MS. SHAPIRO: And that's exactly the way that
these work. You pick them up from near where you are and
then, just look if you were taking your own car and parking
it outside of Aldi, you park it where you arrive, right?
And that is part of what makes this so powerful. The
cities and people do not want to bring something back to
someplace that is not convenient, and so you -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: But it's not
convenient for the other people who come walking around or
try and trip over these things as they try to get by when
they get left someplace where they shouldn't be in the
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first place.
MS. SHAPIRO: Right. So there are two things.
One, people will illegally park cars, and that means that
they will park them in crosswalks, they will park them in
front of garages. People will illegally park them. We
don't ban cars because of that. It is on us to make sure
that the scooter fleet is well-maintained. If it is not
well-maintained in all of the cities that we serve, we can
be thrown out of the city if we are not maintaining our
fleet.
So, for example, in the event that there was a
pileup of scooters, right, we integrate with cities 3-1-1
services, their nuisance lines. Any citizen could call
that nuisance line, and we would get that complaint. We
have to resolve that within two hours. Those are the terms
of our ability to serve the cities. Now -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: That's all written
into an agreement you have with the particular
municipality?
MS. SHAPIRO: Right. Correct.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: And how do you do
that? You just send a big truck out and load up all the
scooters and take them? Because they don't do you any good
piled in the street or on the sidewalk where people don't
want to pick them up. You want to have them, you know,
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where the next train comes in, for example, so people get
off there and actually rent them.
MS. SHAPIRO: Right. That's exactly right. It's
not to our business benefit either. But yes, we employee a
team of people in all of the cities that we operate, and in
fact, if we were allowed to operate in Pennsylvania, we
would be -- in just Philadelphia we would be creating more
than 3 0 jobs.
And yes, it is their job of some of those people
to go around and do a couple things. One, check the
scooters, as someone mentioned, maintenance, to check the
scooters. If there are mechanical problems, we have
mechanics, they bring them back to our warehouse where we
service them. If there are scooters that are not properly
placed, it's their job to go and pick them up. And it's
also their job to rebalance them, what we call rebalancing,
which means moving them to where there's more demand or
less demand during the course of the day.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: So you have people
that are constantly doing that, trying to move them around?
MS. SHAPIRO: Yes, three shifts, 24 hours a day.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MR. KOPKO: And if I could add a couple points to
that, too?
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Yes, sure, go
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ahead, Matt.
MR. KOPKO: So I think one thing that's important
to note in terms of fleet management that you're getting on
is I've looked at -- you know, I'm a recovering lawyer, so
I've looked at a bunch of contracts in this world now, and
the typical service-level obligation on these shared
bicycles tends to be within, you know, 10 days or a week
you have to take a bike out of circulation if it's reported
as damaged, as Shari mentioned. And we're on essentially a
10-times-or-greater quality of standard here, which is two
to four hours. So we're talking about in a matter of hours
resolving some sort of issue where, you know, previous
iterations of this micro-mobility were given days at a
time, so I think we're actually moving really fast into a
direction of much more active fleet management and much
more higher customer service.
And then secondly, there was a great report out
of the San Jose Transportation Institute, the Mineta
Institute, that surveyed scooters being parked, and they
found somewhere between 97 and 98 percent of all scooters
are parked correctly, so totally get it. It's annoying and
obnoxious when you see a scooter that's tipped over or
somewhere it shouldn't be, but again, I think that's kind
of frankly beyond the exception as opposed to the rule.
And some of these photos get pretty viral because
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it looks crazy, but the average operation is much more
mundane and much less newsworthy, which is a person takes a
convenient ride from point A to point B, gets where they
need to go cheaper and faster than another mode of
transportation, and leaves it conveniently for the next
person.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: At some point in
time the docking station would allow you to recharge the
scooter. If these are dockless and, you know, at some
point in time the battery operation must rundown, what do
you do, come back, pick them up, take them back to your
shop and then charge them again and then redistribute them
once again?
MS. SHAPIRO: So it's actually more interesting
than that.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Well, I
don't want to take too much time because we have other
people to testify, but try to give it to us in a nutshell
if you would.
MS. SHAPIRO: I will. We have what's called
juicers, and Bird has a similar thing. Anyone can sign up
to get a charger from us. They take the vehicle to their
home, they charge it overnight, and we tell them where to
put it back. And of course they're serviced by our team,
not by the juicers. They earn up to $5 per scooter per
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night, so it's an earning opportunity for them and it
ensures that the scooters are charged.
If there aren't enough juicers to charge all of
them, that is also something that our staff does.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Do you have
a question?
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Okay. So, yes, I
know you sat through the entire day, and I asked a couple
questions about liability, so let's have a scenario where a
rented scooter is on a sidewalk and hits a pedestrian and
broke an arm, what happens?
MS. SHAPIRO: A scooter that's simply standing
there and falls -
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: No, no, no, no,
somebody's operating a scooter, going -- let's assume
they're going whatever the maximum speed is allowed, and it
results in a broken arm.
MS. SHAPIRO: Right, so exactly the same thing
that would happen if someone on a bicycle, an e-bicycle, a
car, or a rental car. It is on that person to have that
liability.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: That person meaning
the renter of the scooter?
MS. SHAPIRO: The renter of our scooter just like
a renter of a rental car.
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DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: No, but some people
don't have an automobile and they may not have automobile
insurance.
MS. SHAPIRO: Right, no, but a renter for a
rental car, if you don't have automobile insurance and you
turn down their insurance, then they are just in the exact
same position.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: All right. And
there was a reference made to the Utah statute with respect
to the insurance requirements there. Do you have an
opinion on what -
MR. KOPKO: Yes.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: -- Utah has done?
MR. KOPKO: So, frankly, we already over-comply
with the Utah requirement. Typically, all of our cities
require that level of insurance, which is why it became
kind of a standard that was put in in Utah.
I think one thing that is important to note here,
part of why this bill is so short is because there are two
things you could be tackling here right now, right? One is
talking about the scooter, how big it should be, how small
it should be, how much it should weigh, should it be
allowed on the road.
And then there's this whole big world of scooter-
share regulation, right? There's owning a scooter and
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operating a scooter and then there's operating these
businesses that allow shared scooters to people. This bill
is only in that first small category, which we thought was
appropriate in terms of the first legislative step here,
just talking about the vehicle code and what's legal or not
legal in terms of the vehicle operation. You guys would be
having a much larger conversation if you wanted to tackle
scooter-share regulation right now because we would be
talking about insurance, we'd be talking about
indemnification, we'd be talking about parking locations,
would be talking about all these types of maintenance -
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: No, I'm just
talking about insurance.
MR. KOPKO: Right. So the short answer is we
already over-comply with Utah. We'd welcome that. But I
would just say that once you start opening the door to
scooter-share regulation, you're probably going to have to
have 10 more discussions about what else we should be
regulating on scooter share. And that might make sense to
let the cities test it out, as they are in a lot of other
States for the first year. And if you guys want to come
back and regulate scooter share more heavily, it might make
sense after Philadelphia has tried it out and come up with
their own rules and figure out what works and doesn't work.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: And I'll assume
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Lime over-complies as well with Utah. So then if that were
the case, then there should be no objection if we include
those insurance limits in the Pennsylvania law.
MS. SHAPIRO: And I will admit honestly that I
haven't talked to our insurance team, so I can't speak
confidently one way or the other, but I'm happy to get back
to you.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: And then I'll
assume that if my scenario with the rented scooter hits a
pedestrian, broken arm, that the policy and the claim would
be against the policies that would be in place by the
rental companies?
MR. KOPKO: That would then have to be kind of,
you know, determined on a fault-level basis, right, because
it would create a big moral hazard issue if anyone who
decides to do something irresponsible in a car or scooter
has zero liability for it. So, you know, there are some -
you know, if you get in a car and drive drunk, I don't
think your insurance company would be happy to pick up that
time. So there are some issues in terms of individual
responsibility versus corporate responsibility, but
absolutely -
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Actually do. I
mean, I'm not an insurance expert, but if I drive my car
drunk, then my insurance company is going to have a bad
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day.
MR. KOPKO: Yes, but you're also going to be on
the hook for a lot of risk as well.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: All right. And,
Mr. Chairman, Representative Innamorato had two really
quick questions. I heard a reference to 30 employees. Is
that the reference to the number of mechanics or the
juicers? Can you give us some parameters on number of
employees that would generally be employed?
MS. SHAPIRO: Yes. So it is not juicers. It is
the operations management for the city, right, the people
who organize the picking up and dropping off and the
managers. Then there are mechanics and there are people
who also do the pickup and drop off of the scooters and the
sort of lowest skilled of the work.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: So if Philadelphia
were to go down this path, what would be the number of
full-time employees -
MS. SHAPIRO: Yes, so -
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: -- generally,
roughly?
MS. SHAPIRO: So, like I said, between 20 and 30
employees.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: All right. And
then her second question was related to consumer data and
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what sort of protections exist for the data. Can you -
MR. KOPKO: So, typically, cities are figuring
out amongst each other how they're going to handle data.
L.A. has taken leadership on what they call the mobility
data specification, which is just a standard API format for
which they are requesting data to and from the rideshare
operators. We have license agreements and we have
statements in most of our agreements that state that this
type of information should be considered personally
identifiable information and should be handled with X, Y, Z
privacy restrictions.
So it seems like there are standards evolving at
the city level, but again, those would be the things that
you would sort of have to be adding into. We're talking
about insurance, then data, then all of a sudden you're
talking about, you know, comprehensively regulating a whole
new industry as opposed to letting the cities kind of take
the first stab at it.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Fair enough. Thank
you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. I'm
sorry, Representative Rothman, you had a question or
comment, whatever.
REPRESENTATIVE ROTHMAN: Just a comment. I want
to thank you. I know you're two of the several companies
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that provide scooters, and it seems to me that this is a
market-driven industry that you've invested the money to
provide what really is a version of public transportation
without any taxpayer investment, and so I want to thank you
for that and the other companies.
And thank you, Dr. Ryerson, for being here and
your enthusiastic support of e-scooters. And I just want
to thank you and -
MR. KOPKO: Thank you.
DR. RYERSON: Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: -- the businesses
for being here.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Yes, thank you very
much.
Our next testifiers, you're probably wondering
whether or not we were ever going to get to you, but we're
here. We have Geoffrey Knight, Planning Director for the
city of Harrisburg; Wayne Martin from the city of
Harrisburg; Scott Petri, an old compatriot of ours, served
in the Legislature till three years ago, Scott? What was
it? How long have you been at the Parking Authority?
MR. PETRI: Less.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Less? Is it only a
year that you've been gone? Geez, it seems longer than
that.
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Dan Mulvenna -
MALE SPEAKER: Julie, if you could pull that one
around.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: What's that? And
Julie Shade, the Manager of Community Development and
Events at Harristown Enterprises, Inc. Have we got
everybody? Have I introduced everybody?
Who's going to kick this off?
MALE SPEAKER: Why don't we go in the order -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Wayne, go
ahead.
MR. MARTIN: I certainly can, Mr. Chairman.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you.
MR. MARTIN: I guess it's good afternoon now.
Wayne Martin -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Lean close to the
mic if you would, please.
MR. MARTIN: Sorry. Wayne Martin, City Engineer,
city of Harrisburg. My responsibilities include right-of-
way management, the sidewalks that we've been discussing
and also the streets, traffic planning, traffic safety, and
design. I also serve on the city's Vision Zero Task Force,
which is the safety initiative of the city to eliminate
injuries and deaths, traffic-related fatalities by 2030.
I guess the question for our city and other
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cities in the Commonwealth is do e-scooters have the
potential to advance the city's transportation goals? And
we believe the answer is yes. The city of Harrisburg has
three strategic transportation goals. The first is to
rehabilitate the city's transportation network to safely
accommodate all modes of transportation. The second is to
utilize a data-driven approach to establish priorities for
transportation projects that address the following
categories: safety, asset management, mobility, including
ADA, American with Disabilities Act, and land-use growth
management. And the third is to amend city planning and
engineering ordinances, regulations, policies, and
procedures to foster a livable, sustainable, and
economically vibrant community.
Safety for all users, the first goal, and this
was talked about at length, but I will highlight a few
points that I made here in my written testimony.
Harrisburg, like most cities in the United States, has
historically approached transportation system in
traditional auto-centric ways. Within the past five years
alone, we've had 19 deaths and 105 reported injuries occur
in vehicle crashes in our city. However, these devastating
events have served as a wake-up call for city residents and
city leadership. Death and injury on city streets are
unacceptable and require immediate change to street design
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and operations within the city.
During the development of our year one action
plan, it became apparent that speed management is a
critical component of safety of our transportation network.
It's important to understand that an urban transportation
network functions differently than a rural or suburban
transportation network that are traditionally dominated by
automobiles. To manage speed, we focus on the speed
differential. Humans walk at about 3 to 4 miles per hour.
The average bicycle is traveling in the 6- to 25-mile-an-
hour range. E-scooters will travel in the 6 to 15-mile-an-
hour range, and ideally, vehicles in urban environments
will travel between 15 and 3 0 miles an hour. That's the
ideal system which we can attain that goal of zero.
If vehicle speeds are in the 35 to 50 miles an
hour in an urban environment, two things happen. The
drivers will lose eye contact with other road users and the
potential for fatality increases exponentially. The risk
of a fatality for an adult pedestrian or cyclist or
e-scooter operator hit by a vehicle traveling at 20 miles
an hour is 10 percent. If the vehicle is traveling at 40
miles an hour, the risk of death is 55 percent, and for
individuals over 70 years old, that risk of death is up to
7 0 percent.
Can e-scooters help manage this speed
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differential? Again, we believe the answer is yes.
E-scooters have the potential to move people and shift
reliance on automobiles in an efficient, potentially less-
polluting travel option. One example close to home here in
the city, the Federal Courthouse is currently under
construction, and one of the questions that has been asked
by GSA, by the city is the current employees, which I
believe is 30 percent was the number given to us by GSA, 30
percent of employees use transit. They arrive at the
Amtrak station and currently walk to the Federal
Courthouse. Will they continue to travel via Amtrak and
walked to the Federal Courthouse when it's, you know, an
additional half-mile away. We believe that e-scooters
present one alternative to that last-mile commute.
In addition to having potentially less
automobiles on the road, as mentioned previously, there are
safety in numbers when it comes to bicycles and e-scooters
as automobile drivers become more accustomed to these road
users and alter their driving behavior by driving slower
perhaps.
Our second goal, the data-driven approach, you've
heard testimony about the e-scooter vendors tracking
information that can be utilized to prioritize our
transportation projects. They can also potentially provide
funding, which was mentioned, to build out bikeway
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networks, and users will prefer, according to the studies
that I've read -- more like surveys, not studies, public
surveys -- users will prefer bike lanes as the preferred
road type as opposed to sharing lanes with vehicles or on
sidewalks.
And the city's third goal, ordinance and policy,
the enumeration of police powers in the bill we think is
appropriate. It shifts that authority to PennDOT and local
authorities to regulate the use of e-scooters. The city of
Harrisburg would intend to do it through contractual
relations with vendors. You know, I don't think anybody
wants to see 100 e-scooters spread out on the beautiful
steps of our Capitol that you mentioned, Chairman
Hennessey, in the beginning of the testimony here, so
obviously the city would need specific authority to
continue to manage our public right-of-way, as we do today.
Another consideration is the 15-mile-an-hour
speed limit, you know, might be too high for Riverfront
Park, for example where we have a lot of pedestrian
activity. The ability to geocode and, you know, maybe dial
back that speed, which can be done through -- our
understanding would be through the technology available
through the e-scooters through the governing systems and
the geo-fencing. That is something that the city would
want the opportunity to regulate.
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It's also important to note that there's a few
bills I think in front of the House, House Bill 792 which
proposes to remove the language from the vehicle code and
allow to park in protected bike lanes. I think that's an
important consideration as, you know, financially strapped
municipalities try to wrestle and accommodate all
transportation users.
So thank you for this opportunity to testify.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. Geoff?
MR. KNIGHT: Yes, good afternoon. My name is
Geoffrey Knight. I'm the Planning Director with the city
of Harrisburg.
At this point in the testimony there's not really
any ground that hasn't been covered, so what I'd like to do
is just provide a little bit of background and context to a
couple of the other statements that were made up here this
morning and this afternoon.
To the chart that showed the growth of e-scooter
rise, one of the things that a lot of the companies that
have offered shared either bikes and scooters is that we're
seeing is that they're moving out of the dockless bicycle
industry and moving kind of in the dockless scooter
industry while that's existing alongside of the docked
bicycles. And so really what dockless scooters, e-scooters
do is they are starting to sift themselves out and fill in
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the gaps that are existing in the current infrastructure,
transportation infrastructure, whether that's first mile,
last mile, just going out for a trip, a spin around up and
down the park or whatever. So we are really seeing that
the industry is evolving pretty quickly, and so
acknowledging, defining, and regulating this industry is
important for the State and for cities like Harrisburg to
begin to get a grasp on this as this industry does mature
and evolve.
The addition of e-scooters to our transportation
network will only increase the constituency that's asking
for a more diverse infrastructure within our streets. As
our modal infrastructure kind of diversifies, we'll need to
see that reflected in the physical infrastructure that we
have on the streets. And, as Wayne noted, allowing things
like park and protected bike lanes will begin to get
scooters off sidewalks, which is one of the places they
only feel comfortable operating right now. So as we're
looking at different changes to State regulations, keeping
in mind that the planning bureau of the city of Harrisburg
really sees bicycles and e-scooters operating alongside of
each other and being a similar constituency.
With regards to some of the discussion on
helmets, I would note that the city of Seattle, Washington,
had a bike-share system for a while, and I think they were
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the only large city that required helmets in operation of
the bike share, and that requirement has been blamed for
the downfall of that system because, first of all, who's
carrying a helmet with them around every day? You may want
to get on a bike on a whim or on an e-scooter on a whim.
And the second option is rolling out the
logistics in case these companies are responsible for that.
Are they going to have a machine to distribute those
things? Would you wear a helmet that somebody else had
just worn, or is it going to be something like an
inflatable helmet or one that's made out of cardboard or
something like that? But the logistics of regulating and
enforcing and kind of rolling those things out are very
difficult and generally tend to discourage the use of these
things, which I think is something this bill is kind of not
trying to do.
And finally, I just want to note that I actually
went down to Washington, D.C., this past weekend
specifically so I could try out a couple of these scooters
and I actually rode them from Cleveland Park down
Connecticut through Dupont to the Georgetown waterfront and
backup to kind of test these out in the wild and see what
it was like operating in a manner that was consistent with
legislation that's in here, being on the streets, stopping
at stoplights, things of that nature. And I actually found
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that the other road users out there, particularly
motorists, were actually very accommodating of myself and
the many other scooters that were out there.
So I do think that this industry and this
technology can be safely incorporated into the
transportation infrastructure not only of the State but
also our cities. Thank you.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you. Your
work is cut out for you because this industry is coming at
us fast and furious. I think, you know, we all have to
step up and get things done.
Scott, nice to see you again.
MR. PETRI: Nice to see you, Chairman, and thank
you for hanging in there.
I would like to make three general observations,
three or four, and then, if you don't mind, turn it over
for more formal testimony from my colleague, who's done
some extensive research. So let me start with I think this
is a really important issue for you to tackle, and there
are some important considerations. We all know, having me
previously in the Legislature and you currently, the
deference to local options, and I think that is a really
important aspect of Pennsylvania, the recognition that
geographically we're very distinct.
But I would say to that it is important to decide
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how much detail should be in the State law, and I'll tell
you what my thoughts are in a moment, particularly because
we have other mobility issues, technologies that have hit
us, and from our vantage point at least we may have missed
the mark on some of those, and now we have to go back and
try to re-examine those. This benchmark is going to set
that benchmark going backward and forward for new
mobilities, so I would encourage you, you have to get it
right without any predisposed notion of exactly what is
right.
The next point I would make is that, as the
Philadelphia Parking Authority -- and I guess I should
introduce myself. I'm the Executive Director of the
Philadelphia Parking Authority since January 2 of last
year. We don't have any jurisdiction. We don't regulate
the sidewalks, and we don't regulate bicycle paths. So we
really don't have a stake in the game. But as one of the
partners in Philadelphia, we thought it was important that
we come here as a transportation partner and talk about our
observations and experience because what we do do is
enforce some traffic matters, parking relations, and of
course the curb.
The third point I would make -- and in doing some
Internet research, I stumbled on an article which then
pointed me towards a study, and it's the Remix Micro-
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Mobility Policy Survey, and it is in our packet. It is a
phenomenal survey and advice to legislators. That's how I
viewed it on what are best practices, where you'd hit the
mark, where you wouldn't have the mark, and what you should
really be thinking about with regard to new mobilities.
And they include and define best practices regarding fees,
data-sharing, enforcement, parking, infrastructure, cost
recovery, safety, and service areas. And I think after
you're done, it'll make it easier for you to decide what
should be in the State-enabling law and what should be left
for local municipalities.
Most important is that you define properly in
State law in my opinion certain requirements that you need,
particularly in the area of the format and the sharing of
data. You've heard from two providers that indicate that
by agreement -- and I didn't hear all the time, I heard
some of the time or most of the time might've been the
comment -- provide data. That data-sharing is becoming
more and more of a principle. You also heard the L.A.
example, and that's certainly what oTIS, which is the
Mayor's Office on Transportation and Infrastructure, is
insisting on on all modalities, this L.A. procedure because
it's going to enable them to carve that data into one data
source and share it among the other transportation partners
such as SEPTA and the like.
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But I would urge you to include a data
requirement and a standard so that municipalities can talk
to each other with the same information. Do not make
municipalities individually fight to get that data because
too often in the area of TNCs we've seen some of the sister
companies repeatedly demonstrate their propensity to argue
that almost all data is subject to either privacy or
proprietary in nature. And so if you use TNCs as an
example, I'd be very cautious about not requiring data and
making municipalities fight to obtain data.
The last thing I would indicate is that State law
should set minimum standards and best practices, and you
would allow the municipalities to require such additional
requirements as they may deem appropriate.
So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Dan,
who has a few comments and surveys and studies that you
really haven't yet heard about.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you,
Scott.
Dan?
MR. MULVENNA: My name is Dan Mulvenna, and on
behalf of the Philadelphia Parking Authority, I am pleased
to present this testimony to Chairman Tim Hennessey and
Chairman Mike Carroll and any other honorable Members of
this Committee.
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The Philadelphia -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: And please get as
close as you can to the mic, not so much for our benefit
but people watching on PCN might not be able to hear you.
MR. MULVENNA: Yes. So the Philadelphia Parking
Authority's mission is to provide for safe and continuous
traffic flow in the right-of-way. One of the guiding
principles of that mission is utilizing innovation and
technology to improve the quality of life for the traveling
public.
Like other major cities, Philadelphia is faced
with a growing and all-too-common issue of traffic
congestion. Unlike most cities, however, Philadelphia has
the smallest roadways and sidewalks. Traffic congestion is
damaging to both public safety and economic growth. With
the advent of the online marketplace, population growth in
Center City and transportation network companies,
congestion is only going to worsen in Philadelphia and
other cities.
In an attempt to mitigate the effects of this
problem, a new industry has risen around dockless mobility
scooters and dockless bike shares. It's micro-mobility.
It's why we're here today. In municipalities that have
authorized this mobility, response from the public has been
mostly positive, especially among underserved communities
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and minorities. For example, a recent report from Denver
found limited availability to be the biggest complaint.
There weren't enough scooters for people there.
With more jobs added to the local economy,
reduced congestion during peak hours, and the promise of a
more environmentally friendly mode of transportation, the
micro-mobility industry appears to be here to stay.
As transportation partners in the city of
Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Parking Authority is proud
to be a part of this conversation. With that being said,
we are neutral at best in this matter but only if the
enabling law by the legislator gives the local
municipalities the discretion they deem appropriate.
The PPA is also concerned with the impact to
public transportation. SEPTA is a key transportation
partner in our region, and an independent study should be
undertaken to ensure that there will not be a negative
impact on ridership. There are many residents in
Philadelphia who depend on public transit, and we should
make sure that those who are unable to use dockless
scooters and dockless bikes will not be negatively
impacted. When weighing your decision on permitting micro
mobility devices, we strongly urge that you consider the
economic impact on public transportation utility companies
such as SEPTA.
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A micro-mobility program begins with regulation
and enforcement, which leads to the question of how these
devices will be regulated and enforced. And the answer to
that question is different for each municipality, but all
can benefit from a few guidelines. Defining where, when,
and how these vehicles will be allowed to distribute,
travel, and park is an issue each municipality approaches
differently. Some allow for vehicles to be parked in
what's called the furniture zone, and that's the area where
trees or parking kiosks, trash cans, newsstands are. And
then others are creating on-street parking corrals, a
corded, gated-off area where you can park these dockless
vehicles in the streets. But first, to do that,
municipalities need to reserve the right to where, when,
and how these vehicles will be distributed.
And then with regulation also comes enforcement.
And as regulators of TNCs, as Scott mentioned, we urge you
to require that operators are responsible for the
violations of users. It would be impractical to chase down
every user, considering how many of these devices may be on
the streets.
And also we recommend that municipalities reserve
the right to impound these vehicles if there is abuse. In
one instant, Arizona State University impounded over 800
scooters in one month because of abuses.
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When it comes to data on safety and injuries,
it's currently scarce. There isn't a lot. Someone
mentioned earlier in their testimony the CDC is working on
a study, so until something like that comes out, we can't
really make decisions on that. But what we can do is
require that operators keep their vehicles in operational
order and from operating on sidewalks. That's a huge
safety issue, the sidewalk issue, as other people
mentioned. Additionally, public safety would benefit from
having regular maintenance schedules and data provided by
companies surrounding maintenance.
How municipalities fund a regulatory program
should center on fees tied to the operators, and fee
structures in different municipalities differ greatly among
them. Finding the right fee structure ensures the proper
funding to make a micro-mobility program viable. Some fee
types currently seen in municipalities are annual fees,
permit fees, per-trip fees, and per-device fees.
Permit fees should be balanced, though, so as not
to exclude smaller companies and limit public access due to
high prices. For this very reason, some municipalities
have actually already lost operators because fees were too
high. Fees are best used when they are tied into
maintaining regulation and infrastructure improvement, also
technology fees, too.
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We urge the Legislature to allow municipalities
to receive device, per-trip, and annual fees. Doing so
will allow municipalities to scale its enforcement and
infrastructure cost to the size of fleets.
Municipalities have also used fees as a way of
capping fleet sizes. Almost all municipalities have fleet
caps with a range of 500 to 10,000-plus. To arbitrarily
set a cap on these devices could also ruin a program, as in
Denver. There just weren't enough scooters.
Municipalities would be best served by setting performance
caps to allow for flexible fleet sizes. But also they
should reserve the right to limit fleet sizes at any time
or location.
Allowing for flexibility to meet consumer demand
and special events would create a more dynamic system where
the public would be better served. Finding the right fleet
size will prove challenging but can be better determined by
having access to data provided by operators.
Now more than ever municipalities can determine
the where, when, and how of micro-mobility devices by
having access to data from operators. Data is the key to a
micro-mobility program. With a data access plan in place,
municipalities will be able to determine fleet sizes,
device location, commuter trip specifics, and vehicle
usage.
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There are now a few companies partnering with
municipalities to provide the necessary platform needed for
a data access plan, companies such as Remix -- they
provided the report that we have in our packet -- and
Passport use tools such as a general bike fare, fee
specification, and micro-mobility data specification to
help municipalities tailor their programs.
Philadelphia, through the Office of
Transportation, Innovation, and Sustainability, that's
oTIS, is acquiring a data platform, which is an open API
similar to the one Los Angeles uses for all of their
transportation providers. An API gives municipalities the
ability to interact with the GBSF, a general bike fare
specific fee or a mobility data specification.
Conversely, municipalities would be best served
by having access to both real-time and historical data
while requiring privacy and anonymity for riders. Access
to data rounds out a successful micro-mobility plan for
municipalities. A conversation with regulators from Denver
and a review of their pilot report showed their initial
inadequacies stem from an insufficient data access program.
They didn't have access to data early on, so they just kind
of made the decisions they needed to make. And they were
an early adopter, so they just were kind of taken quickly
by this.
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Early on, municipalities failed to effectively
confront TNCs such as Lyft and Uber. This mini-revolution
caused by TNCs was the first major shift transportation had
seen in decades and has opened the doors for more to come,
as we see today. With the experience gained from the shift
TNCs cause, municipalities can and should able to react.
For your consideration, we're providing you with a report
from Remix and also we're providing you with a report from
Denver. That's their pilot program report.
Ultimately, if the Commonwealth allows for micro
mobility, a program should be through a pilot controlled at
the municipal level and require the industry to comply with
the following suggestions: safety regulations established
by the municipalities; fees such as a per-trip fee, per-
device fee, and a technology fee; operators should be
required to provide data in an open platform; operators
should comply with drop-off zones and areas where pickups
and drop-offs are prohibited; cities should reserve the
right to right-size the size of fleets, require equity as
to where the devices are deployed; and operators should be
responsible for all violations to ease enforcement.
Thank you for your time.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you, Daniel.
And a comment I'd make to you in terms of the
municipalities governing everything is that we've got 2,567
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municipalities in Pennsylvania alone, and most of them
probably are ill-equipped to try to think this through and
try to figure out what kind of limits to put on different
aspects of the operations, so I think they'll be looking to
us for a template and sort of like we are looking to NCSL
and CSG and those kind of groups to share information and
let us know what we've got to do and what belongs in
statute, what belongs in regulation, what belongs left to
the local level.
MR. PETRI: Mr. Chairman, that's why God gave you
wide shoulders because you can handle it. I know that.
And let me say one thing that I did miss that I
want to stress because we talked about it. At least as far
as we are concerned, the Philadelphia Parking Authority and
me personally having an apartment in Old City, allowing
these devices on sidewalks is a very, very, very bad idea.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Somehow I knew what
you were going to say there.
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: Yes. One quick
question if I can, Dan. I just heard your litany of things
that you want us to give the cities and the municipalities
the ability to dictate. I didn't hear in that list any
reference to liability, insurance limits, and such.
MR. MULVENNA: Right -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Was that
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specifically excluded?
MR. MULVENNA: It wasn't specifically excluded.
MR. PETRI: No, it was not. We were going off
the study and I think to have a minimum insurance
requirement certainly most providers are already going to
accommodate that anyway, so they should have no objection.
Now, I think insurance is obviously a key.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. Thank you
very much. Derek Whitesel -- Julie Shade, Manager of
Community Development and Events at Harristown Enterprises.
MS. SHADE: I am going to defer to Derek because
I have no voice. He's -
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: You have a voice
for this Committee, but -
MS. SHADE: He is my voice and a colleague.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: That's fine. Thank
you.
Derek, how do you say your last name?
MR. WHITESEL: Whitesel.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Whitesel.
MR. WHITESEL: White like the color and then
s-e-l.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay.
MR. WHITESEL: Yes. Yes. So my name is Derek
Whitesel. I appreciate your time today. I'm the Executive
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Director of a nonprofit called the Harrisburg Young
Professionals and also speaking on behalf of Julie and
Harristown Enterprises.
I'm pleased to be here with you today to
represent the private-sector support of the legalization of
these electric low-speed scooters in Pennsylvania, as well
as specifically here in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
A scooter represents an effective first-mile,
last-mile option for the public transit commuters, as well
as a short-distance travel alternative connecting people to
their destinations throughout the regions. Harrisburg's
bike-share program has actually proven to be extremely
successful during its first two years of operation. The
addition of electric low-speed scooters would give the
community another transportation alternative in our
communities' toolboxes, providing the regions with a travel
alternative other than a single-occupant vehicle. This
option gives consumers an extended reach whereas a distance
may be deemed too far to walk, too sweaty to bike, or too
far from public transit. The scooter offers a fast and
easy way to access the destination.
Scooters can also enhance city residential living
throughout Pennsylvania. They can help decrease city
dwellers' dependence on cars, providing mobility over a
larger area. In addition, cottage businesses that have
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evolved in other areas where these scooters have become a
staple have provided an economic boom to those communities.
Individuals and organizations have stepped up to the charge
to clean, to repair, and to relocate the scooters, offering
small business income opportunity where it had not
previously existed.
We respectfully request your positive
consideration of this bill, allowing the implementation of
low-speed scooters' usage throughout Pennsylvania. I
appreciate your time.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Thank you, Derek.
I appreciate that. And, you know, you say you request our
positive consideration of the bill. I don't think we have
any choice. We have to. This is coming at us. The
question is how we do it and whether we do it correctly.
So I thank all of our testifiers. Thank you very
much for being here. All of our testifiers today have
given us a whole plethora of information to try to sift
through.
Julie, thank you for your Bette Davis imitation,
that gravelly voice. Sorry, recover quickly.
I should also mention we've received written
testimony from James Fox, the Assistant General Manager of
Systems Safety at SEPTA; Michael Carroll, not this Michael
Carroll -- Michael Carroll from the city of Philadelphia.
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DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: His testimony will
be especially compelling, I'm sure.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: From the city of
Pittsburgh, we've heard from Mayor Bill Peduto from the
Clean Air Council of Pennsylvania; Ted Leonard, as I
mentioned earlier, from the Pennsylvania AAA Foundation;
and we've heard from a group called Spin Scooter. So our
time is going to be occupied by a lot of additional reading
in addition to what we've heard today but probably not as
much as Wayne and Geoffrey have to spend their time trying
to figure out how to manage what's coming at us at
lightning speed.
So with no further testifiers and having gone far
beyond what we thought was going to be the limit, thank you
for hanging in there. I know it's an infringement on your
time to be here, and we appreciate it. Thank you very
much.
Mike, do you have anything else?
DEMOCRATIC CHAIRMAN CARROLL: No.
MAJORITY CHAIRMAN HENNESSEY: Okay. With that,
we are adjourned.
(The hearing concluded at 12:57 p.m.)
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I hereby certify that the foregoing proceedings
are a true and accurate transcription produced from audio
on the said proceedings and that this is a correct
transcript of the same.
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Christy Snyder
Transcriptionist
Diaz Transcription Services
