E-Scooters: A New Smart Mobility Option? The Case of Brisbane, Australia

ABSTRACT

Standing electric scooters (e-scooters)’ rapid infiltration as a mobility option has left cities in the limbo of having to deal with regulation and planning for their sudden interruption. As the first city in Australia to allow e-scooter sharing, Brisbane is at the forefront of regulating their use in public space. We reflect on how e-scooter governance can be considered a continually (re)negotiated site of state-market interface, drawing insights from Lindblom’s science of muddling through, Dewey’s socially organised intelligence, and Leitner, Peck, and Sheppard’s discussion on contesting market domination/modes of social regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• E-scooters
• smart mobility
• regulation theory
• muddling through
• socially organised intelligence

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank anonymous reviewers and editors for their encouragement and insightful comments that have substantially improved the paper. We would also like to thank Robert Lake for his resourceful feedback and the anonymous interview participants for generously offering their time.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Mayor Durkan posited concerns around safety, protecting the City’s budget from personal injury lawsuits, and equity with regard to road/sidewalk space competition (Mayor Jenny Bicknell, 2020; Durkan, 2019).

2. Riding an e-scooter in the open air probably has less risk than riding public transport if there are multiple people using it (on a packed tram for example).

3. The ground for their illegality was based on the fact that, according to the Queensland road rules, motorised scooters must not be able to travel faster than 10 km/h, and Lime scooters (and the time of launching) were able to travel up to 27 km/h.

4. While we have focused on these three theoretical angles, there are other alternatives depending on the researchers’ preference and priority: researchers interested in the environmental sustainability side of smart mobility (e.g. Docherty et al., 2018) have engaged with the ‘transitions theory’ literature (Coenen et al., 2012; Geels, 2011); others interested in a more radical redemocratisation of transportation planning could draw their inspirations from Mouffe (2005) or Rancière (1999) (see Legacy, 2016).

5. The quote is from Robert Lake, communications with the authors, March 2021.

6. For instance, in Seattle, the Department of Transportation (SDOT) decides the geofenced areas of ‘no-ride’ zones; ‘no ride zones’ are ‘areas that SDOT has determined to be unsuitable for scooter use. Riding into a no-ride zone will slow your scooter to a stop; it will begin working again when you leave the no-ride zone’ (City of Seattle, 2020).

7. There has been an increasing attention on the concept of ‘Mobility as a Service’ (MaaS) in transportation planning; MaaS aims to provide all transport options through a single platform that integrates the modes as well as payment for the service (Shaheen et al., 2017; e.g. using the same transportation card for all services including tram, bus, bicycle, e-scooter, etc.). However, the concept of MaaS remains broad at the moment and delving into the specific possibilities of it is beyond the scope of the present paper. The present paper is written from the perspective of planners and the city government that are now confronted with the sudden appearance of e-scooters – focusing on the political aspects of e-scooter governance. We encourage other researchers to explore using MaaS as an approach to integrate e-scooters into the existing transport provision/infrastructure at a metropolitan scale. At the same time, we wish to highlight the fact that such embrace of new technology should go beyond the technical aspects of ‘smooth operation’, since, as we’ve argued throughout our Discussion, technologies have social and political implications that invite planning’s role in citizen engagement and contesting market domination.

Additional information

Funding

No funding associated with this research.

Notes on contributors

Clare Field

Clare Field is a recent graduate of The University of Melbourne’s Master of Urban Planning program having completed part of her studies at Technische Universität Berlin. She is practicing as a planner in Melbourne, with a particular focus on policy reform and pursuing human-centred design within the regulatory confines of the built environment. She can be contacted at [email protected].

Ihnji Jon

Ihnji Jon is a Lecturer in International Urban Politics at Melbourne School of Design. She obtained her master’s degree from Science Po Paris and PhD in Urban Planning from University of Washington (Seattle). Her research interests include environment politics, postmodern urban governance, and feminist science and technology studies. She is the author of the forthcoming book Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2021).