WELCOME TO SAFE WALKWAYS USA
We advocate for measures to restore safety for all people, including people in wheelchairs and the vision impaired, people of all ages and all aspects of life to have the freedom to use the walkways of our city.
Our primary goal is simple: get motorized vehicles, particularly rented motorized scooters, off our walkways.
What You Can Get From This Website
- Tools and resources that you can use as an advocate for pedestrian safety:
- to report scooter parking violations if motorized scooters return.
- to explain the safety problems created by rental scooter companies and their users.
- Parking and staging create obstacles and hazards for pedestrians, especially the disabled and result in injuries.
- Driving on sidewalks injures and traumatizes pedestrians driving them off places they used to think were safe for walking.
- to debunk myths used to justify the scooter rental industry:
- The rental scooter industry decreases carbon emissions.
- False, it increases them.
- Rental scooters are a cost-effective solution to the First Mile - Last Mile transportation problem.
- False, private ownership is cheaper and less risky.
- Rental scooters are safe and just as safe as bicycles and cars.
- False, the design of kick scooters is inherently unstable and much more so than a bicycle, the injury rate for travel by scooter is nearly 400 times that for travel by car and serious injuries associated with travel by scooter are far higher than those associated with cycling.
- Rental scooter companies place safety as their top priority.
- False, they actively work to have safety regulations removed or watered down.
- Rental scooter companies are responsible members of the local community.
- False, they enter markets without warning and disregard local regulations, including those designed to protect property.
- Rental scooter users have a drivers license and obey traffic laws.
- False, they often disregard the rules of the road, leave scooters on or blocking access to private property, the rental companies do not prevent children from accessing and driving them and under 18s do not wear a helmet.
- If involved in a collision rental scooter users have third-party liability insurance coverage provided by existing policies and can easily be identified.
- False, their regular auto and home insurance does not cover third parties injured by a driver of a rental scooter, the rental company will not provide information about a hit and run renter and scooters carry no easily read unique identification.
- The rental scooter industry decreases carbon emissions.
- Information about:
- the role San Diego played in the development of the scooter rental industry,
- the failure of the City of San Diego tfrom 2018 to 2022 o protect pedestrian safety effectively,
- what it could cost for it to do so,
- who members of Safe Walkways are and why we set it up.
The History Of Our Fight For SAFE Walkways
In February 2018 motorized scooters for rent appeared in San Diego with neither warning nor explanation yet in violation of the City's Municipal Code on encroachment [§129.0702 (a) (2)], the California Vehicle Code [§22500 (f)] and the prohibition of the use of a sidewalk as a place from which to run a business without a permit.
While other cities adopted sensible approaches towards the invasion of motorized scooters we witnessed our City do nothing about not only their arrival but also:
- the horrific number of accidents that were happening daily,
- the number of drunks and kids on scooters,
- the inability of police to identify drivers of unidentified scooters,
- the horrendous cost solving these problems imposes on taxpayers.
When the City ignored repeated pleas to enforce its regulations to protect the safety of pedestrians and as affected citizens became aware of each other, Safe Walkways was established in June of 2018 as a Facebook group. Later a similar group was established on social media site Nextdoor. Today the combined membership of the groups is around 600 and growing. Use the icons at the bottom of each page to join us.
Our fight for SAFE walkways has been a fight to:
- change the Municipal Code to get scooter rental operations in the street not on sidewalks.
- prevent scooters being left on sidewalks
- get the companies to immediately remove scooters left on sidewalks, and,
- impound those they don't
- use enforcement about how scooters must be driven:
- scooters must not be driven on sidewalks.
- under 18s must wear a helmet.
- get the City to enforce State law:
- by requiring the companies to:
- geofence all streets where driving a motorized scooter is illegal.
- check the renter's drivers license against their appearance.
- keep children off motorized scooters.
- eliminate dual riders.
- follow ADA State and Federal and regulations.
- prevent scooters from lying on their side and pick them up
- by requiring the companies to:
- to help:
- the mobility impaired who are unable to get where they need to go
- the blind who fall over scooters and are severely injured
- pedestrians who are knocked over and injured
- the ordinary people who are now afraid to go for a walk.
What Was Wrong With The Regulations 2019 - 2022?
From 2018 to mid-2019 there were no regulations governing dockless motorized scooter rental companies. The City only created regulations in June 2019 for its new permit scheme basically a year and half after they first appeaed. The first regulations were problematic because:
THEY CREATED CONFUSION:
- They created two systems for parking of scooters, depending where you were:
- Downtown scooters could only be parked and staged in city-designated corrals in the street - they may not be parked or staged on sidewalks downtown.
- Elsewhere scooters had to be staged in city-designated corrals, but, if there was no corral, then they may be staged on the sidewalk in groups of up to four, each group at least forty feet apart.
- It's a system seemingly designed to create confusion, be self-defeating and be unenforceable. One has to ask how any tourist in San Diego who uses a scooter in Pacific Beach say, where it's staged on the sidewalk and may be parked on the sidewalk, is supposed to know that when they visit downtown they are not allowed to do that.
- The next problem stemed from that dual system.
THEY ENCOURAGED SIDEWALK DRIVING AND PARKING:
- Throughout most of the City of San Diego, the regulations legitimized parking scooters on sidewalks, but:
- When scooters are staged on sidewalks, users then inevitably drive them on sidewalks - they do not activate them and then wheel them into the street, and,
- When users see scooters staged on sidewalks, they naturally assume they may park them there.
THEY LACKED PROVISIONS FOR MONITORING:
- The City almost entirely relied on reports submitted to it by citizens via its Get-It-Done app and those only related to parking issues. It handed those off to the companies essentially assuming that they would "self-manage" the problems they created.
- The City also had a feed from an Australian data-management company, Populus, it contracted to handle the data the operators wee required to provide. This provided information again only relevant to parking. It did nothing to monitor moving violations.
- Similarly nothing was done to determine that the claims the companies made about their benefits in fighting climate change or as a safe alternative to car travel were true.
- The regulations also did not require that the companies provide any evidence that they are reducing carbon emissions - our analysis and that of others indicates that the rental industry actually increases them.
- Likewise they did not require the companies to provide information or evidence of their safety. The City has a Vision Zero goal of reducing deaths on the roads to zero. Since their arrival rental scooters have been associated with a number of deaths and thus the industry undermined achievement of the City's Vision Zero goal.
THEY LACKED PROVISIONS FOR ENFORCEMENT:
- The City initially gave the companies three hours to deal with a parking violation IF the City reports it to the company.
- This was not from the time the violation occurred but from the time the City reported it to the rental company. These reports are simply the reports submitted by citizens who see a parking problem. Yet the rental companies have information about which vehicles are in violation from the moment a user ends a ride because they send a photo of the vehicle to the company when they end the rental.
- After three hours the City may impound the scooter, but the City only employed a service to do that impounding for a few hours a day and they did barely none.
- In 2022 the City reduced this three hour grace period to one hour.
THEY FAILED TO ENFORCE STATE LAW:
- Although the regulations require the companies to slow their vehicles on a few walkways they do not require the rental companies to apply the same technology to prevent motorized scooters being driven on streets where doing so is illegal, (i.e. all streets faster than 25mph and without a class 2 or 4 bike lane).
- State law prohibits sidewalk driving, dual driving, underage driving and driving without a license, yet the City's regulations did nothing to require the companies to ensure those prohibitions were effected until 2022 and the SDPD issued virtually no citations for such moving violations.
- The City Parking Enforcement officers are not enabled to issue parking tickets to the rental companies when say a fallen scooter is blocking a dropped curb at a crossing, thus barring someone in a wheelchair.
- Unlike other cities San Diego does not require the companies to pass on to the users any fines it imposes on them for say blocking a disabled parking space or drop ramp at a crossing.
- The regulations did not require labels against dual riding nor that the scooters display a unique identifier that is easily read at a distance until 2022.
Our paper stating the problems the industry creates and solutions for them were provided to the City in 2021.
2022: Contracts For A City Shared Mobility Device Program
The Request For Proposals
In November 2021, with a new Mayor and members of Council in office, the City announced it was taking a different approach. It issued a Request For Proposals, (RFP), seeking companies to provide Shared Mobility Device, (SMD), services city-wide under contracts. A SMD can be a motorized scooter or bike, an e-bike or a number of other device types, available in the public domain to rent by the public using an app. The RFP stated that the City wanted to make a wide range of types of devices available to the public, e.g. cargo bikes to carry things, and trikes, so that the elderly would feel stable.
The RFP contracts were to be for three years initially, extendable for a further two years. There would be a limit on the number of operators to a maximum of four. The total number of devices was to be limited to a maximum of 8,000, down from 14,500 in the last half year of the 2019 permit scheme.
The End of Dockless
Significantly the new contract approach also prohibited the staging and parking of motorized scooters on sidewalks anywhere in the city, (not just downtown), and requires the companies to ensure that driving them on sidewalks is also prevented. These represented significant improvements as they reflect the achievement of our goal to get scooters off sidewalks.
In their proposals the companies to a greater or lesser degree promised the City that they had effective sidewalk driving detection technology and would provide a range of vehicles for rent by the public.
You can view the publicly available versions of the proposals of the selected companies: Bird, Lime, Link Part 1 and Part 2 and Spin.
August 2022 To November 2023: City SMD Program Collapses
Council modified the Municipal Code to require parking only in corrals in the street city-wide and four operators were selected to operate the City's SMD program. Lyft was one of the four but dropped out and removed their scooters. They were replaced by Bird which had not initially been selected. The other three operators were Lime, Link and Spin.
All the successful operators made claims in their proposals about their ability to detect and prevent sidewalk driving but Lime left saying they couldn’t comply. Link was told to leave by the City. Bird suffered a significant loss of their scooters which were stolen and taken across the border to Tijuana. They replaced them with older models which were not as appealing to both thieves and riders. The older models did not have the sidewalk detection and prevention technology required by the City and promised by Bird. Spin was acquired by Bird in 2023 leaving Bird as the sole operator in the City SMD program but then Bird filed for bankruptcy, By November 2023 the City's SMD program had collapsed and no dockless motorized scooters were available for rent.
November 2023 To January 2024: Proposals To "Entice" Scooter Companies Back
Kent Lee, a new member of the SD Council elected in November 2022, who took his seat in January 2023, presented proposals based on requests made by various scooter rental companies including Lime. These were to roll back the safety provisions put in place by Council the previous year. For instance to:
- End the curfew that reduced drunk driving
- Replace multiple license checks that made it difficult for kids to rent scooters and require only one.
- Have scooters only emit an audible warning instead of being slowed to 3mph if driven on a sidewalk.
These proposals went to Council in January 2024, an election year. We presented arguments against them to all members of Council - see our presentation about sidewalk driving, the misleading information given Council Members about greenhouse gas emissions savings and our press release. At the Council meeting some Council Members indicated their opposition and concerns. That was sufficient for CM Lee to withdraw the proposals for further consideration.
February 2024 Onwards
Currently the City's Mobility Program has no motorized scooters and no operators. Many pedestrians, especially in the beach communities and downtown, have expressed their relief and feeling of greater safety when they go for a walk.
CM Kent Lee's office as indicated that he has no intention of ressurecting his proposals.
Alyssa Muto, the Director of the City's Sustainability and Mobility department, who had insitgated and overseen the fiasco of the City's failed Mobility Program, left to take up a position as the City Manager of Solana Beach effective May 6, 2024.
We have advocated that for next year's budget the residual funds of the now defunct program be re-allocated to other active programs to ensure that the City has no funding to support the return of scooter companies considering a return.
Why "Safe Walkways" And Not "Safe Sidewalks"?
The answer is that people walk in many more places than sidewalks including:
- promenades,
- plazas,
- paths,
- trails,
- alleys, and,
- boardwalks,
to name just a few and all of which we have here in San Diego. We think "Safe Walkways" covers more ground and believe it or not, though rental scooters create problems on sidewalks they also create them in all those other places too.
THANK YOU FOR TO ALL OUR SUPPORTERS OVER THE YEARS FOR HELP IN RESTORING SAFETY TO THE WALKWAYS OF SAN DIEGO AND BEYOND.
How About A Walk Along The Boardwalk Honey?
