Metropolitan PC Benjamin Kemp used CS spray and baton on 17-year-old with learning disabilities
A police officer has been dismissed after hitting a vulnerable teenage girl with a baton “at least 30 times”, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has said.
Metropolitan Police officer Benjamin Kemp, based at north-east command, was dismissed without notice following a disciplinary hearing by the IOPC. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/Rypbkq
Modern Love in miniature, featuring reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.
Credit...Brian Rea
Tito’s Trust
Tito asked me to marry him, but not for the happily ever after. He had AIDS — a death sentence in the early 1980s. He wanted his property to go to his partner, Michael, but his father disapproved. After Tito’s death, I was to wait a few years, then sign everything over to Michael. I was honored by Tito’s trust and might have said yes, but his father relented, allowing Michael to inherit Tito’s assets, though he would not be invited to the funeral. Forty years later, I miss my friend. Would he be married to Michael if he were alive? — Lynn Tamayo
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Cascades Park in Monterey Park, Calif. Tito and I went there a few times to talk.
Maybe More Than Slightly
“Why can’t you find someone?” my parents asked when I was 26. “He’s not here yet,” I said. “He’s in Africa.” (I’ve always been slightly psychic; my parents have always been slightly skeptical.) As the “Dating Diva” at Manhattan’s Learning Annex, I felt confident in my ability to help myself and others “find a mate or just a date.” In my 40s, I still felt confident but relied less on my “dating tricks.” One rainy night, I bumped into a tall man who rolled his R’s. Today, my South African husband says he loves me and our daughter in Afrikaans. — Estelle Erasmus
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An advertisement for my Learning Annex class.
My Second Mother
Our mother, Vilma, would kiss our foreheads when departing for work. I’d get ready for school knowing we would reunite late at night. My sister, Angie, would grab my hand and say, “We’ll be OK.” Lonely after school, we would wait for our mother to return to our Queens apartment. “Angie, can you help me with my homework?” I’d ask. “Yeah, let’s do it together.” As my single mother hustled, Angie took care of me when I needed care, comforted me when I sought comfort. Not even two years older than me, my sister will always be my second mother. — Mishell Lovato
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My sister is on the right; I’m on the left.
What Might Have Been
We started dating a few months before the pandemic. She lived in New Jersey while I lived in New York, and she drove a dusty compact car. The back seat was like an Army surplus store: blankets, picnic chairs, snacks, water. She was a civil engineer and liked to be prepared. The first time we kissed was in her car, contorted across the front seats. I remember the scent of her shampoo and the weight of everything behind us and the year ahead. The last message I received from her was: “The pressure is too high, I can’t. I’m sorry.” — Rahul D’Silva
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St. Petersburg, Fla., where I’ve been spending the pandemic with my mother.
A virtual wellness event featuring Paltrow, hosted by one of Australia’s largest beauty retailers, has prompted furious customer backlash
Announcing an event with an international A-lister on the lineup may seem like an impressive get for an Australian retailer. However, when beauty behemoth Mecca announced Gwyneth Paltrow as the keynote speaker at their virtual wellness summit, Mecca Life, their usually loyal customers revolted.
“Paltrow and Goop peddle enormous amounts of misinformation and make money by preying on women’s insecurities,” the cardiothoracic surgeon and author Dr Nikki Stamp wrote on the event’s Facebook page. “Every time we endorse this behaviour, we allow it to continue. Mecca has always been a champion for women so now, when women are at risk, will you step up to the plate and cancel this terrible event? Or will you let Australian women be further exposed to her nonsense?” Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RylRj8
Our latest snapshot of key economic indicators finds business activity booming, but borrowing reaching record levels
* UK economy builds momentum as Covid restrictions ease
* Angel Gurria: overhaul of global tax system can wait no longer
* OECD: Biden offers ‘once in a lifetime’ chance to end tax abuse
Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RylRcm
Arouca 516 opens 175 metres above the River Paiva in north of the country
The world’s longest pedestrian suspension bridge has been completed in northern Portugal, where residents of the nearby town hope the tourist attraction will help revive a region whose economy was devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hidden between rock-strewn mountains covered with lush greenery and yellow flowers inside the Unesco-recognised Arouca Geopark, the 516 metres (1,700 feet) bridge hangs 175 meters above the fast flowing River Paiva. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RykpWy
From Senegal to Nigeria, a growing wave of salons and small cosmetic companies are challenging colonial notions about how to wear and care for hair
Women kick the sand from their slippers, and ease into the cool comfort of a natural hair and skincare store in central Dakar. On the shelves are jars filled with handmade supplements of organic shea butter, coconut, castor and olive oils, sourced from across west Africa.
In floral silk hijabs and abaya dresses, the women sit on sofas near the back of the store, discussing their hair beneath a mural of poised black women and men, wearing a mixture of classic natural black hairstyles. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RygT2F
New Zealand’s glaciers are retreating. After years of inaction, Covid could be a wake-up call for change – but is it already too late? Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RygT11
It’s hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain
During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further. From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans). With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. “If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” he said.
“Shamshan! Shamshan!” the mesmerised, adoring crowd echoed back. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyfqzR
State security will provide ‘guidance’ to organisations deemed to have anti-espionage responsibility as hostilities with western governments deepen
Chinese social groups, enterprises and public entities will have increased responsibility to combat foreign espionage under new regulations issued by the country’s ministry of state security.
The regulations, which were released and took effect on Monday, come amid deepening hostilities between China and some western governments, including over the detention of foreigners accused of national security crimes. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RybVjQ
Laura Italiano claimed she was forced to write a report about migrant children being given a copy of the VP’s book as part of a welcome kit
A reporter at Rupert Murdoch’s New York tabloid has resigned after she claimed she was forced to write an incorrect story about migrants and Kamala Harris.
The New York Post published a story on 23 April headlined “Kam on in”, which claimed that migrant children were being given a copy of the vice-president’s 2019 book, Superheroes Are Everywhere, as part of a welcome kit in Los Angeles. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RybVYq
* Liverpool’s CEO Billy Hogan wants to find ‘workable solutions’
* Spirit of Shankly fans’ group vote for board representation
Liverpool have agreed to open discussions with fans following the toxic backlash from their involvement in the controversial European Super League.
Fenway Sports Group, the club’s owner, was among the main drivers of the project which collapsed within 48 hours of plans being launched after outcry from all corners of the game with fans protesting outside Premier League matches to voice their opposition. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyZrY8
Trump continues to exert a massive gravitational pull on the party while the president forges ahead with ambitious agenda
For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.
The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyWdhB
In devastating report, human rights experts call on International Criminal Court prosecutor to open an immediate investigation
The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted under international law, an inquiry into US police brutality by leading human rights lawyers from around the globe has found.
A week after the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in George Floyd’s death, the unabated epidemic of police killings of Black men and women in the US has now attracted scorching international attention. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyWdcD
By Major Jackson , Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Let me begin again as a quiet thought in the shape of a shell slowly examined by a brown child on a beach at dawn straining to see their future. Let me begin this time knowing the drumming in my dreams is me inheriting the earth, is morning lighting up the rivers. Let me burn my vanities: old music in the pines, sifters of scotch, a day moon like a signature of night. This time, let me circle the island of my fears only once then live like a raging waterfall and grow a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be the birdcage or the serrated blade or the empty season. Dear Glacier, Dear Sea of Stars, Dear Leopards disintegrating at the outer limits of our greed; soon we will encounter you only in motivational tweets. Reader, I should have married you sooner. This time, let me not sleep like the prophet who believes he’s seen infinity. Let me run at break-neck speeds toward sceneries of doubt. I have no more dress rehearsals to attend. Look closer: I am licking my lips.
Research finds ‘quite a strong association between shift working and being hospitalised for Covid-19’
* Coronavirus – latest updates
* See all our coronavirus coverage
Shift workers treated in hospital are up to three times more likely to test positive for coronavirus than other hospitalised patients, a study has found.
Shift work was defined in the study as working outside the hours of 9am to 5pm, and it is estimated that around 25% of the UK’s workforce engages in some form of such work. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyW1PR
29 April 1946 Carrion crows often to blame for the killing of weaker lambs
Cumberland
A vixen was seen at daybreak with a cub dangling from her jaws. She was crossing swiftly the strath at the head of the lake to a mountain coombe notorious for the number of deep bields in which foxes seek refuge in time of danger. The flockmaster explained that the vixen had been disturbed by a visitor’s terrier who had “marked” the earth in which she had laid down her cubs. “That would be the last of the litter,” he added. “She hadn’t much more than a mile and a half to go, and she’d probably spent the night in removing the litter.”
Related: Country diary: this fox won't give up its prey without a fight Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyRrWv
After years of anxiety, how is the singer coping with losing his brother, lockdown and memories of his unhappy schooldays?
Will Young exits a cab and ambles up a quiet south London street towards me, where I’ve been loitering outside his terrace house like a superfan. No sooner has he shown me through to his garden than he has popped back out to buy cigarettes. There can’t be many pop stars who would feel comfortable leaving a journalist alone in their home, especially one who has had as many run-ins with the press as Young.
The walled garden is filled with bushes and trees that neither of us are able to name, as well as a tremendous number of plant pots. “I’ve gone completely insane: I’ve never bought so many bulbs in my life,” says Young, on his return from the corner shop. “Did you see the tulips out the front? I’ve gone potting-crazy. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I have such a passion for it now.” His neighbours have started calling him “the garden centre”, as he is always trying to foist cuttings on them. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyRrVX
Parts of KRI Nanggala including its rudder, anchors and outer body found scattered at bottom of sea
A missing Indonesian submarine has been found, broken into at least three parts, deep in the Bali Sea, army and navy officials have said, as the president sent condolences to relatives of the 53 crew.
On Sunday, the Indonesian military head, Hadi Tjahjanto, said there was no chance of finding any of the crew alive. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyRFQV
Special programme investigates if the broadcaster ignored the way controversial reporter landed scoop
It was one of the most controversial and shattering TV programmes the BBC has ever broadcast. And early next month, the corporation is to return – in a Panorama special – to its 1995 interview with Princess Diana by the then little-known Martin Bashir.
Related: How did the Martin Bashir I knew become TV’s anti-hero? Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyNxJd
The west backed military solutions across the Sahel. With the death of President Idriss Déby, that strategy is helping to destabilise the region
The death in battle last week of Chad’s unloved dictator, Idriss Déby, has pushed the Sahel up the west’s political and media agenda. The sudden burst of interest is unlikely to last. The global attention span for this desperately poor, unstable and ill-governed region is chronically short. And yet the Sahel is, or soon could be, everyone’s problem.
A vast, arid swath of sub-Saharan Africa that comprises Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania and Burkina Faso (the so-called G5 Sahel), plus parts of neighbouring countries, the Sahel is where the world’s toughest challenges collide. The spread of jihadist terrorism, claiming record numbers of lives and posing a possible threat to Europe, is the most closely watched phenomenon. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyNxH6
President called Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday to inform him US would make designation on 106th anniversary of the genocide
Joe Biden has become the first US president declare formal recognition of the Armenian genocide, more than a century after the mass killings by Ottoman troops and opening a rift between the new US administration and Ankara.
Related: Biden vows US will work with Russia on climate Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/RyNT20
Chloé Zhao, the director of “Nomadland,” brings an outsider’s gaze to America’s late-capitalist present.Photograph from Alamy
In the twentieth century, the number of women nominated for the Best Director Oscar was precisely two: Lina Wertmüller, for “Seven Beauties” (1976), and Jane Campion, for “The Piano” (1993). That’s the same number of female directors nominated this year alone, the first time such a thing has occurred. In the interim, exactly one woman has won (Kathryn Bigelow, for “The Hurt Locker”), and the number of nominations for women directors has now totalled seven. In the past few years, the Academy has become a lightning rod for the industry’s imbalances of race and gender, and each heartening “first” carries a whiff of “Is that all there is?” The math remains stuck in the single digits. Still, it’s something.
Even without the demographic hurdles, the directing category is a musical-chairs situation. With up to ten spots available for Best Picture, but only five for Best Director, major omissions are inevitable: this year, Aaron Sorkin (“The Trial of the Chicago 7”), Florian Zeller (“The Father”), Shaka King (“Judas and the Black Messiah”), and Darius Marder (“Sound of Metal”) all directed Best Picture contenders but didn’t make the director list. In a surprising turn, what was expected to be the Sorkin slot went to Thomas Vinterberg, the Danish director of “Another Round,” which is nominated in the Best International Feature Film category. Vinterberg’s inclusion may reflect the Academy’s widening geographical membership, and, to my mind, makes the category a bit spicier. Finally, a chance to set aside the vaunted American counterculture of “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and contemplate, instead, a group of Copenhagen schoolteachers who decide, for purposes of research, to spend their days piss drunk.
Below, a closer look at this year’s nominated directors.
Lee Isaac Chung, “Minari”
Photograph courtesy A24
“Life began for me,” Willa Cather said, “when I ceased to admire and began to remember.” Chung has said that he was thinking of this line when considering his fifth full-length film, a dive into his own childhood as the son of Korean immigrants who settled in rural Arkansas. “Minari” mixes autobiography with fictional touches, but it feels like memory, rendered in crisp, compassionate strokes. On paper, Chung’s story has familiar elements: hardworking immigrants chasing the slippery American Dream, a boy watching helplessly as his parents’ worldly struggles erode their marriage. But Chung never strays into the mawkish, keeping the tone watchful and even tactile. (You can smell that farm air.) Chung captures small moments—a grandmother introducing her grandson to a strange herb, a flash of discomfort at church—that tell a big story about creating a home as an outsider. Now that he’s put his own life onscreen, Chung is breaking out of the first person—his upcoming projects include an adaptation of a Japanese anime film.
Emerald Fennell, “Promising Young Woman”
Fennell’s début feature, to borrow a line from “Fatal Attraction,” is not going to be ignored. In fact, you can tell a lot about the battle of the sexes over the past few decades by comparing the two thrillers. In 1987, the figure of a single woman whose sexual allure comes with a dangerous streak was a bogeywoman: an obsessive, unstable threat to Reaganite domestic idyll. In Fennell’s film, she’s our heroine: a traumatized, self-styled feminist avenger who lures men to the edge of date rape by playing drunk, only to snap into focus and scare the bejeezus out of them—all on behalf of her deceased medical-school classmate, a victim of rape. Fennell’s high-wire concept could have fallen into any number of traps, and some would say that her polarizing ending did just that. But, like “Fatal Attraction,” hers is likely a film that will be hashed over for decades, both as a time capsule of our fraught #MeToo age and as a visceral cinematic provocation, shot in queasy candy colors. Will a rainbow wig ever look innocent again?
David Fincher, “Mank”
Photograph by Miles Crist
Of the five directors, only Fincher is a Hollywood staple, having been nominated twice, for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “The Social Network.” He’s been putting out crackling, unconventional hits since the nineties, when he directed “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” and kept the uneasy thrills coming with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Gone Girl.” “Mank” is something different: a caustic love letter to one of Hollywood’s under-sung greats, the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who shared (loaded verb) an Oscar win, with Orson Welles, for writing “Citizen Kane.” Like “Kane,” “Mank” is interested in the byways of power and in a man’s accountability to his past, and it’s filmed in a pastiche style that painstakingly evokes golden-age cinema. But, whereas “Kane” does so with economical sting, “Mank” is emotionally diffuse, distracted by its own stylistic preoccupations. Ironically, the movie, about a screenwriter getting overshadowed by a director, was directed to within an inch of its life, while its screenplay, written by Fincher’s late father, Jack, was left out of the screenwriting category.
Thomas Vinterberg, “Another Round”
To my knowledge, Vinterberg is the only director here who has produced an honest-to-God manifesto. This was back in 1995, when he and Lars von Trier wrote their Dogme 95 Manifesto, distributed in red pamphlets and announcing a new movement that would rescue filmmaking from effects-driven Hollywood bloat. (Adherents were asked to swear by a “Vow of Chastity.”) Vinterberg directed the first Dogme 95 film, the pitch-black comedy “Festen,” which the Academy promptly ignored; the year it came out, “Titanic” won Best Picture. Oh, well. What a difference two decades and a splash of vodka make. “Another Round” follows a foursome of teachers who catch wind of a theory that maintaining a blood alcohol content of 0.05 per cent can liberate one’s soul and—whoops!—spend their days and nights increasingly trashed. You probably can’t get further away from the Zeitgeist than the wayward decadence of four sad, middle-aged Scandanavian dudes. But it sure is fun to watch, and the last scene is dynamite. As far as the Best Director race, Vinterberg, as befits a Dane, is probably a red herring.
Chloé Zhao, “Nomadland”
The Oscars have never welcomed a character quite like Zhao. The daughter of a Chinese businessman (her stepmother, Song Dandan, is a Chinese comedy star), she grew up in Beijing before rebelling in the typical way: by going to film school at New York University (her teachers included Spike Lee) and making micro-budget Westerns that cast actors alongside real-life rodeo cowboys and drifters. Now she’s the queen of Oscars season, and next on her agenda is a Marvel movie about a race of immortal aliens. To this head-spinning résumé, add the fact that she’s been a gracious, disarming presence during this socially distanced awards season, while collecting a bafta, a Golden Globe, a D.G.A. Award, and the major critics’ prizes. “Nomadland,” adapted from a nonfiction book about senior gig workers, captures something elemental about America’s wobbly, late-capitalist present, the way our stubborn individualism persists even as society melts away and reforms itself around a desert campfire. Perhaps we needed an outsider’s gaze to make some sense of ourselves.
Bottom line: Zhao is all but certain to win, and, when she does, she’ll be the first woman of color to do so: one fewer item on the Academy’s long list of blind spots. Let’s hope that she and Bigelow won’t have to spend too much time as a sorority of two. Is this a bad time to mention that no Black director has ever won?
Fleets of electric scooters have taken over city streets worldwide. With New York finally climbing aboard, do they represent a tech hustle or a transit revolution?
Shared electric scooters offer a solution to what transportation experts call the “last-mile problem.”Illustration by Igor Bastidas
New York City used to be an early adopter of new transportation modes. In the late eighteen-sixties, New Yorkers took up the velocipede, a primitive version of the bicycle. Half a century later, the city embraced the automobile, and eventually made free parking available for the fossil-fuel-burning machines—a remarkable giveaway of expensive public space that many carless citizens would like back now. New York also engineered and built a subway system, above ground and below ground, which, before the covid-19 pandemic hit, carried five and a half million riders every weekday—a landmark of American people-moving the city may never reach again, if remote work is here to stay.
But when it comes to shared electric scooters—the adult, motorized versions of the standing “kick” scooter that you push with one foot—New York has taken the slow lane. As with its bike-share scheme, Citi Bike, which launched in 2013, years after most other big cities, New York has adopted a conservative approach to this ballyhooed new mode of getting around town.
Beginning in Southern California, Bird and, later, Lime, both venture-capital-backed tech startups, dropped fleets of rentable electric scooters onto the streets of Santa Monica, where Bird’s vehicles appeared in 2017, and San Diego, Lime’s first city, in 2018. Bypassing municipal regulators, the companies hoped to attract customers as quickly as possible. Under Uber’s former head of international growth, Travis VanderZanden, Bird got its black-and-white scooters into a hundred cities globally during a yearlong blitzkrieg. Blindsided city governments, struggling to respond to this onslaught, temporarily banned scooters in Seattle, West Hollywood, and Winston-Salem, among other places.
Although Bird wasn’t close to profitable, it soon reached unicorn status—a billion-dollar valuation. Lime then joined Bird in the unicorn paddock. Investors went all in on “micromobility”—the buzzy, catchall term for bicycles and lightweight electric vehicles—hoping to stumble onto the next Uber. Within a year, more than thirty scooter-share startups had popped up around the world.
In many cities, scooter-sharing was adopted faster than bike-sharing, and by a broader demographic of ridership. Bird amassed more than ten million rides in its first twelve months. Users loved the scooters for their convenience. In Austin, Texas, for example, during South by Southwest, scooters proved to be ideal for hopping between venues. On the West Coast, Venice Beach sizzled with the sound of scooter wheels. By 2019, the long-necked, flat-bottomed machines had become a fixture of the urban landscape in Paris, Vienna, Madrid, and Mexico City, like for-hire mechanical swans clustering on sidewalks.
Transportation wonks hailed scooter-sharing as the best solution to their “last-mile problem,” when the trip between the train station and home is a little farther than walking distance—around a quarter of a mile, for most people. Futurists saw it as the first transportation mode to incorporate mobile-computing and global-positioning technology in its core design, and touted the e-scooter as a harbinger of the battery-powered, software-controlled car of the future. But to detractors e-scooters were a fad, and scooter-share programs were a tech hustle that exploited a limited public resource—city streets—to enrich private investors.
Bird and Lime attracted lawsuits from injured riders, and passionate animosity from lots of people who encountered the dockless scooters that were left in the middle of sidewalks. In May, 2018, San Francisco, after receiving almost two thousand complaints, issued cease-and-desist orders to Bird, Lime, and a third operator, Spin, which was bought by Ford in November, 2018. A class-action suit in Los Angeles the same year accused Lime, Bird, and others of “aiding and abetting assault.” Scooter vandalism became a performance art. The Instagram site Bird Graveyard documented busted Birds, trashed Birds, Birds in the Bay, and Birds flambé.
Among the big transportation hubs in the West, only New York and London stood fast during what is now seen as the Wild West phase of scooter mania. Then came the pandemic, scrambling transport habits around the globe, and creating rare opportunities for what transportation theorists refer to as “mode change.” To judge from New York’s increasingly crowded bike lanes, the scootering mode has arrived.
E-scooters aren’t the first standing electric vehicles to attempt to enter New York’s transportation system. The Segway, a two-wheeled “human transporter,” was released in December, 2001, and hyped by Jeff Bezos as “one of the most famous and anticipated product launches of all time.” There were photographs of Bezos and the Segway’s inventor, Dean Kamen, riding the machines on sidewalks around Times Square.
Today, the human transporter is perhaps best remembered as the electronic steed that Paul Blart mounts in “Mall Cop,” a 2009 film that leans heavily on the sight gag of a casually standing person who is in motion. But the Segway’s influence lingered in the broad set of state and city laws that banned most forms of single-person E.V.s from the streets and sidewalks, including e-bikes and e-scooters.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
In the late two-thousands, the first wave of e-bikes arrived in the city as food-delivery workers, virtually all immigrants, began using them. For a fifteen-hundred-dollar investment in an e-bike, a worker can increase his nightly earnings by two dollars an hour—which could amount to thousands more in yearly earnings. Some Yuppie early adopters had also taken to the outlawed bikes: my sister-in-law’s elbow was shattered in Manhattan, in 2010, by an e-biking filmmaker who was going the wrong way in a bike lane.
A crackdown began in 2017, shortly after a sixty-year-old Upper West Side investment banker, Matthew Shefler, who used a speed gun to clock cyclists in the Columbus Avenue bike lane, called in to “Ask the Mayor,” on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” and decried the dangers of the modern-day velocipedes to Bill de Blasio.
“You say ‘raised by wolves’ like it’s a bad thing.”
The following year, the N.Y.P.D. issued delivery workers hundreds of five-hundred-dollar citations and sometimes took away their e-bikes. Workers who spoke Chinese or Spanish had their bikes confiscated at a much higher rate than those who spoke English. The Deliver Justice Coalition fought back with the support of influential local politicians, including Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens, and Carlos Menchaca, a City Council member from Brooklyn, but they lacked the funds to lobby state lawmakers in Albany effectively. The status of pedal-assist e-bikes was eventually clarified as exempt from the law—Citi Bike began electrifying its fleet in 2018—but the full-throttle e-bikes favored by the city’s forty thousand delivery workers remained illegal.
During the same period, micromobility companies began to eye the lucrative New York market, despite being blocked by the Segway laws. Bird and Lime did have the funds to spend on lobbying Albany lawmakers. Bird brought in Bradley Tusk, who had designed Uber’s strategy for disrupting New York City with its gig-working drivers in the early twenty-tens; between January and June of 2019, Tusk was paid a hundred thousand dollars. Lime also spent heavily on lobbying.
Phil Jones, Lime’s senior director of government relations, took a leading role in crafting the new law for the scooter companies. “There were a lot of overarching state laws put into place that made two-wheeled electric vehicles illegal, inspired by the Segway,” he told me. “That’s what we were up against, and that’s what delivery workers were up against.” Jones helped consolidate five bills aiming to legalize two-wheeled E.V.s into a single piece of legislation, Senate Bill 5294A, sponsored by Jessica Ramos. With the financial capital of the scooter bros and the political capital of the persecuted deliveristas, the bill was passed by the New York Assembly in 2019, but Governor Andrew Cuomo vetoed it, ostensibly because he wanted all e-scooter and e-bike riders to wear a helmet. According to insiders, the underlying reason was the Governor’s hostility toward Ramos, a rising star in state politics.
On March 20, 2020, Cuomo put the state into lockdown. Within weeks, the food-delivery workers whom the N.Y.P.D. had been harassing were being hailed as frontline heroes. During the terrifying early days, particularly, it seemed as though ambulances and delivery e-bikes were the only vehicles moving. Cuomo, who had backed down on his demand for helmets, as long as a rider is older than eighteen, signed the bill that April.
In July, the City Council mandated a scooter-sharing pilot. In October, the Department of Transportation issued a Request for Expressions of Interest; the D.O.T. would award up to three of the applicants with contracts. New York is one of the world’s largest potential markets for micromobility, and an invaluable proving ground for the concept, so the scooter pilot attracted intense interest from dozens of companies—not only Bird and Lime but also many smaller operators that hoped to prevail over the two Goliaths. One of these was Link, which is owned by Superpedestrian, an engineering and robotics firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Link’s fleet of fluorescent-yellow scooters can be rented in Seattle, Oakland, Madrid, Rome, and seventeen other cities.
By January, 2021, the field in New York’s pilot competition had narrowed to seven. On an arctic day at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the finalists were invited to demo their scooters and operating software for D.O.T. observers.
“We are definitely the underdog here,” Paul Steely White, Superpedestrian’s policy director, said as he glanced around at the reps from the other companies that were setting up their scooters on the frigid, windswept pavement.
Bird and Lime were at the Navy Yard, too; Ford’s Spin; Voi, a Swedish company that operates in European cities, where the bicycle-friendly infrastructure makes scootering less daunting than it is in New York; Beryl, a British company; and Veo, a Chicago-based startup.
White pointed to Superpedestrian’s victory over Bird in its bid for Seattle, in September, 2020; Link was one of three operators that were issued permits. (Lime and Wheels, a California-based maker of a hybrid scooter-bike, received the others.) White attributed Bird’s defeat to its disruptive history as well as to the company’s use of gig labor to service its scooters. He hoped that Link, which has a perfect compliance record in the twenty-one cities in which it operates, and has never used gig labor, would have a similar advantage over Bird with regulators in New York, where gig labor won’t be allowed. Both Bird and Lime, for their part, say that they have moved past the early years of disruption, and have become compliant government partners. More recent generations of Bird’s scooters, such as Bird Two, in scratch-resistant silver, are much sturdier than its early models, as are Lime’s.
To unlock the dockless shared scooters, users download a smartphone app. Rides generally cost a dollar to start and then twenty-five cents a minute, which makes them economical for short, fast trips, but costly for recreational larking. In renting a scooter—or a bike—you provide the hire company with information about you, your route, your travel speed, your driving style, and your destination. Cities grant scooter concessions in part to have access to these data, which are aggregated and anonymized according to rules that underpin the Mobility Data Specification, an open-source digital tool. This information is far more granular than the data that can be gleaned about subway or bus ridership. What to make of the fact, according to a study commissioned by the Dublin City Council, which fitted cyclists with sensor-enabled lights made by the cycling-technology and data firm See.Sense, that women swerve more than men when they ride, and that they stay closer to the curb, even though the road is rougher there? See.Sense’s Irene McAleese told me, “They could be cycling close to the gutter to feel safer, if good-quality cycle infrastructure is not available.”
Both White, fifty, and a colleague, Graham Gullans, thirty-six, wore heavy parkas, mittens, hats, and face masks. Their eyes lit up as the D.O.T. observers began arriving. One at a time, the observers tried Link’s yellow scooters, heading toward a set of orange cones. Gullans sprinted behind each one to call attention to the precision of Link’s geofencing. A data-driven form of collective intelligence employed in scooter fleets, geofencing uses G.P.S. to create virtual boundaries around terrestrial places. The technology can keep scooters off sidewalks and away from restricted areas by automatically cutting the power to the motor when the scooter crosses the geofence. Geofencing also requires users to end rides in designated scooter-parking areas, reducing sidewalk clutter. You could still pick up a parked scooter, though, if it isn’t locked to anything, and throw it into the East River.
The finalists in the New York pilot all employed a version of geofencing, but they differed in significant ways. Some systems rely on cloud computing, which can entail delays of up to thirty seconds when the scooter hits a boundary. Link does all the mapping and computing on three microcomputers built into the scooter, so its geofencing system kicks in almost instantly.
Gullans wanted to be there when Link’s scooters hit the geofence at the orange cones and stopped. “I was just really excited to show off our system,” he told me. “I was also trying to stay warm.” If nothing else, the day would prove conclusively that scootering is not the best mode of travel in the dead of a New York winter. You can’t put your hands in your pockets while driving or lean into the wind. In a lot of ways, walking that last mile works better, and it’s free.
Still, “we showed that we’re trying really damn hard,” White told me. “I think this is part of the underdog mystique that ultimately wins them over.”
Paul White has been at the forefront of micromobility since before it was a concept. He’s risen to be a colonel in the war on cars during his career, with most of it spent at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit founded in 1973 to fight the supremacy of the automobile in the city. As T.A.’s executive director starting in 2004, White was the public face of cycling in New York, calling for better, safer bike infrastructure, and eulogizing riders killed by cars and trucks. He was friends with the dynamic D.O.T. commissioner under Michael Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan, who created hundreds of miles of bike lanes. He was instrumental in getting cars banned from both Central Park and Prospect Park, and in helping to persuade the city, under the Bloomberg administration, to build the Prospect Park West bikeway, which was installed in June, 2010. Anthony Weiner, who opposed the bike-lane boom when he ran for mayor in 2013, vowing to rip the lanes up if elected, called White and his colleagues “policy jihadists.”
It therefore came as a shock to many in the bike-advocacy community when, in the fall of 2018, White announced that he was leaving the nonprofit world to join Bird, the Silicon Valley unicorn. The company had offered to make him part of its public-policy “dream team,” and after discussing the role with a former colleague, Melinda Hanson, the founder of Electric Avenue, an E.V. consultancy, he decided to take the job. “I was pushing fifty, and I had been at T.A. fourteen years,” White told me. “Young Jedis were coming up through the ranks.” Being an executive director mostly meant fund-raising, and, he said, “that wasn’t what I originally signed up for in terms of trying to kick down doors.” Community boards, which tend to be dominated by car drivers who don’t want to lose their free parking, fought back against bike lanes. Under Mayor de Blasio, City Hall’s top priority was the Vision Zero program, which focussed on reducing auto-related fatalities, rather than on building cycling infrastructure. The pandemic has proved to be a disaster in this regard. Drivers, delighted to find the roads empty for once, floored it. Road fatalities have been the highest since Vision Zero began.
“I saw what was happening with scooter mania,” White explained. “Yes, there were all these issues with sidewalk clutter, but just look at the numbers. More women were riding, more low-income people were riding, and it was more racially diverse.” White felt the same energy around the micromobility movement that he had experienced in bike advocacy during the Bloomberg years.
The lockdowns in the face of the pandemic brought scooter mania to an abrupt halt. After mid-March, 2020, no one wanted to share anything, and, with no one going anywhere, scooters’ data-gathering capabilities were useless. Across the U.S. and Europe, the metal swans went into hibernation, which meant removing thousands of scooters from city streets.
Layoffs followed throughout the industry, and Lime eventually lost its unicorn status. Still, when White got an e-mail from Bird’s management summoning him to a Zoom Webinar on March 26, 2020, he had no inkling of what was to come. A woman’s voice read a statement collectively firing more than four hundred Bird employees, including everyone on the Zoom call. (The mass termination is preserved on YouTube.) “It was pretty brutal,” White said. Immediately after the ninety-second call ended, screens on the company-issued laptops, on which people had been working from home, went to gray and everyone was locked out of e-mail and Slack.
White was “really low” for a couple of weeks, he said, and he considered leaving the transportation field altogether. In 2019, he and his wife, Zoe Ryder White, a poet, and their three children had moved to a six-acre farm in Ulster County. He had lots of projects in mind. But, as lockdowns eased and scooter-sharing returned to cities in the summer and fall of 2020, he began lobbying to join Superpedestrian.
“I wanted to work for the good guys,” he said. “I just have so much invested in this personally. I feel like if we don’t win New York, I’m going to be filling potholes for the Ulster County Department of Transportation.”
Electric scooters don’t look like the coming revolution in transportation, but to Horace Dediu, a business analyst and micromobility’s leading evangelist—he coined the term—that is part of their appeal. “The next revolution in transportation will come from the bottom,” Dediu has said. Dediu was born in Romania and came to the U.S. as a child; he attended Tufts and the Harvard Business School. He now lives in Finland, where he is multimodal. On YouTube, he philosophizes about urban mobility while riding his bicycle.
Dediu argues that, just as the heavy desktop computer has been superseded by lighter laptops, tablets, and smartphones, so the automobile will be “unbundled” into much lighter, cleaner, and less resource-dependent E.V.s that can be used for most of the trips people now make by car. (In the U.S., sixty per cent of all car trips are less than six miles.) Lithium-ion batteries, first introduced to consumers by Sony in high-end camcorders, today power an ever-expanding array of mobile devices—not just our phones and laptops but also vehicles like e-bikes, e-scooters, e-monowheels, e-skateboards, and other continually evolving forms of micromobility that no longer require the user’s energy to move them.
“This place is too crowded—let’s check the Internet for a spot no one knows about.”
Dediu calls e-scooters “smartphones on wheels.” No other vehicle on the road has a higher proportion of brains to brawn. Scooter riders, however, are less reliably intelligent. In the Wild West days, reckless driving and cheaply made scooters reduced the life span of some scooters on the streets to just over twenty-eight days. When Bird and Lime launched, they deployed consumer scooters bought from the Chinese manufacturers Segway-Ninebot and Xiaomi, which weren’t made for the hard-knock street life of a public-transit vehicle. In San Francisco, brakes failed as some users were scootering down steep hills, leading to class-action lawsuits. In Auckland, New Zealand, a software glitch caused scooters to brake suddenly. In October, 2018, Lime recalled two thousand of its scooters from fleets in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Lake Tahoe over fears that the batteries, which are installed under the standing platform, might explode. Lithium-ion-battery fires can occur on rare occasions when a short circuit causes the battery to release a large amount of its stored-up energy at once; that’s why airlines won’t allow lithium-ion batteries in checked baggage. There was a fire at Citi Bike’s main charging hub in Brooklyn, in May, 2019.
Still, Dediu believes that today’s scooters could evolve into tomorrow’s automobiles. The technologies embedded in a state-of-the-art e-scooter and e-bike—mobile communications, autonomous driving capability, and artificial intelligence—will be central to the cars that Apple or another tech company might make in the future. If cities are going to meet the zero-emission goals they’ve set and if automakers like Ford and G.M. are going to electrify their fleets by 2030 and 2035, respectively, as they have pledged, automobiles will have to become smaller, lighter, and more efficient, particularly given the limits of lithium-ion-battery technology. Four-wheeled, covered quadracycles, electric rickshaw-taxis, and electric minibuses resembling three-wheeled tuk-tuks are all possibilities.
But the disposability of shared scooters also raises the question of just how green this new mode of transport really is. There is still no commercially reliable way to recycle lithium-ion batteries—a huge caveat for the sustainability of E.V.s in general. All the superannuated scooters eventually end up in landfills, as did shared bikes, which were widely embraced in China early in the past decade, then abruptly cancelled in many places, leading to shocking photographs of enormous bike-burial sites. Added to the environmental costs of discarded batteries and scooters are the emissions produced by the trucks and vans that bring the scooters to charging stations—or, in some cases, to gig workers’ homes. On important issues, such as labor practices and sustainability, the Wild West of micromobility remains unsettled, even as the go-go early days of disruption have given way to the courtship of regulators like New York’s D.O.T.
To get a better sense of scooters as proto-vehicles of the future, I visited Superpedestrian, the home of Link. The company currently has a hundred and ninety employees, many of whom work at its R. & D. lab, in a former machine shop on a quiet back street in Cambridge. Assaf Biderman, the company’s Israeli-born forty-three-year-old founder, joined me on Zoom for a tour, beaming in from an island in Greece where he, his wife, the Israeli singer-songwriter Nili Ohayon, known as Onili, and their six-year-old daughter, Livia, were spending the pandemic. When they return to the U.S., the family plans to settle in Brooklyn.
After completing his military service in Israel, Biderman majored in physics and architecture at M.I.T. At the university’s Media Lab, he worked under Hiroshi Ishii, whose research into human-computer interfaces was pioneering in the early nineties. Collaborating with Ishii, Biderman told me, “brought me into the idea of using new sensors and digital tools to create a meaningful connection between humans and machines.” Biderman was also inspired by Bill Mitchell, the Australian-born dean of architecture at M.I.T., who foresaw the profound effects that data would have on architecture and city planning. As Biderman put it, “When the urban environment starts to emit data, you can begin to plan it with quantitative tools.”
In 2003, Biderman and Carlo Ratti, a former postdoc in Ishii’s lab who is now a professor at M.I.T., founded the Senseable City Lab, within M.I.T.’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, to explore how introducing digital technologies into the built environment can aid in the study, design, and management of cities. As the lab started consulting with cities around the world, Biderman told me, he kept hearing that demand for urban mobility is expected to triple by mid-century. “Growth in global population, growth in urbanization, and rising incomes are all driving it,” he said. “But the streets we have are what we’ve got. How can you use those streets to move more people more efficiently?”
Superpedestrian was launched in January, 2013. Biderman assembled a team of forty robotics engineers, who spent the next four and a half years coding a machine-learning-based operating system that could be used in any small electric vehicle, including a car, and for which they eventually received thirty-seven patents. “A self-sensing control system” is how Biderman describes it.
In 2017, the company brought out the Copenhagen Wheel. By replacing the back wheel of a conventional bike with the Wheel, you could convert it into an e-bike. In addition to its vehicle intelligence, the Wheel could sense and learn from the city’s infrastructure. It recorded carbon-monoxide levels, reported on traffic congestion, and used algorithms to detect potholes. The Wheel also had the machine-learning capacity to adapt to a rider’s unique pedalling style and pace.
Priced at seventeen hundred and fifty dollars, the Wheel went on sale in 2017. The only thing it couldn’t do was sell. “It offered too much for its price,” Biderman told me. “We should have charged four or five thousand for it. Then people would have understood they’re getting the best.”
In 2018, Biderman entered the scooter-share market. He asked his engineers to design a high-tech scooter, and they loaded it with all the intelligence and self-diagnostic capacity that the Copenhagen Wheel had, as well as many new features. During my visit to the lab, Graham Gullans showed me Link’s Seattle fleet on a monitor. The individual scooters, represented as green dots, were zipping around the city in real time. Choosing a random dot and clicking on it, Gullans explained how Superpedestrian’s operating system was performing more than a thousand autonomous maintenance checks a second—brake issues, battery-cell-temperature imbalances, severed internal wires, water penetration—so that an algorithm that has learned to detect signs of incipient scooter failure can take the vehicle out of service before a serious malfunction occurs that might land the machine in the shop and the rider in the hospital. (The system can also detect collisions and report unsafe driving to local control centers.) As a result of this regimen of automated self-care, Link scooters require maintenance once in every two hundred and fifty trips, versus the industry standard of once in every fifteen to forty trips.
“The scooters even open their own service tickets!” Biderman exclaimed. “With the instructions on what needs to be fixed for the mechanics. And, once it is fixed, the scooter tests itself to see if the work was done correctly.”
Last November, I bought an electric scooter for my wife, as a birthday gift. It was a portable model, with a steering column that folds. You can get one for five hundred dollars, and a fair number of people who rent scooters and enjoy getting around on them eventually do buy their own. That poses problems for the long-term viability of scooter-sharing. “The best customers end up leaving the market,” David Zipper, an urban-mobility and technology-policy expert and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, told me.
As a gift, the scooter was a disaster. My wife rode it maybe fifty yards down the unprotected bike lane on our street in Brooklyn, went over a speed hump, and that was that. Like the women in the Irish cycling study, she didn’t feel safe. Horace Dediu, the micromobility seer, told me that he considers women to be an “indicator species” when it comes to new forms of transportation. “In Europe, whenever women begin to use a mode it becomes mainstream very quickly,” he said. Cycling has long skewed male, but in Denmark more women cycle than men, a fact that Dediu attributes to the country’s investment in infrastructure.
After taking a few spins on our street, I felt safe enough. (“Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white man,” the writer Sarah Hagi memorably tweeted in 2016.) So I set off for a test commute into Manhattan, following my usual bike route.
In a 2018 study of Austin scooter injuries conducted by the Austin Public Health Department and the Centers for Disease Control, a third of the accidents occurred on the first ride, so I went cautiously, wearing a helmet, but I soon got the knack. Cruising down Carlton Avenue, I caught the giddy appeal of e-scootering. “It’s like supercharging yourself for a few minutes,” as Assaf Biderman put it to me. You stand there, and with virtually no effort at all—only the slightest pressure of your index finger on the trigger-shaped throttle button—you’re skimming along through the air. But the standing position also accounts for the P.B.E. (Paul Blart Effect): you look like a blissed-out dork. Elon Musk told the journalist Kara Swisher that scooters “lack dignity.”
On my outbound trip, I almost lost my balance on the rough blacktop around the perpetual construction on the protected Flushing Avenue bike lane. In downtown Manhattan, I steered around potholes and other gouges caused by the freezing and thawing of pavement and the plowing of snow. Cities in more temperate climates, such as Southern California, where scootering first took off, don’t have New York’s pothole problems; in 2020 alone, the D.O.T. filled 120,561 of them. The standard size of a wheel on an adult’s bicycle is twenty-six inches in diameter, and it will roll through all but the deepest ruts. Scooter wheels, by contrast, have a much smaller diameter—mine are ten inches—and can’t negotiate the hairier craters as easily.
Even cities with smoother infrastructure have reported an epidemic of certain types of injuries at the beginning of sharing programs. Wally Ghurabi, the medical director of the emergency center at UCLA Health Santa Monica Hospital, participated in a 2018 study, conducted by the university, of two hundred and forty-nine patients admitted to the E.R. after scooter accidents, of whom ten had worn helmets. A hundred of them had head injuries. “You take a seventy-kilogram person going, let’s say, fifteen miles an hour,” Ghurabi told me. “He topples, loses his scooter, and lands on his head. Imagine the force of seventy kilos times fifteen miles an hour, hitting the asphalt. Asphalt is not forgiving. I’ve spent hours upon hours taking asphalt out of people’s faces in the forty years I’ve been doing emergency medicine. And, because they’re unprotected heads, you have brain bleeds. People have to have surgery to evacuate the blood.”
Ghurabi compares the enthusiasm for electric scooters to the in-line skating craze of the early nineteen-nineties. “Roller skates put my kids through college, man!” he said.
I got home safely, and soon I was regularly scootering around Brooklyn and into Manhattan. If nothing else, it was a half hour of lightheartedness in the day, although my mellow was somewhat harshened by hostile vibes I detected from other users of the bike lanes. Human-powered cyclists—my erstwhile mode buddies—seemed especially peeved at me. Was it my lack of body language, which seemed to make it difficult for oncoming riders to anticipate my projected path? Was it mode rage? Purists, like my friend Rob, think that bike lanes should not be for motors of any kind, including e-bikes, and certainly not for e-scooters. But, if you forgo the dangers of the open road, and scooter on the sidewalk, you menace pedestrians; in addition, some city sidewalks, which are maintained by property owners, are in worse shape than the streets. (It’s also illegal.) In vain, I searched the eyes of passing scooterists for some inter-modal camaraderie, but I found only a shared sheepishness.
In December, as I was leaving a community-outreach event on scooter safety which Paul White and a colleague, Paul Mondesire, were staging at Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Restoration Plaza, I hit a hole. I had scootered over from Fort Greene—a harrowing two-mile trip along Fulton Street, which, like many city streets, has only two stripes of faded white paint for bike lanes, and for some stretches not even that. After watching community residents try e-scooters for the first time, with mixed levels of enthusiasm, I said goodbye to the two Pauls and scootered across the plaza. A chunk was missing between the plaza and the adjoining concrete—more pockmark than pothole—and the front edge of my scooter caught it, instantly ending my joyride and sending me hurtling toward the pavement face first.
Newton’s third law, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, is a tired maxim of everyday physics, but when your face is involved in the equation the third law becomes the only thing in the universe that matters. The prow of my bicycle helmet was probably going to save my head from a brain bleed, but it wasn’t going to protect my nose, teeth, and skin from skidding across the concrete.
Because I was travelling at eight miles an hour, about half the scooter’s top speed, I was able to get my hands out, just. Mondesire rushed over to help me, but I jumped up, with gravel embedded in the heels of my palms and a bloody knee, more shocked than hurt. Had I been going any faster, it would have been very ugly.
“Textbook fall!” White shouted.
Cartoon by Sam Gross
The pandemic has brought a temporary mode shift to urban transportation systems around the world. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has seized on the opportunity presented by the pandemic to accelerate her vision of la ville du quart d’heure—a city in which mobile citizens can avail themselves of multiple modes of transportation to get anywhere in fifteen minutes. An app like Google Maps, which already lists trip times for driving, mass transit, biking, and walking (and plans to add scootering soon), could calculate the best mode to use for certain segments of the trip, and when to switch.
Hidalgo has closed quayside Seine roads and the Rue du Rivoli, restricted car use on the Champs-Élysées, Paris’s busiest street, and introduced hundreds of kilometres of coronapistes—pop-up protected bike lanes that can be installed virtually overnight. More than half the people using them are new to cycling or scootering. Since the pandemic started, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has added almost two hundred miles of protected lanes, and London’s cycling population has grown two hundred per cent.
“This is it!” David Zipper, the urban-mobility expert, said to me, of the possibility for transportation reform in New York. “This is our window! And if you miss this opportunity it’s not going to come around again.”
In New York City, the Mayor recently announced a new road-level bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge; the Queensboro Bridge is getting a two-way bike lane on the north side and a pedestrian walkway on the south. But if the recent opening of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall, the $1.6-billion addition to Penn Station, is any indication, multimodalism may not come naturally to city planners: there is no bike parking at all, except for a Citi Bike rack out front. The new commissioner of the city’s D.O.T., Hank Gutman, has promised ten thousand more parking racks for bicycles across the city.
At a recent forum on transportation in which eight of the Democratic candidates vying for office in November’s mayoral election took part, much of the discussion focussed on how they would meet Vision Zero’s goal of zero road fatalities by 2024, the importance of dedicated bus lanes, and whether there should be more N.Y.P.D. officers on the subway. The question of expanding cycling infrastructure came up only briefly, and none of the candidates mentioned e-scooters. Andrew Yang, the former Presidential contender, committed to biking to work at City Hall if elected, although he allowed that he might need to take a car now and then, “to make phone calls.”
Even before the pandemic, transport planners knew that many people who take up biking are shifting from public transit, or walking, and not from cars. The micromobility gains in Paris and London are mostly at the expense of their Métro and Underground systems. Post-pandemic New York needs to act on two fronts. It has to better protect its bike lanes, so that more cyclists and scooterists feel safe enough to use them—in 2019, cars and trucks killed twenty-nine cyclists in the city, a twenty-year high. And it has to make sure that the older forms of mass transit recover so that New Yorkers who have absolutely no desire, or ability, to jump on the latest micromobility vehicle can rely on them as they used to.
As people go back to working in offices and shopping in stores, but potentially remain leery of trains, buses, and car pools, many will mode-shift to four wheels rather than two. Ridership on the subway is still at only thirty-five per cent of its pre-pandemic levels; bus ridership is about fifty per cent. Traffic, however, is already reaching pre-pandemic levels at the river crossings and on interborough expressways open to commercial traffic, even as it remains depressed in midtown. According to Sam Schwartz, a longtime New York transportation analyst, the city is facing a “scary” traffic scenario this fall, unless something is done to redirect the public’s atavistic retreat to private automobiles.
If seventy-five per cent of remote workers return to their Manhattan offices, he explained, but twenty per cent of them remain fearful of public transit and mode-shift to driving, the number of vehicles entering the central business district in Manhattan will increase by two hundred and nine thousand cars over the 2018 peak, when midtown traffic crept along at an average of five miles an hour. (Congestion pricing, the plan to toll drivers crossing the East River and entering Manhattan below Sixtieth Street, seems all but inevitable now.) Unless the M.T.A. receives additional funding, there will almost certainly be cuts to subway and bus service to make up for missing fares. Instead of the fifteen-minute city, we may be looking at a ninety-minute one.
Three weeks after the Navy Yard event, the D.O.T. announced that it had selected the northern part of the East Bronx—including Eastchester, Wakefield, Pelham Parkway, and Co-op City—for the first phase of the e-scooter pilot. The borough has the lowest median household income in the city, and eighty per cent of its residents are Black and Latino. Transportation options are sparse, and there are no Citi Bikes, partly because the city skipped many lower-income neighborhoods in its bike-share rollout. Will Carry, a D.O.T. official involved in the development of the pilot, told me, “D.O.T. wants the e-scooter pilot to be a success, but we also do not want to hurt Citi Bike—so we sited the pilot entirely outside Citi Bike’s service and planned expansion areas.” Geofencing will be used to corral scooters in busy areas, but not on quieter residential streets, he said. The plan is to expand into the South Bronx next year, and other boroughs after that.
What if shared scooters turn out to be just another Segway: a human transporter that people don’t need? “If people are not that into it, we would take that into consideration,” Carry allowed.
Superpedestrian’s Paul Mondesire grew up in the Gun Hill Houses and later in Co-op City, so the D.O.T.’s choice of his home turf, where Link had done a community-outreach event, seemed to bolster the company’s chances.
But it was not to be. The winners, which were announced last week by Commissioner Gutman, in a ceremony held in Pelham Parkway, were Bird, Lime, and the Chicago-based company Veo.
“We’re just puzzled,” Biderman told me, on a Zoom call with White. “We know we have the best vehicle—the best technology, the highest safety rating, and we’re the only operator with a one-hundred-per-cent compliance record.”
White said, “We didn’t invest in lobbyists.” He added, looking crestfallen, “Still, this stings.”
“We’ll be fine,” Biderman said. Only days before, he had reached an agreement with an automotive company to license Superpedestrian’s intellectual property for use in a new four-wheeled electric vehicle. “Our business is not only about the operations of a rental business,” Biderman went on. “We are an engineering company that makes a platform for microvehicles. And the world is going micro.” ♦
An earlier version of this story misidentified a participant in the D.O.T.’s demo and a location of its pilot program, and misspelled the names of Zoe Ryder White and Graham Gullans.
