Something Missing?

Complete Streets Without Micromobility

Who could ask for anything more? 

Back in February 2019, the City of Philadelphia begged off on bringing a scooter-share program to the city, suggesting, among other things, that the topic was very new and required further observation as it developed and evolved in other places. And the City suggested that it might be willing to revisit the subject of a scooter share program in Philadelphia in about a year - that would be February 2020.

Well, guess what? February 2020 is right around the corner. Things have been remarkably quiet. So I wrote an article reviewing what I had learned and seen during the course of the year, and suggesting that it might be time to bring scooters to Philly. (To see the article, click here.)

The responses I've had from the City to that scooter article have been interesting. I'm told that at least a few Council members are cautiously favorable. The City administration, however, remains very concerned that the poor overall quality of Philly's streets creates serious safety risks. And, frankly, I do have sympathy for this position.

My main motivation for scooters, however, is to get more traffic onto our existing protected bike lanes - specifically, the Pine and Spruce lanes, which have recently been repaved and upgraded.

And so, as I was thinking about this, I came up with another of my bizarre ideas. Would it be possible to use Pine and Spruce as the two pieces of a kind of trolley line? The scooters would be geo-fenced so they could only run on these streets (and perhaps a few others). We could have the eastern terminal in Head House Square and the western terminal at 34th and Spruce, next to the University of Pennsylvania, HUP, and CHOP. There would also be intermediate stations with corrals, where people could either pick up or drop off a scooter.

I realize that a closed system like this is just about the opposite of the original Bird-Lime concept of go anywhere, park anywhere. But it might be a way to get scooters going in Philly, and it might relieve some of the congestion out by HUP - which, if you haven't been there recently, is quite horrific.

I don't want anyone to get hurt on a scooter. And I don't want anyone's feelings to get hurt. But if our repaved bike lanes on Pine and Spruce aren't safe enough for scooters, I think I'd like to know why.

What the curb looked like before parked cars drowned everything.

The photographs here were taken by Edwin Locke in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1937, for the Farm Security Administration.