Dockless electric scooters have been around Austin since 2018, but the city is flying blind when it comes to crash data. The rentable rides zip through town at speeds up to 15 miles per hour, but crucial details about crashes — how many, how severe and where they happened — are missing from city records.
A new audit reveals that the city’s efforts to regulate e-scooters are held back by this data gap.
Austin "is unable to identify safety trends or compare safety among e-scooter providers or even with other mobility modes," Patrick Johnson, one of four people on the audit team, told a panel of city council members.
Two e-scooter companies reported zero crashes in 2022 and 2023, despite logging nearly 3 million trips. Meanwhile, another company reported 342 crashes in the same period. On average, one person dies in an e-scooter collision each year in Austin.
Part of the problem is a lack of any common definition about what counts as a crash. Police reports often put dockless electric scooters in the same category as gas-powered Vespa-type vehicles. Hospitals, doctors' offices and the city's health department aren't on the same page either. And riders often don't report when they get into a crash.
This isn't just an issue in Austin. A 2022 report from the National Transportation Safety Board found similar problems nationwide and recommended police keep a separate count of e-scooter crashes.
Other cities are grappling with the same issues. City auditors looked at regulations in Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, Nashville, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Some cities ban the devices overnight, while others, like San Fransisco, require riders have a driver's license.
Among the cities surveyed, Austin had the second highest number of rentable e-scooters with 6,700 permitted devices. Seattle has 9,750.
E-scooters popped up on Austin streets in April 2018 when companies like Bird and Lime flooded the market. The zippy rides became an instant hit with new users while horrifying city officials confronted with tangled clusters of scooters blocking sidewalks and getting dumped in rivers. The city responded by impounding the tiny vehicles until emergency regulations were in place.
Since then, the city has charged companies licensing fees, set limits on how many scooters each company can deploy and established rules about where and how they can be used. But the vehicles remain wildly popular with data showing more than 2.6 million scooter trips in 2023 alone, far surpassing the 58,600 e-bike trips recorded the same year.
E-scooters solve many transportation problems, offering a quick, breezy alternative to trudging blocks through the Central Texas heat or hunting for parking downtown. Transit users can ride to a bus stop that's just a bit too far to walk. Tourists use scooters to visit the shops and restaurants where they spend money.
"It's very convenient, I love using these," said Keenan Gurley after his first-ever ride on an electric scooter. Gurley was visiting Austin from Akron, Ohio, for a gaming and anime convention during a hot week in July. "I like the fact that we can ride in the street and they have like bike paths and stuff for us, beat all the traffic."
In response to ongoing concerns, the City of Austin updated rules last spring, slashing the total scooters permitted from 8,200 to 6,700 and capping the number of companies allowed to operate to two. Lime and Bird are currently the only providers in Austin.
But those changes didn't go through any public process, auditors reported. Scooter companies told auditors the city didn't reach out to address their concerns, straining relations with the firms as the city seeks greater cooperation and compliance.
In a statement, Lime said it fully supports the city's efforts on improving safety.
"As the provider of choice for Austin residents, we take pride in our role as a committed and proactive partner to the city," Chris Betterton, senior operations manager at Lime, said in an email. "We are proud of our transparent reporting practices and welcome collaborating with the city to enhance reporting standards, ensuring consistency across all vendors."
Bird did not respond to a request for comment except for an automated email to acknowledge receipt of the message.
Austin's Transportation and Public Works (TPW) Department — which regulates scooter permits, speed limits and parking — says it agrees with the audit's recommendations like collecting more reliable crash data. Changes will be put in place by March 2025, TPW said.
"Public safety is paramount in my responsible role," TPW director Richard Mendoza told the city council's audit and finance committee.
Mendoza said he became frustrated with the "unsightly" proliferation of scooters blocking sidewalks and getting dumped into waterways, causing environmental concerns. He acknowledged he fast-tracked the new rules this year, but felt he had no choice.
"While it may seem that some of the changes I instituted, and the stakeholder involvement process was condensed, I felt a responsibility to take action and institute some of those tighter management protocols," Mendoza said, while revealing that he relaxed some of the proposed rules at the request of scooter operators.
After meeting with the heads of trauma departments from Austin's major hospitals, Mendoza said he had been pushing for a ban on scooters during the overnight hours when the most severe scooter crashes tend to occur. But he dialed back the proposal following a face-to-face meeting with representatives from the scooter companies.
"I was reminded by our vendors that much of our service staff [in the hospitality industry] use these devices to get to and from work," he said, agreeing instead to lower the speed limit of e-scooters from 15 mph to 10 mph downtown during late-night hours.
Mendoza said he had wanted to reduce the number of permitted e-scooters in half from 8,200 to 4,100. But he agreed to lower the cap by a third to 6,700. And he made allowances to increase the number of micromobility devices for large special events like South by Southwest and the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
"It seems like scooters have been in Austin for a while," Mendoza said. "But they're still an infant sector of mobility."
