GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Electric scooters in a tree, in the Grand River, at the top of a slide, outside a strip club and, generally, just everywhere but their parking spots.
Since October, local comedian Carl Sobel has been documenting misplaced and misparked scooters across Grand Rapids on his aptly-named gr_scootsontheloose Instagram page, juxtaposing pictures of at-large scooters in sometimes odd places and settings with inspirational quotes.
“I’m a stand-up comedian, so I’m always trying to find the funny in everything. I just started to see these things in weird spots, like in tall grass, and thought, ‘Someone should keep track of that,’” Sobel said. “I just think it’s funny, but people think I’m a scooter activist now. It’s just this dumb thing I’m pointing out because I think it’s funny. Just bring lightheartedness to the annoyance that they cause.”
While the page has gotten good reception, garnering more than 1,300 followers and generating a steady flow of resident submitted pictures, it also highlights an ongoing problem the city is trying to solve: How do we get people to properly park the scooters?
The stand-up electric scooters first hit a large swathe of the city by the hundreds in late September as part of an ongoing Grand Rapids pilot to examine how these ride options, dubbed “micromobility services,” can contribute to the city’s transportation system.
The pilot area covers downtown as well as about a dozen surrounding neighborhoods that account for roughly half of the city’s population.
Unlike numerous other cities with electric scooters and looser parking rules, Grand Rapids officials created about 175 designated parking spots for the scooters so they’re easy to find and out of the way.
City officials say the majority of users park them properly instead of dropping them wherever. But still, they concede improper parking is one of the largest issues so far with the pilot.
“It does remind us that these scooters are out there, and I think we as a community can probably do a little bit better job of parking them,” Justin Kimura, assistant director of Mobile GR, said of the Instagram page. “I think these are the exceptions. The majority of them are being parked in the zones.”
As of April 15, there have only been 210 “vehicle relocation requests,” or people notifying the electric scooter vendor, Spin, that a scooter is misparked, since the pilot began.
Spin recently set up a local number that people can call or text if they see a scooter out of place. The number is now labelled on each of the scooters.
Anecdotally, Kimura says the number of misparked scooters is likely higher. Sobel, who wakes up every morning to new user-submitted photos of misparked scooters for his page, agrees.
Sobel said he has about 70 new misparked scooter pictures submitted by residents on deck at all time to post. Because of the way Instragram works, he can’t delete the photos until they post.
“My phone, my space is just all scooter pictures,” he laughed. “I’m trying to go on vacation with my girlfriend and I’m like, ‘I can’t take any pictures because I have all these scooters. I can’t let the people down.’”
Sobel discourages people from staging photos or damaging the scooters. With exception to a scooter that was fished out of the river, he doesn’t post deliberately staged photos or those showing damaged scooters.
The city doesn’t spend any money or labor time rounding the scooters up.
That work falls on Spin, which has crews go out and wrangle misparked scooters and scooters needing a charge. The Spin crews also redistribute the scooters throughout the parking zones if they are too many in one area.
Kimura said staff are examining a few ways the city and Spin can make proper parking easier and incentivize good parking habits.
The city is currently looking for new places to establish more parking zones, including in residential areas. Some ideas include taking up some street parking or turning a grassy patch in the right-of-way into a concrete parking zone.
As for incentivizing, some potential measures implemented in other cities and being discussed include requiring a picture of the parking job to end a ride to having a user rate the previous person’s parking job, with good reviews potentially giving ride credits.
“Right now, because it’s a pilot, we really want to focus on education and really getting people to learn how the system should operate and how everyone can contribute to making our city neat and tidy,” Kimura said.
There are ways to fine improper parking, but those are “a last resort,” Kimura said, as the city doesn’t want to preclude people from the service and unnecessarily fine people.
The discussions come as another micromobility vendor, Lime, is slated to join the pilot with its own stand-up electric scooters and electrically-assisted bikes tentatively in May or June.
The city leaves it up to the vendors to decide how many scooters and e-bikes they deploy.
An average of 500 scooters were deployed by Spin between March 15 and April 15, with about 17,000 total trips during that period, Kimura said.
“As long as there’s scooters I’ll do it, because I just like making people laugh,” Sobel said of continuing his page.
Sobel, whose calling is stand-up comedy, built a small venue in his garage to keep live comedy going through the pandemic.
The tickets are free but generally limited to about 25 people. People interested in upcoming shows can go to https://www.facebook.com/ComedyOnIda for more information.
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The Link LonkMay 11, 2021 at 03:09AM
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Instagram page highlights the funny side of misparked scooters in Grand Rapids - MLive.com
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Funny
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