We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
E-scooter shares began rolling out in cities from Santa Monica to Paris to Mexico City nearly ten years ago. Scooters, rentable through an smartphone app, were part of a broader embrace of micromobility, using small vehicles to solve the “first-mile/last-mile problem.” E-scooter shares, along with bike- and e-bike-shares, can help bridge the distance between home or work and the subway or bus, and in the process, help reduce carbon emissions.
New York City has been a relatively late adopter, and many New Yorkers remain unaware of the scooters’ gradual rollout at the city’s edges in the northeastern Bronx and eastern Queens. Beginning in 2021, the New York City Department of Transportation authorized e-scooter share services in two zones near the ends of MTA subway lines, where riders rely on often unreliable buses to get to their jobs or run errands. Three private companies now operate the e-scooter share system, used by tens of thousands of riders taking millions of trips each year. Ahead of the program’s launch, the DOT emphasized community participation in locating parking corrals, and equity, launching in outer borough neighborhoods without CitiBike, offering discounted rides to SNAP recipients and NYCHA residents, and hiring hourly employees, rather than gig economy workers, to rebalance scooters throughout the day. But, as with similar programs nationwide, the initiative has raised the ire of some who are not eager to share streetscapes designed for cars. And with a lack of proper infrastructure — such as hardened bike lanes — to support the safety of pedestrians, bikers, and now scooter riders, how much further can the program go? Urban planner Thandi Nyambose had a front-row seat to the rollout of the Bronx pilot program. Below, she gives us an account of micromobility’s ups and downs in the outer boroughs.
You exit the 5 train at the elevated E 180 Street stop in the Bronx, taking the stairs down to street level. Your apartment is 15 minutes away if you can catch the Bx21 bus, which is supposed to come every ten minutes. Exhausted, you can either wait at the crowded bus stop, or — as of summer 2021 — use an app on your phone to unlock an e-scooter directly underneath the train station and glide the last leg of your trip down the bike lane, whizzing past car traffic on Morris Park Avenue, before pulling up to your home in under nine minutes.
E-scooter share programs offer a sustainable “first-mile/last-mile” solution in urban areas, effectively filling the gap between home and mass transit without involving a gas-powered vehicle. Lightweight, electric, and virtually silent, e-scooters can travel much faster than the average walking speed, many up to 20 mph. An app shows riders the closest available scooters. Once they approach an e-scooter and scan the unique QR code between the handlebars, it unlocks and is ready to ride; in New York City the base price is $1 plus 30–39 cents per minute thereafter.
By the time e-scooters arrived in New York in 2021, they had already been deployed in over 150 US cities. This was part of a larger international trend called “micromobility”: a range of vehicle offerings that are small, silent, low-speed, and accommodate just one or two people. In 2022, Chicago’s city-owned bike company, Divvy, retrofitted hundreds of its docked e-bike stations in order to integrate e-scooters into its fleet. Divvy’s e-scooters are now a permanent staple of the city’s transportation system. Navigating issues including sidewalk obstruction, lack of oversight, and resistance from both local governments and residents, cities have wrangled, embraced, or banned e-scooters. In Mexico City, operators shrunk or completely dissolved their operations after 2019, lamenting challenges like scooter theft and harsh government regulations from the mobility secretary, who imposed strict data requirements and limited units to keep the city “orderly.”
As the e-scooter industry boomed in 2017 and 2018, New York City was an obvious candidate for this new mode of transportation. However, both e-scooters and e-bikes with a throttle remained illegal in New York State. Policy makers considered them a safety risk to both pedestrians and riders; while transportation activists, delivery worker coalitions, e-scooter operating companies, and politicians like Jessica Ramos, a Democratic senator from Queens, believed e-scooters could also help New York hit its climate targets. In 2019, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice declared a 2050 goal that 80 percent of trips within the city be made on a sustainable mode (such as walking, biking, or mass transit), and that the remaining vehicular trips be zero emissions.
The strains of the pandemic also pressured cities to promote socially distanced transit and reduce the number of people relying on cramped trains and buses. In June 2020, after years of heated discourse and hundreds of thousands of lobbying dollars, New York State legalized e-scooters and e-bikes.
By late 2020, the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) launched a competitive process for a two-year e-scooter pilot program, with the possibility to expand after the first year. It would start with an area in the East Bronx made up of the largely residential neighborhoods of Wakefield, Edenwald, Co-Op City, Allerton, Morris Park, and Pelham Gardens. The plan emphasized equity and accessibility: As mandated by 2020 Local Law 74, the program would target neighborhoods situated outside CitiBike’s service and planned expansion areas, and those at the margins of the City’s fixed-route transportation networks — areas where subway lines end. Operators were required to offer heavily discounted pricing for riders for NYCHA residents and SNAP recipients and to provide wheelchair-accessible scooters to people with ambulatory disabilities.
In April 2021, NYCDOT announced the selection of three experienced private operators: Bird, Lime, and Veo. The DOT would oversee the operators, who in turn would provide app service, scooters, fleet managers, and monthly data reports. Each selected operator was authorized to deploy up to 1,000 e-scooters in a geofenced segment of the coverage area.
In order to avoid controversy over the new service’s use of public street space, the DOT advocated for parking corrals, which would designate e-scooter parking locations amongst the 99 cent stores, delis, and botanicas on busy White Plains Road, East Tremont Avenue, and Westchester Avenue. In early 2021, before the program officially launched, the DOT began an outreach campaign to educate residents and solicit feedback on locations for the corrals. This consisted of virtual meetings, surveys, on-street demos, as well as planning briefings with elected officials, community boards, business improvement districts, hospitals, and partner agencies. The corrals, simple white rectangles painted onto the sidewalks or roadbeds, are generally successful in reducing obstructions on crowded streets. The rest of the system is completely “dockless.” Users can drop scooters off almost anywhere when they’re done, in front of a subway station, store, or home.
Zones that require corral parking are clearly indicated in the app. In Bird’s app, for example, the zones are highlighted in orange, with actual corrals (or “nests”) marked with a “P.” Before ending a ride in the app, riders must submit a photo of the vehicle to ensure it has been parked correctly. The app encourages those ending a trip outside a corral zone to park neatly. The scooter should be upright using its kickstand and parked in the “furniture zone” of the sidewalk, not blocking the way for pedestrians, doorways, access ramps, or bus stops. If a rider consistently parks incorrectly, they may be fined or suspended.
The City also mandated operators to hire W-2 workers, as opposed to the gig laborers they largely rely on elsewhere. Seven days a week, fleet managers working for Bird, Lime, and Veo “rebalance” free-floating e-scooters. With guidance of a special operator panel within the app, they collect electric vehicles into a company van and move them from low- to high-demand areas like transit hubs and business districts. These same employees are also tasked with conducting on-foot patrols to correct parking violations and maintain tidiness, as well as performing quality checks and minor repairs like brake adjustments, tire inflation, and vehicle cleaning. Across the three New York operators, they are paid an hourly rate in the range of $21–$22 per hour.
DOT still conducts ongoing outreach to increase ridership and discount enrollment, including in-person community events like helmet giveaways outside NYCHA buildings. Many enrolled in the discount program are repeat riders. Between August 2021 and August 2022, affordable membership riders constituted 1.9 percent of all unique user accounts and 3.8 percent of all e-scooter trips. But there is much work to be done: seven percent of the population in the initial pilot area reside in NYCHA developments, and 21 percent are SNAP recipients.
In June 2022, the City doubled its Bronx coverage area to include Parkchester, Castle Hill, Country Club, and Throggs Neck, and the total e-scooter count to 6,000. Six months later, the DOT announced that a new RFP would allow interested companies to compete to enter the market and potential additional areas. This marked the end of the pilot, indicating that the City deemed the scooters viable for a longer term, larger program.
In fall 2023, the DOT announced it would add southeast Queens to the patchwork of coverage, working with the same three scooter companies. The next year, DOT staff began educating Queens residents on the program’s offerings and taking feedback for parking corral placement. In June 2024, the program launched in Flushing, Auburndale, Jamaica, Rochdale Village, and Springfield Gardens. While corrals are only required in the dense downtowns of Jamaica and Flushing, e-scooters are being ridden and parked everywhere: from single-family homes on suburban streets to, more commonly, subway stations and shopping districts.
Four months after the Queens expansion, Bird shared that its Queens e-scooters had completed 250,000 rides, with 65 percent starting or ending within 50 feet of a transit stop. A Queens Twitter user wrote, “As someone who needs a bus to get to the subway station by my house, these things are *amazing.* Instead of waiting 20 minutes for a bus sometimes, I just scoot scoot 🛴 and I’m home in under ten minutes.”
The Queens and Bronx programs have followed different trajectories, highlighting key distinctions between the two areas. The East Bronx pilot area was designed to provide a meaningfully large and diverse area to test out the service, but there are currently few safe and active pedestrian corridors. It is varied in character, from the historic planned community of Parkchester, to the single-family homes in the Van Nest neighborhood, to the world’s largest self-contained cooperative housing development (Co-op City). In the center of the coverage area is Morris Park, one of the largest healthcare job centers in the city. It has the highest e-scooter ridership in the Bronx, but large pockets of low-slung and industrial development divide the neighborhood and hinder vehicular and pedestrian circulation. Lack of nighttime activity along industrial corridors and insufficient street lighting under the elevated trains creates safety concerns for potential riders. Many of the issues can be traced to decades-old car-centric infrastructure like the Cross Bronx Expressway. The notoriously congested highway shapes the flow of traffic in the Bronx, and at the human scale, crossing it is difficult for pedestrians, cyclists, and e-scooter riders.
A comprehensive neighborhood plan to open four Metro-North stations with connections to Penn Station is chugging along. Slated for completion in 2027, the planned commuter hubs will anchor a six-mile, 46-block-long development corridor. E-scooter usage will evolve in tandem with larger planning decisions like this one, where they can be a critical mode of transit to reach the regional connections provided by Metro-North.
Like the East Bronx, the Queens coverage area is crisscrossed by highways and commuter rail. Downtown Jamaica, a major transit hub, sits at the crossroads of thirteen bus lines, two subway lines, the Long Island Railroad (LIRR), and the AirTrain from John F. Kennedy International Airport. But even from under two miles away in more suburbanized neighborhoods, people struggle to access transit.
Suburban segments of the Queens pilot area, like Hollis, a neighborhood just east of Jamaica, are predominantly populated by single-family homes connected by car-centric arterial streets. Most rides within this area are to or from the Hollis LIRR station. E-scooters here don’t pile up, but the occasional one can be found parked outside a residence, evidence of commuters riding the last leg of their trip home.
More people in the Queens coverage area have cars and are therefore more likely to perceive interventions like bike lanes, bus lanes, and new mobility options as taking up a limited public resource — road space — and ultimately to show hostility towards a program like this one. In June 2024, Whitney Barrat, President of the Downtown Jamaica Partnership Business Improvement District commented: “While we’re fortunate to have one of the largest transportation hubs in North America in our district, the area surrounding the AirTrain is lacking in proximate subway connections, and people tend to rely heavily on their cars.”
The denser segments of the Queens pilot area present their own challenges. The Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street intersection at the Flushing-Main Street 7 train station is the third busiest intersection in the city (behind Times Square and Herald Square). Even with 40 parking corrals in the area, some often spill over with e-scooters, and riders frequently leave scooters in no-parking zones. In September 2024, City Council member Sonia Ung introduced legislation to have the program banned in Downtown Flushing, citing the chaotic sidewalks of her district: “There is a lot going on in Downtown Flushing. A lot of people on the sidewalks on the streets, dealing with illegal vendors, so the sidewalks are very congested. So what is not needed is an addition.”
While the built environment shapes rider experience, many New York riders have not been deterred. Public outcry consistently focuses less on concerns for rider safety, and more on impediments to public street space, particularly in areas with entrenched suburban car culture; or on littering public space in already overpacked business centers like Flushing and Jamaica. Bronx residents finally grew accustomed to the sight of scooters on their streets, but can Queens?
You are riding a scooter up Utopia Parkway, preparing to turn onto Booth Memorial Avenue. But first you must pass under the notorious Long Island Expressway. It’s a dark block and you feel vulnerable on a scooter at just a few inches off the ground with no helmet, so decide to ride on the wide sidewalk, even though you know it’s not allowed. So what if you have to dodge a couple pedestrians?
New York City laws require operators to limit speeds on their e-scooters to 15 mph, though many of the vehicles can go up to 20 mph. Using GPS technology, the Bird, Lime, and Via apps can create bounded areas where e-scooter speeds are capped below the 15 mph limit (like greenways in public parks) or shut off completely in prohibited areas (like Jacobi Medical Campus and Co-op City’s interior roads).
In 2022, 44 percent of all riders who responded to DOT’s e-scooter survey reported riding on the sidewalk, and the reason is simple: 30 percent also reported they felt safer riding on the sidewalk than in the street. On already full New York City sidewalks, like those of Downtown Flushing, this trend feels threatening to some pedestrians and has contributed to a storm of negative PR. Some e-scooters are designed to produce an unpleasant beeping sound when sidewalk riding is detected, or even to automatically slow down to a crawl, but GPS can be distorted by the “urban canyon” effect (signal interference from tall buildings).
While e-scooters tend to be perceived as more dangerous than e-bikes due to their small wheels and high center of gravity, studies have shown bikes to be more dangerous. A 2022 DOT report concluded that shared e-scooters were widely used, with zero fatalities reported among over 1.3 million trips that year. And for the small number of Bronx e-scooter crashes that were reported, the majority resulted in minor injuries or no injury at all. Just six crashes required admission to a hospital. The same report found that 80 percent of crashes did not involve a collision with another motor vehicle, pedestrian, or bicycle: the majority of e-scooter crashes involved only the rider. These numbers can be improved by creating more connected bike lane networks.
Some Bronx corridors — including White Plains Road, Boston Road, and especially Morris Park Avenue — have been particularly popular for e-scooters. Morris Park Avenue has a conventional bike lane in both directions as well as access to the 2 and 5 train lines, and two bus lines. The DOT has pledged to prioritize more street improvements within the coverage zones, which lack connected bike paths, to improve on rider experience. Because both e-scooter areas lack safe infrastructure like the protected, or “hardened,” bike lanes found primarily in Manhattan, the issue of sidewalk riding is likely to continue regardless of rider education or cutting-edge sidewalk-riding detection tech.
Despite prevention efforts, parked e-scooters continue to materialize in the middle of the sidewalk creating a tripping hazard and obstacle for strollers and wheelchairs. At roughly 50 pounds, the e-scooters are awkward or impossible to move if left blocking a building entrance or a driveway, especially for elderly and disabled people.
More extreme examples of mis-parked scooters range from e-scooters abandoned next to freeways at the borders of the coverage area to e-scooters submerged in the Bronx River. Between July 2023 and September 2024, the Bronx River Alliance reported pulling 410 e-scooters and e-bikes out of the river, presumably after bored teenagers or frustrated residents pushed the parked vehicles down the hill into the water. This pollutes an already precarious urban river ecosystem and costs the companies — as well as non-profits like the Bronx River Alliance — money and time to remove. Veo temporarily paused service along the river in summer 2024 to deter this, which meant removing access to one of the only protected bike lanes in the Bronx service. Streetsblog reported:
“A Wakefield resident … with more than 1,200 trips under his belt told the Bronx Times removing access to the bike lanes along the Bronx River Parkway and Bronx Boulevard — which feel safer to travel on than other nearby options — was ‘one of the worst things Veo could have done.’ . . . ‘Going through Bronx Park is like the safest way for me,’ he said. ‘Every other street is riddled with potholes, people double parking, the sidewalks are narrow, so even if I was to ride on the sidewalks for safety, it’s hard to do that.'”
Local elected officials have pushed back on e-scooters in their neighborhoods, placing the newest phase of the program at risk. In October 2024, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams wrote to the DOT requesting an immediate operational pause for the entire Queens area. Soon after, Republican Council member Kristy Marmorato called on Mayor Eric Adams to terminate operations in her Bronx district. Frustrations surrounding the clutter of the free-floating parking model quickly became a topic at Queens Community Board meetings. Qns.com quoted one resident lamenting that lawless e-scooters were “invading the neighborhood.” After just three months, Queens Council member James Gennaro denounced the program as “a total disaster.” He added “These e-scooters are a blight. They are a menace.” As of now, there is no sign of either program stopping.
At this early stage, can we assume opposition to e-scooters is a symptom of an inevitable learning curve in a community that will eventually come to embrace them? Or is it an indicator that the DOT hasn’t targeted the right areas, and should focus on pockets of New York better suited for micromobility?
In spite of opposition, ridership continues to grow. With 650,000 trips and over 40,000 new accounts created in the Queens area in 2024, riders took up scootering to get home from school, commute to work, and shop. In January 2025, Lime announced that 2024 was its most successful year in the Bronx, with approximately 1.49 million rides across 59,000 riders. That’s a 55 percent increase in total rides compared to the previous year. Rides for both consistently average about one mile per trip, and the vast majority of trips start and end in the same neighborhood, illustrating that the program is primarily serving local residents, as intended.
This level of usage, often in less-than-ideal riding conditions, has shone a light on New Yorkers’ appetite for micromobility. August 2025 will mark four years of shared e-scooter operations in New York, throughout which the DOT has promised to build on the program’s momentum with dozens of capital improvements like hardening bike lanes and network expansions. Most recently, in an effort to improve conditions for delivery workers, the Adams administration shared an Electric Micromobility Action Plan, with a section devoted to comprehensive street design. The potential for shared e-scooters could be vast: think borough-wide, multimodal trips, where subway or train networks can reach deeper into communities so residents can scoot from home to appointments without paying for a rideshare or burning a single fossil fuel. But with no comprehensive plan for infrastructural improvements from the DOT or from the operators to address user compliance, the future for our current riders is a murky one, and the skeptical onlookers will most likely remain skeptical.
All photos copyright Abigail Montes
All maps by Thandi Nyambose
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
