They arrived in mysterious fashion. Flocks of electric scooters — like motorized skateboards with handlebars — were dropped overnight on the sidewalks of Santa Monica, California, with labels encouraging people to rent them by the minute using an app they could download on their phones.
Eight years later, these divisive little conveyances — battery-powered, eco-friendly, zippity quick and stored wherever the rider feels like — have changed how many Americans get around, raising hackles as they go.
Cities across the country are still sorting through the implications of their launch, a deliberately lawless approach popular in Silicon Valley: deploy first, ask permission later.
Are e-scooters an answer to our urban transportation woes? Or speedy little indictments of well-financed disruption for its own sake?
Commercial disobedience
Give the people what they want. “Disruption” — a core belief in the tech industry — is a bold expression of that idea.
Governments evolve too slowly, often fighting the battles of yesteryear while allowing commerce and regulation to become stagnant. Instead of waiting for them to catch up, disruption tells companies like Uber, Lyft or Airbnb to ignore obsolete or illogical restrictions, long enough to prove that their products or services deserve a place in the market. The bureaucrats will come around.
E-scooters are hyper-efficient. They’re cheaper than cars, more convenient on a small scale than buses or trains, and more environmentally sound than any of the above. Plus, they hardly take up any space.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have found that “investing in micro-mobility infrastructure such as e-bikes, e-scooters and bike lanes can reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions in cities.”
The business model is more responsive to people’s needs than traditional alternatives — especially in urban areas and resort towns. The rental paradigm used by Lime and Bird makes e-scooters affordable to users who couldn’t buy one.
And with dispersed storage, riders drop off their e-scooters right where the next users probably need them, because humans follow similar traffic patterns, like coming and going from the same mall or movie theater.
Besides, riding these machines is just a fun way to get around. “You rarely see somebody on a scooter who’s not smiling,” said Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas, during one industry-sponsored Q&A.
The most recent data, from 2023, shows 69 million rented e-scooter trips across the U.S. and Canada, up nearly 18% from the year before. Many of us love the wind in our hair, with a handle to hold onto and no pedaling.
As one CEO put it recently, people are “voting with their rides.” That’s what makes disruption so potent: It introduces incentives for change.
“This is a prime example of how the free market works,” according to a 2018 editorial by Investor’s Business Daily. “Without any planning or government involvement, this new service exploded on the scene. As a result, commuters suddenly have a new, efficient, nonpolluting way to get around in cities.”
Cash is not king
Don’t equate disregard with innovation. Democratic institutions move more deliberately because elected leaders have a duty to let all our voices be heard. They answer to voters, not CEOs, and that requires a process. We task them, among other duties, with keeping our streets safe.
Inundating our cities with a new form of transportation without regard to how it fits with our laws and infrastructure isn’t defiance of tyranny. It’s just selfish and dangerous.
Our streets weren’t built for e-scooters. On sidewalks, their speed makes them missiles on wheels as they circulate among unsuspecting pedestrians. In streets and bike lanes, they’re the opposite, slow and unprotected against heavier vehicles.
University of North Carolina researchers found in 2023 that small wheels and tires make e-scooters uniquely vulnerable to potholes, grates and other common road hazards.
The rental paradigm so popular for e-scooters is not sustainable. Bird, the sector’s original darling, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. That company and others like it have delivered a service that many people want, but only at an artificially low price made possible by venture capital — until that financial support ends.
“Encouraging ownership of bikes and scooters for regular users is the preferable outcome,” Paris Marx writes in Jacobin, “as they’ll last much longer and will always be available to their owner.”
But how many consumers will buy them at their true cost? And what happens when a city remakes its roads to accommodate a business that can’t survive?
Throughout their history, e-scooters have created new issues that citizens and governments have had little opportunity to confront before getting swamped. That forces them to make up new rules on the fly, hoping to accommodate the advantages of rented e-scooters while mitigating — or simply ignoring — the negative consequences.
But that doesn’t mean these companies have popular support. In 2023, nearly 90% of voters in Paris, France, chose to ban the pestilent rides. More recently, the New York borough of Queens implemented a scooter-sharing program that was described by one city council member as a “take it or leave it, this is what it is” solution. One participating CEO said the program was simply too big to pause. This time, he might be right.
This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.