Alternative Transit

Tim Fulton 00:12Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. We are a weekly Columbus-centric podcast focusing on the civics, lifestyle, entertainment, and people of our city. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. This week: How should scooters, ride-hailing apps, and car-sharing services be considered in the conversation about alternative transportation? Can we think of them as a public good when they are for-profit entities? Columbus Underground reporter Brent Warren discusses the options for last-mile transit that exist in Columbus, how they came to be, and the motivations and incentives for the companies that get us from point A to point B. You can get more information on what we discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Also, the Confluence Cast is on Patreon. Find out how to support this podcast on our website, theconfluencecast.com, or at patreon.com/confluence. The Confluence Cast is sponsored this week by the Central Ohio Transit Authority, or COTA. It's time to shake up your commute and roll with COTA. Getting started is easy. Just go to your app store and search for "Transit." Download the Transit app and set up your COTA account. With the Transit app, you can plan, track, and pay for your COTA rides. You can download Transit today. Enjoy the episode. Sitting down here virtually with Columbus Underground reporter Brent Warren. Brent, how are you, sir?

Brent Warren 01:51I'm good. How are you?

Tim Fulton 01:53I'm doing well, thank you. We are talking today about alternative transportation in Columbus. We're going to get a little bit into the numbers and how things work. Specifically, we're talking about scooters, we're talking about single-use rental cars. Is that how you refer to that?

Brent Warren 02:13Yeah, free-floating rental cars, yes.

Tim Fulton 02:17Bicycle rentals, that sort of thing. So Brent, first of all, this is your specialty, that's in development at Columbus Underground. Can you talk through a little bit about what we have available here in Columbus, and when did it come to be?

Brent Warren 02:35Sure. Well, right now we have lots of scooters. I think most people who live in a central-city neighborhood in Columbus, they see them around. They're everywhere. And scooters first came in the summer of 2018. Bird was the first company to arrive. And they just sort of came, and you saw this in a lot of cities all over the country. They dropped off like hundreds of scooters onto our streets, and they hadn't really checked in with the City of Columbus before they did that. You know, we can talk more about that.

Tim Fulton 03:13I do want to interject there, because it's funny. Someone at the city at the time referred to it as, "Yeah, they just came and did it." And then they went on an apology tour to let everybody know, "Yes, we're here. And what do you need from us in order to stay here?"

Brent Warren 03:30Right. And that's what they did. And I think the timeline is, they came that summer, and then by the fall, the city had sort of crafted some rules and regulations. And they passed legislation, and they came up with kind of a permitting system. So now there's like four different scooter companies operating in Columbus, and they all have to report to the city, they have to give them the numbers, how many people are riding them. They have to make sure that they're offering the scooters not just in the Short North and downtown; they have to be in parts of Linden and the Near East Side and Franklinton as well. And the city has people who track that stuff now. So that was 2018 that they started, and then the regulations came soon after that. It seemed like a big thing when it happened, because at least in the transportation world, we're not used to big things like that just happening. Usually there's lots of planning and discussion and meetings about things, but they just kind of did it, you know? And, like you said, they kind of did an apology tour. I remember, in those early days, I had sent an email — I don't remember which scooter company it was — but just looking for some information, to one of their press people. And they got back, and the first line was, "We are looking forward to working with the City of Phoenix on this." You know, it just shows they were doing this all over the country at the same time. The scale of it is just crazy. And my understanding is that — and I think you know a little bit more about this world too — this was like venture funding, venture capital, that was making it possible, I understand.

Tim Fulton 05:20Well, and, you know, "move fast and break things," right, is a very common phrase. I would encourage anybody who's interested — there's a new show on Showtime about Uber, when they first started getting extra venture capital, and how, basically, it empowered them to break the law, that they could now afford to break the law. So, the regulations that came along pretty quickly — there were rules about where you could ride, right?

Brent Warren 05:51Yeah, where you could ride. One of them was that you are not supposed to ride on the sidewalks, which, of course, we still see lots of people riding on the sidewalks, but officially that's not permitted. And like I mentioned, the city wanted to make sure that all different neighborhoods were getting a chance to use these things if they wanted to. Which, the companies, if you don't have that kind of requirement, they're going to go basically right around where the college students are — the Short North, downtown, and that would be it. But actually — I wrote a story in the spring of 2019 — people in Franklinton started noticing that all of a sudden they weren't allowed to ride Bird scooters or to rent them in their neighborhood, when they had them before. And then it turns out that Bird had shrunk their home area, their footprint. So people in Linden or the Near East Side, all of a sudden, could no longer get scooters there either. So I started hearing about this, and I reached out to the city and to Bird. And a few days later, everything went back to the way it was. But basically, the scooter companies — my impression is, they're going to get away with what they can. And every once in a while, they actually are testing, like, "Let's see, if we do this, if anybody notices."

Tim Fulton 07:23Well, and that's a big part of this space too. You move a button, or you make a button have rounded corners, to see if you can get folks to behave in a different way that's more aligned with your profit model. And I think a big part of this discussion is the acknowledgement that transportation, at its core, is a public good, right? And that's why our tax dollars pay for things like COTA. We are dependent on — and there are trade-offs here, right, it's both good and bad — we are dependent on for-profit entities providing what we sometimes refer to as last-mile transportation. Whether that's a scooter from a bus stop here to your doorstep, or a bicycle along the Scioto Mile. These are companies that some are receiving incentives from the city, but at their core, they are for-profit entities, right?

Brent Warren 08:24And, you know, obviously in Columbus, we saw one of the big issues with that relationship with Car2Go. If people aren't familiar with Car2Go, they were here, they had the little two-seater cars, blue and white cars. And they were in Columbus from — I was actually surprised how long it was — it was from late 2013 to May of 2018. Okay, pretty good chunk of time. And I talked to not an insignificant number of people who said Car2Go is nice, because it allows a family like me to only have one car. Because it has, it's sort of a nice safety valve. If I need a car for some reason, like once a week or once every couple of weeks, it's there for me. So I don't have to buy a whole other car, I can just have Car2Go. It's basically the same model as scooters, where it's free-floating, you just find them on an app and you go get them. It's a one-way trip. So you just pay for when you're using it, and then you park it. They worked out a deal with the city where they can park it on public parking spaces. So it was something that worked for a lot of people, and then all of a sudden it was gone. The city couldn't do anything about it. Car2Go said, when they left, "Oh, the numbers just aren't there in Columbus." But then Car2Go itself completely folded up within a couple months after that. So they're not even operating in North America anymore. Surprise, surprise. Right. So that's an example of what you're talking about, like people come to rely on this service, this thing that fits, helps you live in a place like Columbus where there's not great transit. But then it just disappears overnight.

Tim Fulton 10:12Yeah, and to an extent it's an adoption issue. I think Car2Go is an issue of, it's a capital-intensive type business model, where you're buying cars that people are using, and sometimes they get into accidents, right? And I rode them, they were fine. Like, they got me from point A to point B. Also, there was a subscription model — I thought they did a really good job of looking for different avenues for people to use it, where you as an individual could do it. They reached out to companies and said, "Would you like to provide this offering to your employees?" But they just couldn't make it work all the way.

Brent Warren 10:55Right. And the update, then, is we have a new company now on the streets. It's called Free2Move. Have you seen them around town yet?

Tim Fulton 11:05I don't think so.

Brent Warren 11:06I've seen a few of them. I mean, I've been looking for them, but I have seen a few of them. They are not little mini cars, they're full — so they're like small SUVs, I think. Okay, Jeep Renegades, maybe, one of the smaller Jeep models. And it's exactly like Car2Go in terms of the model. They're spread around the city, they have a deal worked out with the city where they pay the city something in exchange for use of either metered spaces or just on-street free parking spaces. So you just park it wherever you can find a public spot. And it's just like the Car2Go model. The cars are bigger, you can actually fit four people into them, and you can fit stuff in the back too. So that's the main difference. But it's another company — I think it's maybe a European company — it's another company trying to get into this market and do the same kind of thing that Car2Go did.

Tim Fulton 12:09I mean, it's shared transport. Yeah, absolutely. And then you have done basically freedom-of-information requests with the city, because we require now these companies — like scooter companies and Car2Go, the bicycles — to report, like, what does the usage look like? I assume that's maybe how they're taxed. But what are those numbers telling you?

Brent Warren 12:39The numbers are pretty big. I mean, I started looking into that, I think, since the beginning. I tracked it for that first six months in 2018, and then 2019. And then 2020 was a very weird year, obviously, for lots of reasons. But yeah, a lot of the scooter companies just shut down completely at the beginning of the pandemic — which is another thing you could point to, like COTA had shut down completely. And actually, the CoGo bikes — CoGo, that's the bike-share system that has the docks, the little stations all over town — that one is sort of a partnership. There's a private company that runs it, but the city actually owns the bikes and the equipment and everything. So that's a little half-and-half, but CoGo kept going directly throughout the whole pandemic. But anyway, sorry, you asked about the numbers, just the usage. So last year, I just did an article on this where I tallied up all the scooter rides for 2021. And there were almost a million rides taken in Columbus. And that's more than there were in 2019. It's similar to the levels we saw — I think a little less than what we saw in the very beginning, that first half of 2018. But just to give you a sense of what that means, that's maybe around 2,000 trips a day, 2,600 trips on average every day, in Columbus. So obviously it's very weather-dependent. So in the summer it's going to be way more than that, in terms of how many trips people are taking a day by scooter in Columbus. But I think most people might be surprised at how big of a number that is.

Tim Fulton 14:38Absolutely. And I ride it from time to time. I will say I honestly ride it more when I'm in another city. You know, if I don't want to rent a car, it's just the easiest way to get from one side of a neighborhood to the other. But here, the virtue is the time at places like the new Crew Stadium or at Huntington Park, where you don't want to — you're not gonna hop in a cab, you want to get somewhere quickly. And this is my totally old-man complaining: please just have one person at a time on your scooter. And please don't ride them on brick streets. You will fall, something will happen.

Brent Warren 15:26Well, you know, I live in the University District, so I see anything you can imagine with those scooters. They push them to the limits, especially college students.

Tim Fulton 15:38Oh, absolutely. So what's interesting to me here is that there is some sliding scale of partnership with the city, right? Where the scooters, they don't need to dedicate any infrastructure, they don't need to worry about where they're going to park. They just need to make sure that, first of all, they're getting paid, and the city's getting paid for the money generated in the city, and also that people are safe. So they put together legislation around that. And that's that model. Whereas with Car2Go, yes, there's a parking-space issue, but also, when Car2Go came, that was a real partnership, in that the city offered dedicated parking spaces just for those cars. I don't know if that's going to continue with the new rideshare, but that's a whole other thing.

Brent Warren 16:30You mean with Car2Go, there were actually spots that were only for the Car2Go? Correct. Okay, I forgot. They were few...

Tim Fulton 16:37And far between, yeah. They almost felt like staging areas for the beginning of the day for those cars. Additionally, we would be remiss if we weren't talking about the fact that we have Uber and Lyft here. That's another alternative transportation method. I think that gets covered — if you want to know about it, watch the Showtime series again.

Brent Warren 17:01It is crazy to think of how new Uber and Lyft were at one point. Yeah, now it's just sort of like, nobody gives it a second thought. It's just what has always been, it almost feels like.

Tim Fulton 17:13It's totally ubiquitous. And, like, I was thinking the other day about this job I had five years ago, how I used to get food delivery from the same place every day. And I was like, "Why did I do that?" And I was like, "Oh, DoorDash didn't exist," or "UberEats didn't exist." It just wasn't a thing. And you understand — I try to explain things to my daughter, "This is the way things used to be." I tried to explain to her what a videotape was, or, excuse me, what Blockbuster Video was, and even the DVD portion of it. She was like, "That doesn't make any sense. Why would you go somewhere to get a movie to watch?" Yep. So, back to the conversation about the partnership: but the bikes, there is sort of — the city is a little bit more involved, right? Like, yes, you said that they own the bikes, but they're provided by and maintained by this private company.

Brent Warren 18:14And the city is involved with deciding where the stations go, and all that stuff.

Tim Fulton 18:23Yeah. And there, one would think, are being equitable about that placement and looking at where it can benefit the most people. Are there other companies or methods coming around?

Brent Warren 18:42Well, there is. I wrote — let's see, this was last year, I believe — I wrote about a local company that is trying to get their own bike-share system off the ground, and they want to do it in Columbus. I think they're also looking in some other cities; they mentioned Cleveland when I talked to them. Their name is Trip. I think it's Trip Bikes, or just Trip. But they have a cool kind of model, and I'll be curious — when I talked to them last year, they said 2022 was their target for launching, so sometime this spring. I haven't talked to them recently to find out if they're still on that schedule or not, but when I talked to them then, they were optimistic about it. And it's all e-bikes — which CoGo also has some e-bikes now, actually. A lot of their bikes are — anytime you see a CoGo bike with the pink wheel, that's an e-bike, so it makes it easier to ride, basically.

Tim Fulton 19:44And for those that haven't ridden it, you do still have to pedal, it just kind of — the battery kind of helps.

Brent Warren 19:51Yeah, it's a pedal-assist, they call it. And I think they're pretty fun. When I first rode an e-bike, I was like, "Oh, I get it. I understand why people like that," especially if you do a lot of urban riding where you're stopping and starting a lot. It really makes a difference to have that little assist from the bike. But the local company, they have kind of a different design of bike. They have really thick wheels, they're super comfy — I got to ride on one — and they actually have a little bit of a throttle. So you can actually get a little jolt of speed without pedaling. So they're a little more like what you would think of as a motorbike or something. But they still look basically like a bike. They're just trying to rethink the model a little bit. And I think it'll be interesting to see if they can make a go of it. Because this is a space where it's been all of these national, Silicon Valley-based companies. And here's this Columbus-based company saying, "We think we can do something a little bit differently, and we can roll it out here first, and we'll see if it works." So I'm curious to see how that goes for them.

Tim Fulton 21:01Well, and, just to talk about the business model and sort of ownership, those come — at least best I know, a lot of the scooter companies were small startups, and then ended up being acquired by folks like Uber and Lyft, transportation companies that basically knew this space. That's frankly kind of the name of the game in startups: you either go public, or you get bought. And you kind of have to be an omnibus-type company in order to go public. So having that exit, as it's called, is a good thing. So, and then we have Lime bikes too, correct?

Brent Warren 21:49Yeah, Lime — actually, Lime bikes first came to Columbus right before the scooters did. So they've been here for a while. They also, I think, started out in Dublin and a couple other places, but I don't think they're still in Dublin. But yeah, Lime bikes, they have the e-bikes also, and it's a free-floating service. So it's just like the scooters, there's no station or anything. It costs a little more to ride a bike than it does a scooter. But yeah, it's the same thing. You find them on an app and you go get it.

Tim Fulton 22:21Got it. I mean, I don't think we're in a transitional phase anymore here. I think that this is sort of how it's gonna be. And I'm always looking for innovation, but I don't see anything else coming down the pike, really, in this way, for providing that last mile of service. But it's fantastic that we have it, in addition to — as we talked about with Josh Lapp a couple weeks ago — an ever-evolving transit system that is fully a public good.

Brent Warren 22:55Sure. Yeah. And actually, I think that brings up a good point. One of my big things that I've been trying to keep an eye on with scooters is — when they first descended on all of our cities, I heard some people say, "Maybe this could be a good thing. If you have all these scooter riders, maybe that creates a larger group of people who will advocate for things like protected bike lanes, better trail systems." Because scooters, I mean, they're different than bikes, but they're similar in that you would rather not have them on the sidewalk, where it's illegal, and, for safety, you'd rather have them separated from cars. So this idea of, you have a kind of constituency for protected lanes that can hold scooters or bikes or whatever else, whatever kind of thing they come up with next — it seems to me like that's something that could be promising. Although in Columbus, we haven't really seen a lot of progress on that front lately. But maybe it's still to come, who knows?

Tim Fulton 24:10Yeah, I mean, we will see. And I would like to try and blame our climate, that we have cold, wet winters, for this not working out. But it's like two weeks a year that it's like, "Yeah, totally not okay to get a bike."

Brent Warren 24:28Also, I've got to say, when you start looking at what other cities are doing — like, Minneapolis is one of the great bike cities in the country, and they've done it. They have much worse winters than we do. They have a great network, protected lanes, off-street trails. And I just wrote an article last week about — I was talking about the downtown plan that's coming up in Columbus, and looking at something that they did in Calgary in 2015, which was, they just sort of implemented a protected bike-lane network in their downtown on a temporary basis. They just did it right away, and then they tweaked it as it went along. But Calgary, obviously, is a lot colder than Columbus, and it had some success in building out these kinds of networks for bikes also.

Tim Fulton 25:21Well, and what they do — so I spend a little time in Calgary every day for work. And what's interesting is, at given times of day, basically if it's not rush hour, they just shut down all the side streets for pedestrians and for bicycles.

Brent Warren 25:44In the downtown area, yes?

Tim Fulton 25:47Yeah. The throughways are open, and you can get anywhere that you want to. But streets like — Gay Street downtown, it just would be closed, like there's just no — in their mind, there's no need for this to be there. And they made extra room by getting rid of the parking, because they don't want people parking downtown. And if they want to park downtown, they should pay for it. So, lots of interesting models there in terms of a planning perspective. So, transition is happening, and hopefully we get there. Yep. So cool. Brent, I wanted to give you the opportunity — even though you're a reporter, I end every episode by asking, what do you think Columbus is doing really well? And this can be in the context of our conversation or not. What do you think Columbus is doing really well? And then following that up with, what do you think Columbus is not doing so well?

Brent Warren 26:43Well, I always say, when it comes to bike infrastructure in Columbus, the city of Columbus has done actually a great job over the last, I don't know, 10 or 20 years, of building out the river trail system, the Central Ohio Greenways. There are some people who have been slowly plugging away, filling in the gaps, making it a really pretty amazing system now. There are still gaps to it, but they've sort of quietly been making progress on that front, to the point where you can hop on a bike and go out to, you know, Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park and be on a trail the whole time. There are some pretty good rides that you can do. So I always give credit to Columbus for that. Now, when you look on the on-street side, that's where I think we've just fallen behind any sort of peer city that you can look at. We just haven't made any progress on that. I mean, there was momentum under Coleman, but it's been a long time since he was mayor, and not much has happened since then in terms of — specifically, what everybody seems to agree, is that you need protected bike lanes, and you need a network, you need it to connect up to things. And we haven't made a lot of progress on that. There's some hope. Maybe the downtown plan represents an opportunity to do something about that. So we'll see. We'll see what happens with that. I'm looking forward to finding out.

Tim Fulton 28:16Yeah, great. Brent, thank you so much for your time.

Brent Warren 28:19Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Tim Fulton 28:28Thank you for listening to the Confluence Cast, presented by Columbus Underground. Again, you can get more information on what we've discussed today in the show notes for this episode at theconfluencecast.com. Please rate, subscribe, share this episode of the Confluence Cast with your friends, family, contacts, enemies, your favorite commuter. If you're interested in sponsoring the Confluence Cast, get in touch with us. We can be reached by email at info@theconfluencecast.com. Our theme music was composed by Benji Robinson. Our producer is Philip Cogley. I'm your host, Tim Fulton. Have a great week.