As Spin’s future in Pittsburgh is debated, disabled residents say the e-scooters are an ableist nuisance

In July 2023, the City of Pittsburgh’s permit allowing Spin to rent its e-scooters to residents expires. That means the City has a decision to make about whether the orange and black machines should remain a transportation option in the future.

The case that Spin and the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI) made before Pittsburgh City Council in April was that the two-year pilot program was good for the city for a few reasons: It provides affordable transportation for young Pittsburgh residents; e-scooters produce fewer carbon emissions than cars; and the company had sufficient safety and accountability measures in place to protect pedestrians and its users. Since the program’s introduction, there have been almost 1 million trips on the 1,000 e-scooters present in the city.

However, not every Pittsburgher is sold on the benefits of the program. At best, those in dissent find the e-scooters to be a nuisance due to users haphazardly leaving them on lawns, driveways and sidewalks. At worst, disabled Pittsburghers say, the e-scooters presence has made their travels throughout the city less safe, and that the City failed to take their needs into account when putting the pilot program in place.

Sidewalks, accessibility and safety

During a public hearing, wheelchair user Alisa Grishman told council members that the e-scooter program was ableist and not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. After presenting council members with photos of e-scooters that had blocked her path due to being parked on sidewalks, she explained that when an e-scooter is left on a sidewalk, it can force wheelchair users like her to move into the street, where they risk being hit by cars. By not taking this into consideration, Grishman said, the city had prioritized the needs of able-bodied people over the rest of the population.

“Who actually thinks they can justify this level of discrimination?” said Grishman, who is also the founder of accessibility advocacy group Access Mob Pittsburgh. “I have to go in the street, which is super, super not safe. I’m already dealing with cars parked in front of bus stops. Now I’ve got these e-scooters parked in front of bus stops. That is a civil rights violation.”

She added that it was unreasonable to be expected to wait for Spin employees to retrieve improperly parked e-scooters, as sometimes the retrieval could take days.

“I’ve got better things to do with my time than report every single time,” Grishman said.

Jason Shaffner, Spin’s general manager of the Central Region, noted during his testimony that the safety quiz every rider has to take on the app before boarding an e-scooter and the company’s willingness to ban repeat offenders are evidence of how seriously the company takes safety. According to DOMI, the e-scooters are popular among the 18-to-24 crowd, and many students report that they use the Spin scooters to get to and from work and school. DOMI Director Kim Lucas told City Council that she was relieved that the use of e-scooters could prevent safety incidents and congestion on the road.

From one student’s perspective, the e-scooters presence provides a quick way to get out of unsafe situations. During an active shooter hoax at the University of Pittsburgh, student Brendan Gola said at the public hearing: “The availability of the scooter brought me to a safe location much faster than walking or public transportation would have enabled.”

Are they safe for everyone?

The policies Spin has in place haven’t fully curbed the improper use of e-scooters and the hazard they can create for people like Gabriel McMorland. Prior to becoming visually impaired, McMorland recalled she enjoyed biking and supported the city’s bike share program because, for the most part, bike riders rode responsibly and put them back in the corrals when they were finished, she said during the hearing. That’s not the case for the e-scooters, she said, and for older residents, lifting abandoned e-scooters isn’t a tenable option due to their weight — nor is it reasonable for someone like her, whose limited vision already makes her especially vulnerable to being hit by a car.

“There’s not a lot that says ‘easy target, come get me’ [more] than watching a blind trans girl stumble around abandoned scooters on a broken sidewalk in the rain,” McMorland said. “So I don’t know if I’m gonna get hit by a car or caught up in some kind of a hate crime.” Better urban design, she said, would keep her safe.

Going back to the program’s origins, Paul O’Hanlon, a member of the City-County Task Force on Disabilities, claimed the advisory group had been excluded from discussions about the program from the beginning. According to O’Hanlon, when the pilot program was originally proposed, the task force sent a letter to DOMI objecting to it, only to be ignored. The group’s reason was that the task force found the program to be convenient for some Pittsburghers, but ultimately not accessible.

“We said, from our perspective, a problem was identified, an inaccessible system was developed, solving the problems for the most able-bodied, but not for those for whom the gap is actually the most severe,” O’Hanlon said. “We’re left with no proposed solutions for people with individual circumstances for whom these scooters are not a safe, acceptable, accessible, and appropriate transit rotation solution.”

Cues from California and Paris

Now-Pittsburgher Amy Zaiss previously lived in Oakland, California where multiple e-scooter companies operate, and cautioned that the city could be dealing with the same situations she saw in the West Coast city, where users regularly left them on sidewalks and in driveways. Additionally, she pointed out that since Spin is not yet a profitable company, there is a risk that it could go under and leave users who’d come to rely upon them in the lurch.

Speaking of other cities, members of Pittsburghers for Public Transit have pointed out that Paris voters found the presence of e-scooters so troublesome, 89% voted to ban them from the city via referendum in April 2023. As The New York Times put it, that vote reflected “exhaustion with a public-transit alternative that was once seen as convenient and climate-friendly but is now largely regarded as dangerous and environmentally questionable.”

In the case of Pittsburgh, Laura Chu Wiens, executive director of Pittsburghers for Public Transit, said during the hearing that mobility is a right, not a privilege, and that for all the previous testimony about how the e-scooters increased transportation options, in her view, the program has more costs than benefits.

“Spin scooters generate emissions from charging and because diesel vans are outpacing and rebalancing them,” Wiens said. “An increase in scooter trips doesn’t mean that scooters have replaced car trips, it’s likely that they have incentivized new non-essential trips, which would lead to increased congestion, more sidewalk hazards and more emissions.”

Next steps

Ultimately, dissenters said, the e-scooter program is an inadequate way of addressing the existing transportation issues that persist in the city.

Neither Pittsburgh City Council nor the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure responded to Technical.ly’s inquiries on when a decision would be made about whether the City would continue the pilot program.