This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Dylan Rivera and Jacob Sherman of the Portland Bureau of Transportation to discuss micromobility. We chat about the importance of cities regulating access to transportation markets, importance of bike infrastructure, transportation wallets and alternatives to a parking pass.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: So let's talk about micromobility a bit. I'm curious about kind of the overall landscape for micromobility at this moment in Portland.
Dylan Rivera: We were thinking it might be helpful to go over a little bit of the context here for when this whole micromobility movement arrived. Because in Portland, it was a little different than a lot of places, a pivotal part of our history dates to the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s of environmental protection and trying to protect rivers and forests by, literally in some cases, removing a highway and replacing it with a park in downtown Portland in the 70s, refusing a new highway project that would have erased 2 percent of the housing in the city for the sake of a new interstate highway connection, and instead diverting those federal dollars into light rail, and then in 1993, becoming the first city to adopt a goal to reduce carbon emissions.
And so, all along Portland, for generations, has had this environmental ethos that we then translated into public policies, our everyday life and the built environment that makes our everyday life work. So biking and public transit, especially light rail, especially streetcars, as a way to improve our everyday quality of life while we're reducing carbon emissions has been a mantra here in Portland for generations, going back to the 1990s, and then with the start of the first Modern streetcar line in America in 2001 here in Portland.
That movement for innovation and transportation with environmental goals at the forefront has been growing and evolving, and then all of a sudden we had massive venture capital going into new mobility and smartphone-based technology with ride sharing.
Uber came to Portland after launching in dozens of other cities in America and across the world and launching itself in these cities — irrespective of the local wishes, irrespective of any regulatory environment, irrespective of readiness by the community. We saw them coming and they arrived here in December of 2014, before we were ready for them, and it prompted a confrontation that was unique in the United States. We took them to federal court immediately and reached an agreement where they agreed to halt service in Portland. The first time they'd ever halted service in an American city.
And it was because we demanded the opportunity to create consumer protections, environmental protections, equity goals and other rules of the road for ride hailing. That experience was really formative for us here in Portland, and that informed how we approached e-scooters in 2018, because we did not want a repeat of what happened with Uber.
We saw scooter companies launching themselves in cities across America without any notification, without any collaboration with local officials or policymakers, so we took proactive steps here in Portland to write the rules for a scooter program and invite the companies in on the timeline that we needed to have permits ready for them to apply for.
With scooters, we said, "We welcome you to come to Portland." They had been knocking at our door and calling us already. And we said, we welcome you in a few months — when we're done writing the rules of the road and creating a program for you. That set us on a path that made us unique in America, that has given us data that no one else has.
That's really helped inform our planning and policymaking as a city in ways that no other cities been able to.
Jacob Sherman: As Dylan was saying there, we said, give us 90 days [to] stand up some rules, some requirements, and then we can move forward. And so we initially in 2018 moved forward with what was a four month pilot.
I actually started at the agency a few months into that pilot. Shoutout to my colleague, Brianna Orr, who was managing things at the time alongside another colleague, Erica Nebel. We manage that four month pilot with kind of a test and learn approach — really asking ourselves whether and how scooters help us advance our climate, help us advance our safety and help us advance our equity goals that we have as an agency.
I think, in general, in the kind of new mobility, technology innovation space, we're really focused on policy-driven approaches and want to know how these technologies are helping us move forward on some of these goals that we've established as a community. It's not just innovation for innovation's sake. It's purpose driven innovation.
We finished the pilot. We actually told companies they had to leave and pick up their scooters, and went into a process where we wrote a fairly exhaustive report about our initial findings. And that report is available up on our website.
We saw promise in it, and we still saw some kind of peril and some challenges. And so we actually recommended that we do another pilot. When we wrote that report, we were one of the first cities in the U.S. to do exhaustive reporting like that. I think the New York Times wrote something saying it was the most detailed analysis of scooters at the time and downloaded tens of thousands of times. And we said, let's do another pilot because we haven't answered all of the questions.
And so then in 2019, we stood up what was supposed to be another relatively short term pilot. We had that pilot, though, different than the first one. The first one was really structured maybe in a fairly traditional regulatory sense of here's a permit, come fill out the paperwork, get the permit to operate and go.
This second pilot, we actually structured it as more of a competitive permit. And so again, established our goals and a framework. And then we asked companies how they could meet those goals and actually submit an application. We had, I believe it was about 12 companies apply and six made it through that permit process and over the course of 2019 through today there's been a lot of churn and a lot of challenge in the e-scooter market.
The pandemic certainly accelerated, I think, some of the market challenges that probably would have happened anyways. Venture capital, I think, as folks know, as well as interest rates have really tightened, so it's been an interesting space for us to be in partnership or kind of in a quasi-partnership space with an industry that's really had its ups and downs over the last five years.
