Who’s Using the Scooters?

The last time you were in downtown Lincoln, you probably saw a bunch of rental scooters lying around. These are one of the minor developments of my lifetime. Every city is lined with these things. For a while I didn’t really understand why. What is the purpose of rental scooters and are they accomplishing it?

For some people, scooters stand for a needed change in the ways that cities are structured. The scooter companies themselves run on this premise. Automobile dependency in large cities creates challenges for existing structures. Rather than endlessly fighting a war for more parking, many cities have elected to use alternative transportation like bikes and scooters in addition to their public transportation systems. In a city like Lincoln, the vast majority of households have access to cars. The population downtown is not so desperate for parking. Garages are available and street spots are usually unoccupied.

So the function of the scooter in Lincoln is suspicious. I have only ever seen them being used by college students. Often I’ll even recognize someone from Union. They are being used not by urban travelers, but young people looking for leisure activities. This should be pretty easy to understand for any Union student. It is not always easy to find leisure activities, so scooters are sometimes expected to fill that role.

The question is, will these devices even last throughout our lifetimes? Certain things from our lives will retreat into vintage after us. This is a fact of life. Things that seem natural to us will one day look dated and tacky. Scooters are a kind of symbol of this. They stand for a new kind of city that might never materialize. They project a sense of green-urbanism that many cities and corporations are currently attempting to cater to. We may live to look back on this era of bike-lanes and ride-share apps the same way that we look back on 70s haircuts. You might see a ride-share scooter in an antique store next to a typewriter or a cassette player.

Tech companies love to display the ground-shaking abilities of a youth-centered worldview. If we let go of our inhibitions and accept the change, amazing things could happen. You might have a lot of bright ideas about how a city should be run, and maybe even get to act on them in your career. But if things don’t pan out, at least someone can find a way to have fun with what you’ve done.

By Luke Morris