City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams is urging City Hall to put an “operational pause” on the ongoing electric scooter share pilot program in Queens, citing an epidemic of discourteous parking practices.
In a letter to Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez, Adams—who leads the city’s legislative body while also representing neighborhoods like Jamaica and Springfield Gardens—said she has “profound concerns” with the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) e-scooter pilot, which launched in eastern Queens this summer following a yearslong program in the eastern Bronx.
Specifically, the speaker contends that scooter parking has been haphazard throughout the pilot area, with riders leaving their scooters on sidewalks or roadways and blocking pedestrian traffic flow.
“The lack of orderly operation and enforcement when e-scooters are left on public streets and sidewalks with reckless abandon must be urgently addressed,” Speaker Adams wrote in her Oct. 7 letter to Rodriguez, which was shared with amNewYork Metro. “I am requesting a reset of the department’s E-Scooter Share program in Southeast Queens to ensure the necessary protocols and protections are enacted to prioritize the safety of all residents while supporting local transportation needs.”
The speaker suggests that the “operational pause” should be used to “properly address these many outstanding issues.”
The pilot launched on June 27 in an approximately 20-square-mile area of eastern Queens between Flushing in the north and JFK Airport in the south, following what DOT deemed a successful pilot in the eastern Bronx. Both the eastern Bronx and eastern Queens are areas unserved by Citi Bike and relatively lightly served by mass transit, making them prime spots to test out new forms of micro-mobility.
The same three major scooter companies participating in the Bronx pilot — Lime, Bird, and Veo — also joined the Queens pilot. DOT says that since launch day, 37,000 riders have taken nearly half a million trips in Queens, while 5.7 million trips have been logged in total since the pilot began in the Bronx in 2021. Most rides begin and end in the same neighborhood, the agency says.
Unlike Citi Bikes, the scooters can be parked anywhere when a rider is done with them, except on busy corridors where they must be parked in designated “corrals.” Per program rules, scooters are allowed to be parked in the “street furniture” section of the sidewalk, where decorative aspects like street trees or bus stops are sited, but cannot obstruct the right-of-way for pedestrians on the sidewalk.
But since launch day, some Queens residents and pols have complained about riders disregarding those rules and parking scooters haphazardly, sometimes blocking sidewalks or entrances to people’s homes. Adams said that scooters “are too often chaotically left scattered on public and private spaces throughout Southeast Queens.” “For months, my constituents have witnessed and shared many accounts of e-scooters being left on sidewalks and streets, as well as in front of homes, driveways, businesses, places of worship, and beyond,” Adams wrote in her letter. “These conditions present potential hazards, especially to older adults and people with disabilities in neighborhoods.”Update
Speaker Adrienne Adams is going to have a town hall about the DOT's e-scooter share pilot tomorrow at 1 pm with State Senator Leroy Comrie. I'm sure the corporations and the DOT that approved to put their product on the street against the objections of the communities affected will be there to defend their failure and beg for more chances to continue this PILOT. While waiting for that, here's the sequel to my documentary of this disaster scooter cesspool polluting the streets of South and North Queens.
Correction: Looks like I didn't notice the date on that town hall that took place Mid-August, but I'm not going to take it down because those clips from the second video were made around that time and it really emphasizes the City Council's speaker's negligence and obtuseness by making a photo op grand gesture for a pause of the DOT's e-scooter cesspool PILOT.
