E-Scooters Have Divided Suburban Queens

Photo-Illustration: Curbed

Michael Colson is used to attracting attention while working his route around Jamaica, Queens. He’s a foot-patrol employee for the Lime scooter-share company, which, along with Bird and Veo, began operating in Eastern Queens this summer — a development that at least some residents of the borough seem to deeply hate. “This is sensitive information,” Colson says, showing me a map filled with dots representing the scooters he’s meant to pick up and return to their designated parking corrals. His main job is moving scooters, but his second, unofficial job is listening to people who tell him how they feel about the scooters. “I hear stuff all the time,” he says. “It’s New York.”

The response to the scooter-share program’s arrival in Queens this June has been, at least among a noisy contingent of residents, fairly apocalyptic. Councilmember Sandra Ung has tried to ban the scooters outright in certain parts of downtown Flushing, saying she has been inundated with constituent calls about “dangerous operators” and scooters blocking driveways. Councilmember James Gennaro called them “monstrosities” and “the latest woke transport mechanism” when I spoke to him earlier this month. Local online forums are also flooded with complaints. “You’ll have 13-year-olds riding these scooters in the street not stopping for red lights so pedestrians will have to be extra careful,” one angry resident commented on the Community Board 12 Facebook group. (Another called the scooters an “infestation.”) “Residents are very upset,” the Reverend Carlene Thorbs, chair of the board, which unanimously voted against bringing the scooters to Queens, told me, saying they regularly come up at meetings.

While claims about scooters being a harbinger of doom for the area seem wildly overblown, it was true that scooters were blocking sidewalks, left in front of driveways, and even one thrown over a fence as I walked around on a sunny September afternoon. This is annoying and uncool, as anyone using a wheelchair or pushing a stroller can likely tell you, but the problem is only partially about poor rider etiquette. The scooters are meant to be left in designated corrals — painted white boxes on the sidewalk or street — or, in the case of more residential or less dense areas, out of the way in the “furniture zone” of the sidewalk, where people put out their trash bins. This guidance isn’t always observed by riders.

In an effort to combat rogue scooter parking, Lime, the biggest of the three companies operating in the city, requires users to take a photo of their parked scooter at the end of each ride. The app issues a fine after two warnings for improper parking. “We’ve seen a huge decrease between the warnings,” said Nicole Yearwood, senior manager of government relations at Lime. The company is also investing $2.5 million annually into its Queens operations to address these issues and expand its foot-patrol team. (In the Bronx, a quarter of scooters were improperly parked in the first year of the program, 10 percent of which were blocking pedestrians’ paths — but compliance grew as users learned what to do, which Yearwood expects will also happen in Queens.)

The other part of the issue with ditched scooters seems to be infrastructural: The corrals closest to subway stations and other forms of transit are often overflowing, with too few spots for the people hoping to park there. Which means, frustrating as the pileups may be, the scooters are indeed being used. (Local politicians are quick to brush off this fact. “Not in my district,” Gennaro told me, claiming that any benefits of the program are far outweighed by its “negative aspects.”) When implementing the program, the DOT specifically chose areas like Eastern Queens that are transit deserts and don’t have Citi Bikes to help commuters solve what’s often called the “first mile, last mile” problem: figuring out the last leg home from the subway. Many of these areas are communities of color that have high home- and car-ownership rates, but this doesn’t mean every person in Springfield Gardens or Fresh Meadows owns a car or wants to drive one to the nearest subway station. That’s where the scooters come in.

Since late June, the program has seen 37,000 unique rider accounts take 336,000 trips; according to those who answered Lime’s survey at the end of their rides, 73 percent say they use it to commute. “The average trip in Queens is just over one mile, and the vast majority of trips start and end in the same neighborhood, illustrating that the scooters are fulfilling an important role in connecting residents to mass transit and other local destinations,” Vincent Barone, DOT spokesperson, said. Between the Bronx pilot and the Queens rollout, 5.2 million trips have been taken, with particularly high ridership around shopping districts and near subways, according to a DOT report. “I love this thing,” Mike Kelly, who has been using the e-scooters every day to get to and from his home on Glassboro Avenue to the Sutphin Boulevard subway stop, told me. He had been Uber-ing, but his friends, who he says all use the scooters, turned him on to them. “The only sad thing is winter is coming. It’s gonna be very cold,” he said. Nabil Khatri, who lives in Flushing, told me he uses the scooters to get from his home to the Flushing–Main Street station two or three times per week. There is a bus that could take him there, but “during rush hour the buses are so slow and there’s no dedicated bus lane on my street,” he said.

Which is part of the bigger problem. Most of the issues residents say they have with the e-scooter program could be solved with better infrastructure. Take sidewalk riding. While the Queens rollout is still relatively new, the three-year Bronx pilot showed no fatalities and few severe injuries. (Roughly 95 percent of all pedestrian injuries in the city are caused by cars and trucks.) But fewer scooter riders would likely be zipping down the sidewalk if there were more room on the street to ride safely. “Instead of advocating for us to get rid of scooters, we should be advocating for more protected infrastructure,” Khatri said. More corrals, which the DOT is actively working to add, could help resolve the parking problem, but detractors in Queens don’t want that to happen, either. “Having more bike lanes is not going to be the solution,” Reverend Thorbs said. “We will never stand for or be a part of something that takes away from our parking. We are drivers.”

Despite opponents’ current obstinance, scooter advocates expect that complaints will die down as issues get tweaked and people get used to seeing them around. (Laura Shepard, a Queens organizer with Transportation Alternatives, pointed out that this was exactly what happened with Citi Bike more than a decade ago.) It doesn’t seem as if the scooters are going anywhere, at least not today. In the meantime, there will be more disgruntled comments — this week, Community Board 12 posted another photo on Facebook of a scooter blocking a driveway. The caption reads, “We haven’t forgotten!!!”