Sick of Scooter Riders on Your Sidewalks? Keeping Them Off Isn’t So Easy

It's probably a common sight during your commute — electric scooters zooming down or being abandoned on sidewalks. The City of San Jose wants to be the first in the world to keep electric scooters in the bike lane.

Simran Rakhra, a fourth-year student at San Jose State University, rides Lime scooters occasionally when she’s running late to class. She said she usually rides on whatever path is the fastest.

“Honestly, if there’s a bike lane, I usually go on the bike lane so that I’m not in the way of people,” Rakhra said. “But if there’s nobody there, I’m going to be on the sidewalk.”

According to California state law, electric scooters are allowed on bike paths, lanes, or trails, but not on sidewalks. But enforcing the law is an entirely different beast to tackle. The City of San Jose took the problem to the scooter companies themselves.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said the city is working with several app-based scooter companies to keep riders in bike lanes — and off sidewalks — using technology.

“I can’t tell you what the technology is going to be or whether it’ll be a whole assortment of them,” Liccardo said. “But we’re going to use that as a standard for the rest of the industry.”

One technology most companies are using is geofencing. It uses a person's location and creates boundaries that a user has to stay in — similar to how Google Maps creates a specific geographic perimeter for a person to get to his or her destination. If the person deviates from that path, the app knows and will reroute accordingly to get back within the boundary.

Lime is using geofencing — and detection technology — in its proposed solution to the city.

“When you look at the surface of a road compared to the surface of a sidewalk, they feel very different,” Sam Kang, Lime’s government relations director, said. “Where the road will be bumpier and inconsistent, the sidewalk tends to be smoother and whatever grooves it has tends to be a lot more consistent because of the tiles ... that most sidewalks has.”

Lime scooters detect those differences and can identify with 95 percent accuracy whether someone is riding on the sidewalk or the road. Riders who spend more than half of their journey on a sidewalk get a reminder on their phone that riding on the sidewalk is illegal.

“And for more habitual offenders, we can send them a more stern warning and we can experiment with different educational ways in which we can try to alter rider behavior,” Kang said.

Grüv, another electric scooter company, plans to go a step further with their new software, according to co-founder Alex Nesic.

“Rather than simply informing riders of bad behavior with the hope of nudging them toward better behavior, our approach is designed to decrease the vehicle speed to five miles per hour on sidewalks in real-time while alerting the rider simultaneously of the reason why,” Nesic said.

Colin Heyne, a public information manager with the San Jose Department of Transportation, said he has yet to see a company in San Jose that incorporates all of the e-scooter safety technologies available — one that detects sidewalk riding and one that reduces an e-scooter's speed when on the sidewalk.

“Our next step will be to limit deployment of the [scooter] devices in the area defined in our regulations until companies are ready to deploy devices that meet our regulatory requirements,” Heyne said.

The city hopes to eventually require companies to incorporate the safety technologies that will encourage riders to stay away from sidewalks.

Rakhra, the SJSU student, said she rides her scooter on the sidewalk because she doesn’t always feel safe riding on the road. As she stands on 2nd street in downtown San Jose, she said, “If I’m trying to cross here, there is no bike lane … so it just depends on where you’re at.”