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Atlanta's "Action Plan for Safer Streets" is perhaps the most significant example of the scooter craze actually influencing policy and infrastructure in American cities, but it's not the only one. Scooter companies--buoyed by their fees, data, and millions of new two-wheeled street users--have begun to push cities, especially those that have historically had few cyclists, to rethink their auto-centric street designs. Indianapolis has earmarked the fees it charges scooter companies to build safe "neighborways" for bikes and scooters, and activists in Nashville have used scooter data to make a stronger case for bike lane expansions along popular corridors, to name just two more examples.

Scooter-sharing companies already faced an uncertain future before the coronavirus pandemic, and now that future is in great jeopardy, with most companies suspending service in the U.S.  But no matter what happens going forward, this two-year experiment has clearly demonstrated the demand for micromobility--human-size, often electrically boosted vehicles--in a wide variety of American cities. Scooters have also proven to be a powerful symbol, illustrating the geometry and physics at the root of the nation's transportation problems--for those who are willing to look.

Scooters are a lot of things to a lot of people, but everyone can agree they're popular. In 2018, the first year they were widely available, shared, dockless scooters provided 38.5 million trips in America, more than the nation's much-longer-established docked bike-share systems like CitiBike. All indications suggest that number should be higher for 2019. Atlanta saw more than 3 million rides in the first nine months of 2019. Austin, Texas, saw 5 million rides in a 15-month period between 2018 and 2019. Los Angeles sees about 1 million scooter and dockless bike rides per month. A single company, Lime, which operates fleets of scooters and bikes around the world, announced its 100 millionth ride in September 2019.

All those rides translate to a lot more riders on two wheels--and not only in coastal cities with vibrant cycling cultures. "You have basically double the number of citizens saying, 'Where's my damn bike lane?' " said Regina Clewlow, CEO of Populus, a micromobility data platform, extrapolating from a 2018 report. "I think cities are hearing that." And their constituents might be giving them more leeway to act on road safety improvements that have historically been a hard sell to the car-owning public. Even if only a handful of scooter riders become bike lane advocates, plenty more will at the very least understand their utility firsthand. (It has become commonly accepted that bike lanes are the best place for scooters to ride). Even drivers who might otherwise resent bike lanes are forced to acknowledge that they're actually being used, and are thankful that the pesky scooters are being kept out of their way.

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