City of Wichita conducts pilot program for new scooters

With Zagster’s departure from Wichita earlier this year, Wichita lost its orange Spin scooters along with its bike ride share program.

VeoRide scooters remain, and now there’s a second option for scooter fans through a new pilot program with Santa Monica-based Bird scooters.

“There was a new opportunity in the market,” spokeswoman Jasmine Wallsmith said.

She said the company had looked at coming to Wichita in 2018 but decided against it at the time.

“We’ve kind of shifted our model a little bit,” Wallsmith said. “We used to focus a bit more on some of the larger markets.”

Bird is doing a pilot project with the city of Wichita from Oct. 1 to April 1 with up to 500 scooters.

“They’re going through a deployment process now,” said Mike Tann, transit director for Wichita.

So far, about 200 to 300 have been distributed. Users can download the Bird app to find out where the scooters are and how many are live at a given time.

“One week in, and it’s going great,” Wallsmith said.

At this time last year, Tann said Wichita saw about 16,000 to 17,000 scooter trips a month.

“When COVID hit, everything just went out the window,” Tann said.

He said Wichita’s scooter usage is different than a lot of other cities. Here, he said about 90% of rides are recreational. In other cities, users take scooters to get to other forms of transportation, such as buses and subways. In Wichita, a lot of trips begin and end at same site.

Because there aren’t as many people downtown due to the pandemic, Tann said, “Usage is way down, which is what you’d expect.”

He said it’s off by about 50%.

Tann said there’s no limit to how many scooter contracts the city could have.

“I think the free market manages it more than people think.”

Wallsmith said the cost of a scooter ride depends on the amount of time a user has it. Generally, it’s $1 to unlock the scooter, and the total average ride usually is $2 or $3.

In some markets, Bird has had some issues and even been asked to leave. Tann said the company is one of the two largest providers of micromobility, and with that there are bound to be some issues, particularly with subcontractors who may be handling maintenance or charging.

“A lot of it is based upon how well the community is monitoring that,” he said. “We monitor the system very closely.”

Tann said that’s part of the point of a pilot project.

“We can terminate that contract at any time based upon noncompliance,” he said. “It’s a test for us and them.”

VeoRide’s pilot program with Wichita was supposed to end in September, but it’s been extended through April due to the pandemic.

In addition to having mostly recreational riders, Tann said Wichita is different in that its scooters don’t operate after dark.

“We don’t experience some of the problems that other cities do.”

Tann said there were “zero problems with Spin and VeoRide.”

He said he’s also confident that if issues do arise, the city will know about them immediately, which may be another way Wichita is different.

“If there’s something wrong, somebody’s going to call us.”

This story was originally published October 8, 2020 at 11:25 AM.