Episode 93: Equity Requirements in US Shared Micromobility Programs with Anne Brown (Road Scholars pt. 3)

Madeline Brozen 0:05
Hey, listeners. This is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm one of today's hosts, Madeline Brozen. This is the third episode in our four-part transportation series of Road Scholars. So far, we've given you episodes that straddle the two sides of the transportation housing coin. But now that you've been swimming in the shallow end of the transportation pool for a couple of episodes, we're taking you into deeper transportation waters. Our next two episodes will be more exclusively focused on transportation in the area where I work most closely, equity issues. We'll cover this from two perspectives, what cities are doing in today's episode, and next episode we'll discuss ride-hailing and people with disabilities, rounding out this Road Scholars miniseries.

Today's episode with University of Oregon's Anne Brown walks us through what we know about how cities are and are not trying to incorporate equity into shared scooter and bicycle programs. Shared micromobility programs now exist in nearly every U.S. state, and the usage of these services continues to grow. But a growing body of research demonstrates how these services are disproportionately used within higher-income communities, and that structural barriers inhibit their use by lower-income communities and people of color. So because of these known issues, it's increasingly common for cities to put various types of equity requirements within both public and private programs. Today's episode begins by exploring the motivation and reasonableness behind these requirements, and then transitions into a helpful depiction of the types of requirements that are common. What we're trying to address is a key question. Are these requirements translating into better outcomes, and do they help close these known disparities?

The Housing Voice Podcast Enterprise is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and this series is grateful for support from Claudia Bustamante, Irene Marie Cruise, Tiffany Lieu, and your usual host, term producer, Shane Phillips. If you like Road Scholars or have any questions that you'd like us to tackle, please don't hesitate to reach out and ask.

With that, let's get to our conversation with Anne Brown. Anne Brown is Associate Professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon, where she researches topics relating to transportation equity, shared mobility, and travel behavior. As I'm required to report by the University of California Regents, Anne got her PhD from the UCLA Urban Planning Program, and she's currently on the road with her sabbatical joining us from the Netherlands, so she's a perfect guest to welcome to Road Scholars. Welcome, Anne, to this podcast.

Anne Brown 2:54
Thanks, Maddie. Great to be here.

Madeline Brozen 2:57
I'm also joined by my co-host, Juan Matute, who similarly got to spend time with our guest when she was at UCLA. Welcome Juan.

Juan Matute 3:04
Thanks, Maddie.

Madeline Brozen 3:05
Anne, to get us started today, we're going to ask you to share with us a memorable transportation journey, and the memorable definition is up to your interpretation, so what memory are we walking through?

Anne Brown 3:18
Okay, so I'm going to go with my most unique mode. It's one that I like to use as a – I bet you haven't ridden this mode, too. So when I was in college, I studied abroad in South Africa, and I rode an ostrich. So it wasn't the smoothest ride ever, but it was very memorable. So that's what I'll go with for this.

Madeline Brozen 3:35
Where did you take this ostrich ride?

Anne Brown 3:39
At an ostrich farm, of course. That's what you do when you study abroad in South Africa, but it was very silly. They put a bag on the ostrich's head so it doesn't get grumpy at you, and then you go at, I would say, a trot if an ostrich has a trot. It's very bumpy, but it was hilarious.

Juan Matute 3:57
I was expecting cableway for Cape Town. I've been on the cableway in Cape Town, but I've never ridden an ostrich.

Anne Brown 4:04
Short distance only.

Madeline Brozen 4:07
Yeah, but definitely fits the definition of memorable. The article we're mainly focusing on today was published in December 2024 in the Journal of Cycling and Micro Mobility Research with co-author Amanda Howell. It is titled Mobility for the People, Equity Requirements in the U.S. Shared Micro Mobility Programs. The paper asks what the current state of equity requirements are in scooter and bike share programs across the United States and how these efforts are monitored and evaluated. In the paper, they assemble a data set of efforts from 239 shared programs, e-scooter programs, dockless bike shares, docked bike share systems, and cities with both e-scooters and bike share. This data set reaches across 41 states, and then they categorize the amount and type of equity requirements in each program. They find that while it's common that any program has at least one type of equity requirement, what is required varies program to program. What this shows is that programs use different approaches to help these programs overcome existing barriers for people and communities that may have lower levels of access to micro mobility. They highlight that very few of these programs have data requirements that allow cities to monitor the efforts of these mostly private operators, and even fewer cities that monitor the efforts report their findings. The big question that we're left with at the end of this is whether the presence of equity requirements translates into more equitable outcomes and access. So now that I've introduced your work, I want to ask you about its origins. In the review, you explore previous research in this area, you know, where there have been some type of these inventories before, and you assembled this database that was probably not a very light lift. So what's different about your work here compared to previous research on barriers, and what motivated the questions that you pose?

Anne Brown 6:06
Yeah, so I'll start out in saying this wasn't the research we originally hoped to do. We originally wanted to ask that question, which was how do requirements translate to outcomes? And as we started down that path, we realized, well, first thing is we don't actually know what cities are doing right now, and especially a comprehensive look at that. Not to mention that the data don't always allow one to evaluate the outcome. So the goal of this research instead was then to think more broadly about these equity efforts in micro mobility. So I think with a lot of my work in transportation technologies in general, I guess see it as one of two possibilities. One, they could be used to bridge existing divides within transportation systems. So we often have mobility haves, mobility have nots, if you want to put in a simple have and have not term. And these offer an opportunity to provide more access and mobility for people with more limited options, so people without cars who may not be able to travel across spaces easily, or the other very real possibility is that they could further divide the mobility outcomes for people. So they give more and more options to people who already have good travel options. And the people without great options still don't have any additional benefits or modes. So that's kind of the big picture of why I'm interested in studying equity in these modes. And from the efforts that have been done previously, some of those were focused on a single modes. They were looking at only e-scooters, for example. Some were often surveys, which is also very time intensive, but it involves emailing different city staff, for example, and asking them to fill out the different requirements their programs have. As you can imagine, it can be quite tricky to get email responses when you're sending emails out into the ether. So those are just challenging in terms of getting a really comprehensive picture of equity requirements across the US, the many, many different US programs that are constantly evolving every year and even basically as soon as you hit publish for a study like this, they evolve further. So our goal with this was really to collect that full regulatory landscape of what are cities doing for putting equity into their program requirements. We actually did update the study last year. So we're up to 243 programs in 49 states. So the story remains the same, basically, although we did find that over time we're seeing more equity language in requirements. But yes, Maddie, as you alluded to, it was a labor of love, I'll say. It took us a lot of false starts to try to really figure out what is a requirement, for example, what do cities really mean by a lot of the language they put into requests for proposals or ordinances, for example, that involved often conversations with city staff saying, tell me exactly what you mean by the word should, or must and shall are easier to digest. But we ended up sifting through a lot of public documents, a lot of, again, requests for proposals, ordinances, city codes, sometimes direct contact with staff when that language wasn't posted, and then coding things as requirements or not, and then the specific language there as well. So it took, I think we ended up having four undergrads and one grad student working on this over different times and a lot of different people collecting these data. So they are all now accessible. So if you want to dig into it yourself, we have them all saved so you don't have to dig and find them yourself.

Madeline Brozen 9:35
Yeah. So we'll include this in the show notes, but there's a really lovely dashboard of all the data for this project. And you can go and filter that and look at different requirements. You can also tell Anne and her team if any of these requirements have updated to kind of keep the data alive.

Anne Brown 9:54
Yes, they're constantly updating. And with the dashboard is we're really, we are hoping it's a resource for other cities. So the goal of putting it in a public-facing and interactive form instead of just some static resource that is a little clunkier to sift through is, you know, everyone in cities are time-strapped and some cities don't even have a single person responsible for a shared micro-mobility program. So the hope with this is that you can learn from other people's language, pull from other RFPs, et cetera, so that you're not having to reinvent the wheel with every program. You can pick and choose what others have done, learn from those and adapt to your program.

Madeline Brozen 10:27
Great. That's an excellent public service that you're doing in addition to this work. So before we get into the details of what you found, I want to start with a discussion about the motivation and reasonableness of city requirements on micro-mobility and to think why and how scooter and bike-share programs have equity requirements and why these programs are held to a somewhat higher standard than other modes of transportation. You know, for example, cities don't have programs that require similar efforts from Lyft and Uber for their car rides and now Waymo, autonomous vehicles that were definitely staying in Los Angeles. Although there are some efforts, mostly at the state levels, to address some things, I'd say largely around wheelchair accessibility, but really not the litany of different requirements that you are exploring in this work. Part of the reason for the differences in requirements may be that micro-mobility programs are sometimes publicly managed. That's mostly for the docked bike-share programs. Or it could be that cities are trying to make up for not having mechanisms in place when Uber and Lyft arrived, although the fact that we're just now seeing Waymo as kind of a new arrival in this space without this type of requirement makes me a little unsure that this is the only reason. Now you know, as researchers that care about equity and ensuring that underserved people in communities have access to mobility services, I know we have a strong point of view on kind of the need for regulations and guardrails. But for someone that doesn't work in this space or may be skeptical about why only certain operators are subject to these requirements, can you give your perspective about the reasonableness for these equity requirements in general for micro-mobility programs?

Anne Brown 12:12
Yeah, and I think it's an absolutely fair and good point. I mean, I don't necessarily think it makes sense that only micro-mobility is subject to these requirements. I don't think it means that they shouldn't be. I think there's lots of good reasons that they do include equity requirements, but even beyond equity requirements, there's plenty of evidence that micro-mobility companies have all sorts of requirements. So insurance requirements, for example, that go well above what one might see for, say, ride-hail or other modes. There's other research out there by John MacArthur, Kevin Fang, and Calvin Thigpen that find that basically fees for shared micro-mobility are also much higher than other forms of transportation, including ride-hail and driving. So as you alluded to, I think there's plenty of political reasons behind there. And I think also just deference to the status quo of cars. And I think it should make us question a lot about our current system. So if we really want to be shifting people out of cars or providing high-quality, affordable regulations, we really should probably rethink how we're approaching all of these modes and what their role is within the transportation system. And so I will say I don't think it necessarily makes sense that there are such stringent regulations on these modes more than others. That said, I think there's a really good role and important reason that these requirements exist. And so that's from talking with, say, city officials who see different outcomes when equity requirements go in place, for example, and don't. This is largely anecdotal, but it's not always the case that if you're trying to maximize profit versus the public good, systems might be designed quite differently, right? And so the goal of these requirements is often, I think, to try to bring the public good more into focus. And again, that's not to say that you can't have both achieve good public outcomes and also make a profit. But again, if the goal is to bridge existing gaps rather than widening them, I don't think that the public can assume that this will happen naturally. And so I think, again, one of the goals of the requirements is to try to bridge rather than widen the gaps. But absolutely, we should be questioning the entire system that we operate in and that these modes operate in.

Juan Matute 14:19
So the review highlights one of the most common issues with the lack of geographic equity and micromobility, and that is that stations and vehicles tend to be sited and placed in higher income, whiter neighborhoods, leading to disproportionate use among higher income and white users. A stark statistic you present from the city of Austin is that 80% of city residents reported having no access to micromobility. Your review found that mandated geographic service areas were a common equity requirement for program implementation. Can you discuss how cities use these requirements?

Anne Brown 14:58
Sure. So these, like all requirements and all equity requirements in the program, vary a lot from city to city. But typically what cities do is they will, in their documents, require, they'll either highlight certain zip codes, certain neighborhoods by name, often they'll call out neighborhoods or areas that they've identified through other work like equity priority areas or opportunity zones that require some additional service in those neighborhoods or a certain standard of service in those neighborhoods. So that can look quite different. Sometimes it's a percentage of the fleet that needs to be deployed in target neighborhoods. Sometimes it has to do with the number of trips that begin or end in the neighborhood. It could also be a set number of vehicles that are deployed. Usually it has to do with trying to ensure there are vehicles in the neighborhoods that cities are trying to target. And I think that's quite important. So like you mentioned, vehicles are not distributed equally across space. And so I've done other research in the past with my former PhD student and now alum of the University of Oregon Planning and Public Affairs program, CNMANG. And what we did was we looked at docked versus dockless systems, for example, and how those service boundaries varied across space, specifically for looking at equity neighborhoods. So neighborhoods that had lower median household incomes, lower access to cars, higher percentage of people of color. And basically we found that was when you looked at compared to dockless, it's a much more equitable system in terms of thinking about the people that largely cities are trying to target with these services. But there's a big asterisk there, which is that's the service area. So they hypothetically serve more people. But when you look at where the vehicles actually are, it's still broader than dockless or docked systems. Sorry. And that's there's lower infrastructure costs that can be easier to deploy when you don't have to install docks, for example. But it's much smaller than the actual full area that scooters are allowed to operate. So there's plenty of evidence that suggests that scooters are not just going to evenly distribute themselves across space. And so there's good reason to think that if cities want vehicles in target neighborhoods, that needs to be a requirement or concerted effort. What I will also say about them is they are necessary to get a vehicle in a neighborhood, but having a vehicle on your street is not sufficient to taking a ride. So that's just one of the many barriers that can exist between learning about a program and actually taking a ride. There needs to be a vehicle and there needs to be potentially a whole bunch of other things in place for that to happen.

Madeline Brozen 17:38
Yeah. And I think throughout the conversation, we'll get into more of those barriers and how cities are attempting to overcome them. But following up on the theme of geographic targeting, about a third of the programs had spatial equity requirements, meaning, you know, they had to provide access in some way or form to particular areas. A similar amount or about a quarter of programs had requirements that had targeted outreach or engagement. And you didn't talk about this in the paper, but seeing these two things maybe wonder about the coordination, whether targeted outreach was happening in areas where there were access requirements. And kind of without that, I worry a bit that this is just like a check the box. It's not like we want you to engage in the areas we want you to go in, but it's like, we just want you to engage. And I can't tell if there's any intentional connection between outreach and service areas. Did you have similar questions in the research and can you think of any examples where these requirements were coordinated?

Anne Brown 18:44
a great question, because, you know, when we looked at the requirements in general, one of our questions was, well, what percentage of programs have any equity requirement at all? And that's relatively high. It's about 70% of programs, but a lot have one equity requirement, right? They have, or maybe they have two. Some have seven or eight. But when you then look at the programs that have any of these really, what I think is most striking is that some are very, very prescriptive in what they require, and some are very, very broad. And so community engagement, I think, is an example of it. Can be a little bit of both of that, but often is really broad in how it's required, which I think can be challenging. I think of it as a potential, just checkbox requirement. The other I'd say, and I'll give you some some examples in a minute. But I think one of the really notable things that is not immediately clear, if you know, if you haven't dug into these modes before, is that often the outreach efforts are actually the onus is on the operators themselves, not the cities. And so it has to a lot of reasons. One, you know, it can be the city staff have a lot on their plates. This is a whole new mode. Outreach of a whole new mode is an enormous amount of effort. And so, you know, it's being put on the shoulders of the people who are actually operating that mode. So. Some requirements will say things like and so I jotted down a few examples. Columbia, Missouri, for example, says that companies shall implement and submit a marketing and outreach plan at its own cost to promote the use of small vehicles in neighborhoods currently underserved by small vehicles. So in that case, that does try to link those two, it says you need to be targeting your efforts in those areas. La, for example, has an interesting requirements in that at least as of the 2024 when we last looked at these, it was requiring as part of the application process for companies to partner with local community organizations. I think there's a couple challenges to really meaningful community engagement some of that has to do with the length of contracts, often or pilot programs. So the shared micro mobility companies, with some exceptions, are often changing. They've been consolidating a lot. They have short term pilots. So there's different companies kind of going in and out every year. And so it can be really hard, and also have not a good incentive, I think, for companies to do really meaningful engagement that is going to reach the hard to reach people, versus kind of get that quick boost of, say, enrollment from low hanging fruit. And so that would suggest that longer term contract periods that are now as pilots are now becoming permanent programs. There's some more opportunity there for some of that sustained engagement. But the other question is, how are you actually keeping track of that engagement? So some cities do require the companies track and report those engagement efforts. So Fort Collins, for example, requires companies submit the marketing plans track attendance at events, etc. But again, this is from qualitative work I've done both cities and some operators report that there's not a lot of accountability here even. So you know, thinking about if the accountability is really, do you have your contract renewed? It doesn't always seem like you know, if there's one company who, either by the city or their own perception, is doing a terrific job at Community Engagement compared to another. There's not always a sense that there's teeth with those requirements, and so that all that effort actually benefits them in a kind of long term financial sense. The last thing I'll say is there are cities that have really tried to integrate the outreach for shared micro mobility companies into just their everyday events. So they've said that. I've heard from a couple different groups saying it's not very effective to just have a random pop up table about shared micro mobility. It's really going to where people are. So it's going to street fairs, it's going to the library, it's going to some other transportation program, maybe about a transportation wallet and publicizing the event or publicizing the service there. So it's really thinking about, how do you just integrate it more seamlessly throughout community engagement, versus having these kind of standalone events, for example? But it is not a nut that has been cracked, I would say, and also one that I think is you can't do it once, and it's done right? And so it's something that definitely needs more attention, but so far, I think, has been addressed quite broadly and maybe without a clear sense of what's the best way to do it.

Madeline Brozen 23:03
Yeah, it's a great question because when we looked at the requirements in general, one of our questions was, well, what percentage of programs have any equity requirement at all? And that's relatively high. It's about 70% of programs, but a lot have one equity requirement, right? They have, or maybe they have two, some have seven or eight. But when you then look at the programs that have any of these, really, what I think is most striking is that some are very, very prescriptive in what they require and some are very, very broad. And so community engagement, I think, is an example of, it can be a little bit of both of that, but often is really broad in how it's required, which I think can be challenging to think of it as a potential just checkbox requirement. The other, I'd say, and I'll give you some examples in a minute, but I think one of the really notable things that is not immediately clear if you haven't dug into these modes before is that often the outreach efforts are actually, the onus is on the operators themselves, not the cities. And so that has to do a lot of reasons. One, you know, it can be the city staff have a lot on their plates. This is a whole new mode. Outreach of a whole new mode is an enormous amount of effort. And so, you know, it's being put on the shoulders of the people who are actually operating that mode. Some requirements will say things like, and so I jotted down a few examples, Columbia, Missouri, for example, says that companies shall implement and submit a marketing and outreach plan at its own cost to promote the use of small vehicles in neighborhoods currently underserved by small vehicles. So in that case, that does try to link those two. It says you need to be targeting your efforts in those areas. L.A., for example, has an interesting requirements and that at least as of the 2024, when we last looked at these, it was requiring as part of the application process for companies to partner with local community organizations. I think there's a couple challenges to really meaningful community engagement. Some of that has to do with the length of contracts off of pilot programs. So the shared micro mobility companies, with some exceptions, are often changing. They've been consolidating a lot. They have short term pilots, so there's different companies going in and out every year. And so it can be really hard and also have not a good incentive, I think, for companies to do really meaningful engagement that is going to reach the hard to reach people versus kind of get that quick boost of, say, enrollment from low hanging fruit. And so that would suggest that longer term contract periods that are now as pilots are now becoming permanent programs, there's some more opportunity there for some of that sustained engagement. But the other question is, how are you actually keeping track of that engagement? So some cities do require the companies track and report those engagement efforts. So Fort Collins, for example, requires to submit the marketing plans, track attendance and events, et cetera. But again, this is from qualitative work I've done. Both cities and some operators report that there's not a lot of accountability here even. So, you know, thinking about if the accountability is really do you have your contract renewed? It doesn't always seem like, you know, if there's one company who either by the city or their own perception is doing a terrific job at community engagement compared to another, there's not always a sense that there's teeth with those requirements and so that all that effort actually benefits them in a kind of long term financial sense. The last thing I'll say is there are cities that have really tried to integrate the outreach for shared micro mobility companies into just their everyday events. So they've said that I've heard from a couple of different groups saying it's not very effective just to have a random pop up table about shared micro mobility, it's really going to where people are. So it's going to street fairs, it's going to the library, it's going to some other transportation program maybe about a transportation wallet and publicizing the event or publicizing the service there. So it's really thinking about how do you just integrate it more seamlessly throughout community engagement versus having these kind of standalone events, for example. But it is not a nut that has been cracked, I would say. Also one that I think is, you can't do it once and it's done. And so it's something that definitely needs more attention, but so far I think has been addressed quite broadly and maybe without a clear sense of what's the best way to do it.

Anne Brown 23:45
Yeah, I mean, I think in this conversation already, I'm just seeing how with each one of these things, you just are peeling a different layer of the onion of problems in transportation. The fact that cities may just not have good relationships or good processes with community engagement for operators to plug into and that rather than being like, OK, we want you to do this thing, like there's kind of a, we're going to show you our model, you can plug into it because ultimately it's going to be the city that's left trying to build these bridges of trust. And you probably want a little bit of a short leash, like how these people are doing it, right? Yeah, no, it's a really hard question. I think it's also really tricky when a lot of these companies are coming in and they might not have people on the ground, right? Their team is based in a different city. And so it's a question of who are they reaching out to? Do they know who the local community groups are that would be good to connect with the people they're trying to reach? Right. So I think that also gets to this question of how long are you going to market? What do the companies see as the incentive and what are the teeth that the cities are putting in there to actually make sure that the engagement is meaningful and what are the outcomes they expect from that engagement as well? I've also heard again from qualitative work that while there's benefits to measuring a lot of these quantitatively, some of the learning from people's experience can also be quite important because qualitatively, sometimes they'll say, you know, having 10 people that you really, really connect with and really feel confident in using this service and that it can be a sustained mode for them is actually more meaningful than just getting 100 people to sign up randomly at an event. And so that's also a tricky thing with trying to evaluate some of these engagement efforts is how meaningful is it and what is the longer term effect of it?

Juan Matute 24:57
Turning to other implementation requirements, you found that cities often require that micromobility services accommodate alternatives to smartphones and the use of credit cards. I'm working on a project now on equity and payment methods for transit, and it seems that cash acceptance is suffering a fate where there's a fixed monthly cost to accept cash and it's been distributed over fewer transactions. So I haven't seen a scooter with a farebox yet, so I was wondering how cities employ these options.

Anne Brown 25:29
OK, so piggybacking on this payment question, I want to ask about kind of discounts, because I was pretty surprised that 70 percent of the programs don't have a reduced rate requirement. But I think it makes sense to a point because cities are actually not actively subsidizing these modes, these programs. And this is especially not the case when they're operated by private operators. So the reduced rate requirements do force the operators to pay for the reduced rates as an operating requirement. And just to kind of illustrate this, I just wanted to talk about how much scooter trips cost, because like it's always kind of shocking to me, you know, in contrast to publicly operated bike share costs, you know, those were relatively affordable. We are seeing the bike share industry changing and being increasingly operated by private operators like Lyft, who's been a big growing operator in the space. And so prices are increasing for bike share in some markets. But for example, in Los Angeles, our bike share is operated by the transit agency and a 30 minute trip is a dollar seventy five. I mean, part of that is they peg that as the same amount as a transit fare. There's also a dollar fee for the electric bikes, if you're lucky enough to actually find where one is. And so just to kind of give us an example, I looked up what a lime scooter costs and like it's just not even easy to figure out on the fly, like how much like an equivalent 30 minute trip is. So it's a dollar to unlock and then 42 cents a minute. So if I want to do a 30 minute scooter ride, which to me is like a little bit more than I would ever really want to do, but that 30 minutes would cost thirteen dollars and 60 cents and a 15 minute ride, which may be a little bit more common, right, to kind of overcome what would be a longer walk. That's seven dollars. Seven dollars for 15 minutes is not cheap. So, you know, in contrast, Lime Access program does have really affordable rates. You can have trips if you're qualified to participate because of your income at a dollar twenty five for 30 minutes, really flat. And then going to this example in Los Angeles, the bike share program is discounted even further where qualified riders can pay five dollars a month for unlimited rides. So like good cost benefits if you can get them. And I just want to kind of give these details because I'm not sure people even really think about like how expensive the sticker rate is. And so this isn't to say that smartphone and cash payments aren't barriers, but to your point of pretty much no one uses them, like I think we can say that that may not be the primary, but that cost is just something that just can't be ignored. So to draw a housing analogy here, you know, we often see that there are inclusionary zoning requirements where private developers have to provide a certain percent of affordable units in market rate projects. Most of the time, this is an unfunded mandate. And in some cases where the percent of inclusionary units is set at a really high percentage, this can effectively reduce the overall supply of housing. So best case scenario for both housing and micro mobility is to find a way to have a public funding model to ensure that there's both market stability and cost subsidy. So I'm going to like put that as a point of like, you know, if you need other paper ideas, I would love to think about, you know, where that goes. But taking a detour back to actually work that does exist, you have this other paper that is available online, making its way through the review process, which we will also link in the notes. And this just really digs into this question about these discount programs. You ran a survey to look at the awareness of enrollment in discount ride programs and then how often that enrollment translates into actual use of the scooters. This was a national survey and administered both through a service and through a particular operator. And you found that only about a quarter of the people who likely qualify for these programs are aware that they exist. But most people who know that these programs exist are enrolled. So there's certainly an information gap in knowing about discounts, but a high conversion rate once you know about it to actually being in it. So can you kind of share some of the findings from that work and what do you think it's useful to think about when you put both kind of your work on enrollments and requirements together in conversation?

Anne Brown 31:39
I have a lot of thoughts on price. If I were to hazard a guess from both my own work and previous research, it's not as a rocket science, it's money and it's infrastructure. Basically, those are probably the two biggest pieces that really keep people from using shared mobility. So price is absolutely huge and there's a lot of pieces of it. It relates to both the requirement side. It relates to the knowledge side. So let me see if I can walk this through in a coherent way. Could I get very riled up about this topic? So yeah, about a third of programs actually require discount rides. That's not saying that discount rides aren't more widely available. So some operators, for example, offer national their programs, their discount programs nationally. That said, when you do look at the the cities that have higher enrollment than average, which is this is the theme, pretty abysmal. So we found that 0.6 percent of users across the country nationwide are enrolled in discount ride programs. That's users, not trips. The silver lining here is those users are making disproportionate share of trips. So like you said, if you know about the program, there's a high conversion rate to actually using it. And there's evidence to show that people are using it a lot. So there's a lot of value people are finding and there's a lot of utility there. And then such some examples, some of the kind of superstars in this space, at least again, these are going to be lower enrollment compared to the people who qualify for these services. But Oakland, California, had the highest share of users actually enrolled in the discount ride program at five percent. They were making about 13 percent of trips overall. Portland, Oregon had three percent of users enrolled in their discount ride program, and they were making about 20 percent of trips. So these these users are really frequent users. And the enrollment numbers are low. But again, I think it highlights one of the it should be some inspiration to thinking about what could cities do to make a big difference, because there's clear evidence that this can make a huge impact in in use. A question I still have a lot about the discounts is, you know, what is the basic impact of different pricing structures? I have some upcoming research with Professor Jenny Liu at Portland State University that will be looking at this kind of this price elasticity of discount ride prices. In other words, if you change how much it costs to ride a bike or scooter using a discount ride, how does that affect ridership? Because this happens a lot. Even within requirements, there'll be a program that goes from free to discount or from the way of the unlock fee, then all of a sudden it's two hundred three months a minute. There are so many different ways that these are discounted. It's not a single uniform discount across programs. And so one of the questions I have next is my guess is one free is the most attractive option. But beyond that as well, what are the what are the key structures that can really encourage ridership in use? My guess here is it relates to this point you made, Maddie, which is it can be really hard to know what a trip is going to cost you. Right. They're there by the minute, you know. So how long is my trip going to take? I don't exactly know. And so one thing you some discount rides do and cities could consider is more of a subscription model where it provides basically a some amount of rides per month or per year. But what that really provides is reliability for people to price reliability. So you're not constantly having to guess you don't have to adjust your budget. And I found that in other modes, too. So asking people who are earning low incomes about ride hail, for example, the number one challenge there is the price and the lack of transparency about what it's going to cost. So that's a huge challenge. And these are really expensive modes without any kind of discount. But again, to give some examples about other structures that you see, some are really, really broad and just say operators must discount rides for people earning low incomes, period. Others say things like San Francisco is a really specific one. They say low income user plans must either offer a 50 percent fair discount or unlimited trips under 30 minutes to riders earning below 200 percent of the poverty guidelines. So, again, there's a really big difference there in thinking about what might ultimately be offered, depending on how prescriptive a city city is. The other thing about then the knowledge side is, right, we found that so few people are actually know about these programs. So clearly there's a lot of benefit from them when people are enrolled. But if you don't know about it, of course, you're not going to to use them. There was more knowledge among people who qualified than people who didn't, which I don't know if that's really a silver lining, given the knowledge level is still so low. And this was among riders and non riders. There were plenty of people who were riding, say, shared micro mobility devices that didn't know that these existed and these discounts existed and they qualified. So that's certainly, again, putting points to some of the community engagement side, thinking about how to communicate these out. There's also barriers once you do qualify for discount ride programs. So the signup process, submitting documentation, waiting for approval. This can be really challenging and take a lot of time. I know there have been some companies that have really worked to streamline this process. So working to make it that if you, for example, are enrolled in SNAP, you can automatically get validated on a back end. So it cuts the validation process down from days to minutes. So there's, I think, some really meaningful ways that even the signup process, once you know about it, can also be streamlined. But again, it's not like offer a discount ride program and everything will be affordable and everyone will enroll in it. There's a lot of other pieces that basically need to go alongside that. And if I'll say one more thing on to your earlier point, Maddy, about thinking about these in a kind of public transportation perspective and the role of public subsidy. One of the projects I'm working on here in the Netherlands is about integrating shared micro mobility and public transportation. And one of the questions I ask everyone is, is shared micro mobility public transportation or should we treat it that way? Because if we treat it that way, we would do things probably quite differently. And one of that gets back to subsidy. So the Dutch, for example, the Dutch railways operates their own bike share system that they subsidize heavily for 10 years and it's now profitable. But there's still three stations across a national network that make that profit. And that's a really just different headspace to be in when you're thinking about the finance model of these and their reaction to hearing that US cities don't subsidize these at all and in fact require companies to pay a lot of money to operate in them once. Well, that's never going to work. How are you going to get anyone to ride them? They're going to be so expensive. And I said, yes, they are expensive. That's exactly the problem. So there are some examples of places that have been piloting subsidies. Grand Rapids, Michigan, for example, is currently piloting a program to subsidize their discount ride program specifically. So it's free compared to some form of a more minor discount. So they're testing that out currently and seeing what it does for their ridership and enrollment. So I think there's lots more to be done in this space and happy to talk more about it. I have lots of thoughts.

Juan Matute 38:55
Yeah, I think transit agencies, at least in California, see micromobility as not just competition for mobility, but competition for public funds. So they're not interested in adopting micromobility services except for Metro. But Metro has a lot of money in Los Angeles. So I know from my own work on equity and transit payments that where riders in much of California must establish eligibility for discounts on a per agency basis. And so you reference the burdens in doing so. California is moving towards streamlined eligibility verification across different providers. You reference that there is some momentum in the micromobility space to do not necessarily cross provider eligibility verification, but automatic enrollment in discount programs for those who are enrolled in another means tested program. Can you talk about how this works in cases where it is working or where it is implemented?

Anne Brown 39:55
Yeah, so I don't know if I know of any places fully streamlined and automatic enrollment yet, as in you're enrolled in SNAP and it forwards your data on to a micromobility company and automatically enrolled you. But there are two cases I can think of that, again, that process has been greatly streamlined. So the one is this SNAP qualification. So Lime, the shared micromobility operator currently has is working with Sheer ID, which is the same company that, for example, you need to you want to qualify for veterans benefits, for example, on websites and get different discounts. There it has this registry, this big database behind the scenes on the back end of if you, for example, are enrolled in SNAP, so supplemental nutrition assistance program. And if you are, that program can automatically validate your information. And so it means that you don't have to send pay stubs or paperwork to the company for them to manually validate. It does it in minutes. And so, again, this is from this is relatively new program that they started, I believe, last fall, summer. I could be getting that timeline wrong, but it's it's relatively new. So that's a big new effort. Another is New York City, for example, actually works with their benefits office to when people go in to enroll in other public programs like public housing, for example, or other public energy programs. Discounted rides for shared micromobility is one of those programs that's discussed. So it's actually in-house in the benefits office, just like if you were getting a transit card that was reduced as well, if the transit actually has an income based discount, which you don't. But that's another example of that way. It doesn't put the onus on people having to go out and learn about it themselves. The information is coming to them in a place that it's almost by definition, you're coming to a place with public benefits. You almost certainly qualify. Let's help you, you know, reduce some of those information barriers and and get you those those benefits.

Madeline Brozen 41:55
Yeah, it's like one of my pet peeves or current like hobby horses is just how many people are eligible for different public benefits that they aren't actually enrolled in. And just thinking about how to make things easier for people so that they can actually get the benefits that they are eligible for and how there's just so much usefulness. Right. Like if you have food benefits, it's probably helpful if you have transportation subsidy to get to food, you know, or to get to work and all of these things.

Anne Brown 42:31
Well, and I was thinking, too, that to the point of automatic enrollment, right, if you qualify for 15 different public benefits, for example, the benefit of automatic enrollment is even if you make each of those individual 15 processes relatively simple, it's still 15 processes you have to go through. It's a pain in the butt and it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of knowing that these exist, where to find the right website, where to find the sign up. Right. It's not going to be that simple. And so as much as these can be linked or in my mind, you basically get a folder or some kind of package says you qualify for this and here's all the other things you qualify for. You're already signed up. Go at it. Right. And so just making it as easy as possible, because why put barriers in front of public benefits? These are incredibly important resources that we should not be trying to make more difficult for people to access.

Madeline Brozen 43:21
So thinking of more about these various requirements and whether they're working or not, let's pick up on on data, because it's not important just to have the requirements, but to actually understand how much they're working. And part of the requirements is just data. And this data just helps to manage the transportation. Right. It's not even necessarily just about the equity outcomes, but just like where and how people are using these services. Now, I know I shouldn't be so naive to think that cities care as much about data as researchers do, but I just always get a little shocked. But on the good side, you know, 83 percent of programs in your paper had data sharing requirements. So that's good. But only 27 percent use these data to put out publicly available evaluation reports. You do say that, you know, there may be other things where they're showing up, council reports, internal things of that nature. But just kind of on the data sharing side of things, you talk about two pseudo standards, the general bike feed specification and the mobility data specification. Can you just walk us through what's in these data standards and how data are typically shared between the operators and city partners?

Anne Brown 44:38
Sure. So the general bike feed specification or GBFS, this is typically real time or near real time data that is meant for basic public data to be fed to a consumer facing applications of seeing your vehicles are, et cetera. So and then the mobility data standard is really for mobility providers. It's also thinking about planning. It's thinking about regulatory purposes. That's the goal, at least. And they are, again, supposed to be standardized so that they could be ingested or used across different markets. It lowers the basically with you're an app developer or if you're a company that operates across multiple markets, you don't have to develop totally different data standards and reinvent the wheel each time. So in that they're quite helpful. They have a variety of different data variables within each. So that could be the location of vehicles. It could be the routes. It's the vehicle type. It's the origin and destination. It's a whole host of things that most people probably do not care about that get into kind of the again, the vehicle specifics. But oftentimes when cities are regulating these modes, they say we need standard formats of MBS or GBFS. That said, the cities themselves are not usually using those raw data. They are often contracting a third party data provider. So using some form of data dashboard in order to actually digest the trends that are coming through their data or sometimes they publish a public facing dashboard as well that you can also see where trips are occurring. And those are usually cleaned up so that there's no privacy concerns. For example, you can't see that, you know, Maddy took a scooter trip from Luskin down to Luval or where I mean, that'd be really, really silly. That would probably cost you a dollar unlock fee. cost you $1 unlock fee.

Juan Matute 46:26
We actually have robots now that make a delivery.

Anne Brown 46:33
So you're right to make a trip. So point being, there's different ways that cities digest these data, but what they usually don't have is a large team of data scientists who are crunching raw data. They're usually being cleaned and fed into different data dashboards they can use for decision making.

Juan Matute 46:50
So when a city is looking at these data, what do you think they should be looking at? Like what analysis, what metrics do you look for in understanding either equity or effectiveness of these policies?

Anne Brown 47:04
Well, those are two different things, Juan. What I think cities are often looking for is where trips are originating, where they're ending. Sometimes they're looking at routing. Think a lot of infrastructure planning, you know, where should we add more dedicated parking or where should we maybe put a new bike lane in? Sometimes they're also being used to highlight gaps or certainly they're being used in geographic equity requirements to look at how many trips are beginning or ending in their target neighborhoods or how many vehicles are deployed. So they're using it for all of those pieces. One of the biggest challenges that Amanda and I found in authoring these papers and doing this research was this fundamental disconnect between essentially a program's goal and the data they were collecting and what they were actually able to evaluate, which I think is a really big challenge. And so the example I'll give you is on the, say, program wants to serve people with low incomes. They say we want to expand access to people earning low incomes. We're going to provide a discount ride program. We're going to require the companies provide discount ride program. But then there's no data collected to actually evaluate if people earning low incomes are taking trips. Some operators do say we want you to tell us the enrollment in your discount ride program. In the discount ride program, we want to know what percentage of trips are being made on these. So some cities are doing that, but a lot are not. Right. And so the goal in my mind, at least of evaluation, is to be able to iterate, right, to be able to realize what's working, what's not and how does the program need to be changed in order to better meet those goals. But if you don't collect the data that are aligned with those goals or allow you to answer them, then that's really difficult to do. So that would be my first advice to any cities really seeking to evaluate their programs is start at the beginning. What are your goals? Are you collecting the data you would need to evaluate those? And then once you find something, what does that mean for your next steps? How are you going to change or continue on the path that you're you're doing?

Juan Matute 49:03
That sounds like good advice.

Anne Brown 49:08
Yeah. Oh, I do want to add something. One thing that I think cities are increasingly doing and I think is a really smart approach, is that cities are requiring operators to send out city created surveys to users in order to get a demographic data. So the operators themselves don't collect demographic data, at least of all their riders. They might occasionally do the surveys themselves, but they are very clear every time you talk and they say we do not have our rider, we do not have demographic information attached to individual riders for privacy reasons. So cities often want to know, well, who's using these trips? How are they using them? What are the trip purposes? What's the mode shift? And that really can be a good purpose and a good use of the city created surveys. I really like that they put the onus on operators to send out the surveys. So city has control. They create it. But the operator already knows all the contact information of their users, right? They have the emails, they have the apps. And so there's cities across the country that have been moving towards that. I think it's a great way to collect some of that information that could help answer some of those equity questions specifically.

Juan Matute 50:10
Thinking about outcomes, the evaluation of equity requirements often focus on access. So how can cities better measure the outcomes of micromobility programs in relation to housing, such as improved access or jobs or services for residents of affordable housing or in neighborhoods that have lower cost housing?

Anne Brown 50:32
Yeah, I mean, it's a it's a hard and important question. I mean, again, a lot of times the programs without collecting surveys, they just don't know who the users themselves are. And so I think that would be a good imperative to actually make sure you're sending out a survey to know who who are using the programs. I mean, there could be some spatial analyses there as well, if you really want to focus on certain neighborhoods. I can imagine a really interesting study potentially of, you know, maybe you have a really concerted outreach effort in a target neighborhood and you want to measure how many trips were taken in the neighborhood before or after or during this this outreach. Did it make a difference and do some testing there? I've also seen some partnerships or coordinated efforts with affordable housing developments, not just in shared micromobility, but car share. Certainly sometimes e-bike lending libraries or bike share programs where when you think access for affordable housing residents that you have this concentrated group of people who qualify for the service. And so when someone moves in, you can immediately show up with, say, hey, you qualify for this service. Let's get you signed up. Maybe they co-locate a hub or vehicles right outside. And so there's a more reliable access in that way as well. So I think potential programmatic things that could be done. But in terms of thinking about measuring how does micromobility improve access to jobs, it's really hard to measure. One thing I'll say on that, though, is from interviewing cities and both my current project and past projects, is that one really important thing I think shared micromobility can provide is system redundancy and resiliency. And so if you're thinking about people who are taking transit to get to their job and their bus doesn't show up or their bus is late or they missed a connection, shared micromobility can provide an alternative. Not in all cases. Maybe you don't feel safe riding on that on the road where your bus normally would go. Maybe it's too far. Right. But there are cases that I've talked to cities and they say, yeah, we put scooters at bus stops not because we think people are going to take the scooters to the bus, but in case that bus doesn't show up, people can have another option. And so I think that's another interesting dimension of thinking about shared micromobility and job access, for example.

Madeline Brozen 52:46
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree that I think the car share operators have been more prepared to actually partner with housing providers and just kind of thinking about affordable housing developers in general seems to be a little bit outside of the like typical engagement of the transportation space. And so I really like this idea of just being like, especially for like if you have a hundred percent affordable building, like recognizing those people are all qualified, right. Like it's a really a really great way to think about things, especially with thinking about affordable housing development.

Anne Brown 53:19
For example, one of the big challenges often with shared micromobility is making sure it's a dedicated space to park. And so if you're in the middle of a housing development process and you're potentially looking to repurpose a single street car parking space, that could be a potential good opportunity. Right. You're already in the middle of this big development process. That could be a chance to engage with or rethink some of the street parking as well, especially because that has often been a fundamental challenge for shared micromobility is the governance question. So you might have, you know, LA Metro is the one who's running its bike share, but it's trying to get stations and docks in cities across the region, all of whom have very different permitting processes to actually get a dock in place. So when you think about affordable housing developer, they don't know what that process looks like to get it permanent. So it could be interesting to think about the levers pulled there to make that connection more fruitful. Yeah.

Madeline Brozen 54:11
Yeah, I think it's a huge elephant in the room. Infrastructure is not something we explicitly looked into, but certainly decades worth of active travel research would suggest that you need safe infrastructure, protected lanes, et cetera, in order for people to feel safe and comfortable riding these vehicles. So you could have, you know, a scooter right next to you. Maybe it's free even. But if you don't feel safe riding it, then, you know, you're not getting on it. So and again, that's that gets back to this interesting question of who controls what levers. And so if you are a city who is maybe your, you know, Department of Transportation is the one contracting or regulating the shared mobility, but the city itself is one who actually controls the streets. And again, we think about the funding where the funding streams go there. The Department of Transportation might be collecting the permit revenues. Are they then funneling that money to the city in order to build those lanes? Sometimes there is some research on that I alluded to earlier by John McArthur and Kevin Fang and Calvin Thigpen about where the fees go for shared micro mobility. Some of it goes to infrastructure, some goes into general funds and from there, who knows? But I think it's a great point because, you know, there's a lot of focus on the regulations, my research included. But I think it's very much worth zooming back and thinking about the big the big context and that my other pet peeve that I will or my my own hobby horse that I'll get on right now is about sidewalk access when it comes to shared micro mobility. And I think it's a good example of how zooming out in general can be, I think, really is really important. And shared micro mobility can provide a really interesting motivation or opportunity to rethink some of those status quo's we have. So, you know, there's a lot of feelings about scooters, especially parked on sidewalks. And while I would absolutely agree that scooters should not be tipped over and blocking access on sidewalks, my co-authors, Nick Klein and Calvin Thigpen and I have done, I think, six years of scooter parking research. And what we find is that scooters are not by any means the largest culprit on our sidewalks that are blocking access. So there's vegetation, there's trash cans, there's poles, there's cars, there's any number of objects. And so I really want us to see us take a zoom back, not focus on these scooters over here, but think about sidewalk access as a goal. And so I wish cities would do the same with shared micro mobility broadly, which is take a step back, think, what's our goal here? If our goal is to get people out of cars, onto small modes, having affordable and easy ways to get around, then we need to be rethinking all sorts of things from what we fund to what we subsidize and how we use our street space. So, yeah, it's going to occupy us for a couple of years, I think, that task.

Madeline Brozen 58:26
Yeah, I'll maybe invite you to a running note that I have in my phone, which is like things we learned about things we hate, which is essentially like, you know, the one scooters kind of appeared on the scene and everyone's all up in arms. I was like, you don't hate the scooters, you hate the fact that your sidewalks are narrow. Like that's the actual problem here.

Anne Brown 58:48
Yes, yes, I get I have a whole camera reel of cars blocking my sidewalk access and going like, who am I supposed to call about this? There's no number on the side of that car to complain about it. I can't pick it up and move it.

Juan Matute 59:01
Well, I think our professor Donald Shoup would say that people think about parking with the reptilian cortex of their brain. And that's just a very like that means you can see motion and maybe not much else. So you only really see what's changed. Perhaps. And so if we had trash cans 10 years ago, but scooters arrived five years ago, you only see the scooter. That is 100 percent true.

Madeline Brozen 59:26
Yeah. So as we're kind of wrapping up here, I'm left with the question, like, what's the best that cities can do? Right. Like you've said that everyone does, you know, at least one thing, but it's kind of different in different places. It just made me think about kind of a hierarchy of requirements. Like where the cities identify what's the most likely to be effective in terms of orienting these micro ability programs towards equitable outcomes and try to just focus on a few things with the biggest impact. So of the requirements that you inventoried, which do you think the cities should focus on implementing? And then is there anything that's not being done that would be a good thing to add to the top of a hierarchy?

Anne Brown 1:00:12
I think it comes down to price. That's the number one I would target first. I mean, I think the geographic distribution, you need to have vehicles in order to actually get people on them and infrastructure piece is hugely important. But if we're really focusing on the regulations that I talked about today, I think it's price. And I think it is a reframing of price and thinking about asking ourselves the question, is shared micro mobility a part of public transportation? Because I think that would even bring the requirements around discount rates a step further in both thinking about what is being offered and then also, should cities be subsidizing that? Again, if the goal should not necessarily be just put scooters around in neighborhoods, the goal should be to have people ride them and ride them safely. Right. And so I think focusing on the outcome being riding more than really anything else is a good goal and then really paying attention to how that distribution plays out across space, across users, because also if you're monitoring who is riding them and where, if you look at the opposite of it, you see who is not riding and where are not people riding. And that can give you a sense of where the barriers remain. But I would really love to see things like subscription models where people can just hop on, hop off without worrying about racking up huge bills for trips. I think, like you mentioned, LA Metro earlier has a nice it's very transparent dollar 50 same price as other transit trips. For example, one challenge there is that it's not linked into any past programs. Right. So it's totally separate. So there's a lot more that could be done with integrating these into public transit. Again, I think that's part of this big reframe that I think if, you know, if agencies think about transit, agencies think about transit versus shared microability. From what I've heard from others is it's really about thinking about us transit and shared microability against the car. And certainly that would make streets safer for everyone, particularly people who are not in the cars, which tend to be people who are lower income to begin with. So I think that's another equity forward practice.

Juan Matute 1:02:15
So I think we were both living in Santa Monica when Burr dropped its first scooters in the summer of 2017. At the time you were doing data collection on transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft and taxis in Los Angeles for your dissertation, you've now conducted several studies on micro mobility. Did you think at the time that you'd one day be researching this phenomenon?

Anne Brown 1:02:39
If only I had known. I never thought that. I distinctly remember seeing my first bird scooter in Santa Monica. I was walking back from 800 Degrees Pizza for their five dollar Instagram special and picking up pizza, seeing this scooter, this basic razor scooter with a little box on the top and a QR code. And I still have the picture. It's on my camera reel. I took a picture of it and went home and Googled it. Like, what is this? So I did not expect them to grow so much or that I would spend six years now researching the different dimensions of it. But it's been a lot of fun. So I guess, you know, I should probably never put stock. I should never wager on anything because I would never have guessed that this would blow up. But it's been a lot of fun.

Madeline Brozen 1:03:24
Well, we're glad that you got into the space because we had so much to talk about today and there's lots more other great work that you've done. So thank you to that. As I mentioned, there's a great public dashboard with all the data for this paper so you can explore it yourself. And thank you so much for joining us today on Road Scholars. We're very envious of the fact that you probably have a very safe and comfortable riding environment in the Netherlands, but we're really appreciative that you took out the time of your sabbatical to join us and share your work. So have a great evening.

Anne Brown 1:03:59
Thanks, Maddie and Juan, for having me. It was great to talk with you both about this topic and look forward to more in the future.

Madeline Brozen 1:04:05
Thanks, everyone. All right. You can read more about Anne Brown's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu, where the show notes and a transcript can also be found. The Lewis Center is on Blue Sky and LinkedIn, and I'm on Blue Sky at M Brosen. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.