Will Bloomington squeeze Lime out of shared scooter market, leaving Bird to rule the roost?

When VeoRide withdrew from Bloomington’s shared motorized scooter market at the end of 2023, that left just Lime and Bird as the two companies doing business under Bloomington’s local law that regulates shared scooter operators.

Based on the materials in the information packet for Tuesday’s meeting (Sept. 24) of Bloomington’s board of public works, Bloomington could soon see just one shared motorized scooter company operating in the city.

As of Friday, approvals of new licenses for Bird and Lime don’t appear on the board’s agenda. But included in the information packet are draft findings that conclude Lime should be denied a new license.

That would leave Bird as the sole provider of shared electric scooter rides in the city.

In the information packet, there is no corresponding set of positive findings for Bird. But a Sept. 12, 2024 staff memo, written by  transportation demand manager Jeff Jackson, indicates a recommendation for approving Bird’s new license.

The scooter-related item that does appear on Tuesday’s board of public works meeting agenda is a resolution that adopts new “directives” for shared scooter operating companies.

[Updated Sept. 24, 2024 at 9 p.m. At its Tuesday meeting, in addition to approving the resolution, the board of public works also voted as part of a single motion, to approve the license for Bird and to deny the license for Lime.]

Tripling of licensing fees

Among the directives in Resolution 2024-065 is a tripling of per-ride fees paid by companies to the city, from 10 cents to 30 cents a ride. That helps account for a statement made by economic and sustainable development director Jane Kupersmith on Aug. 27, 2024 at the city council hearing about her department’s budget. Kupersmith said at the hearing she had budgeted for an increase in scooter licensing fees.

Despite a tripling of the fees,  the revenue for the 12-month period ending August 2024 at the 30-cent-per-ride rate, would equate to about the same amount of revenue that was generated from the rides taken in the 12-month period ending March 2020, at the lower 10-cent-per ride rate.

Scooter ridership in Bloomington showed a steep drop during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and never recovered to the pre-pandemic levels. In 2023 the decline from 2022 numbers was sharp. In 2023, the total number of rides for all three vendors dropped by 40 percent compared to 2022 totals, from 317,736 to 188,653 rides. At the 10-cent rate, that translates into a revenue drop from $31,774 to $18,865.

The downward trend has continued this year. Without VeoRide in the mix, the year-to-date numbers through August 2024 show 65,756 total rides, which is about 40 percent fewer rides than the 108,014 rides taken from January to August 2023.

Bloomington is also looking to triple the per-company annual licensing fee, from $10,000 to $30,000. But if only Bird remains, that amounts to the same $30,000 in annual revenue that Bloomington received from three companies, each paying $10,000 a year.

One reason that is given in the draft findings, for denying a new license to Lime, is the company’s refusal to pay the new per-trip and per-year licensing fees.

The revenue from scooter licensing fees has in part been used by the city in the past to cover costs that are related to scooter company operations, like construction of scooter corrals—which are required to be geofenced by scooter companies as designated parking areas for scooter users.

Scooter parking infractions

Another cost covered by scooter licensing revenues is enforcement of scooter parking regulations. In the 2025 budget proposal, parking services includes a scooter enforcement officer in the org chart.  as did the org chart for 2024.

For four years, the city of Bloomington resisted issuing parking citations to scooter companies, even after then-city attorney Mike Rouker assured the city council in 2019 that if the enabling ordinance were passed, parking tickets would be issued to scooter companies, who could choose to pass along the cost to their users.

The resistance likely stemmed from the fact that the city’s legal department realized that it could not make good on Rouker’s assurance, because the ordinance doesn’t provide for that option.

In April this year, now corporation council for the city Margie Rice responded to an emailed B Square question, by writing: “I have reviewed the code, and I would not feel comfortable using Bloomington Municipal Code 15.58 to support the City issuing a citation to a scooter company for parking infractions committed by users.”

Rice continued, “To date, the City has not issued any fines to the operators for user violations. It is my opinion that the code does not give the City the authority to cite scooter companies for parking infractions committed by their users.”

But in response to a question from The B Square, public works director Adam Wason sent a list of 240 parking citations given to scooter companies in the final quarter of 2023.

The approach the city appears to have taken to scooter parking is to secure a contractual agreement with the scooter companies that they can be fined under local code—even if the code itself doesn’t provide for that—by writing it into the licensing agreement:

10 M. Once the City and Operators take measures to promote appropriate parking, Operators with vehicles outside the designated parking area may be fined in the amounts set forth in BMC 15.64.010(d).

Sit-down versus stand-up vehicles

The contractual approach appears to be the same way that the city has handled the question of sit-down scooters and electric bicycles, which are explicitly excluded from the definition of “shared-use motorized scooters” which are the vehicles subject to the licensing requirements under the city council’s 2019 law.

Instead of asking the city council to amend the enabling ordinance to cover sit-down vehicles, the administration has incorporated sit-down scooters and electric bicycles into the licensing agreements.

In last year’s (2023–2024) agreements, scooter companies were given an incentive of a discount in the per-ride fee—from 15 cents to 10 cents—if more than half their fleet was made up of sit-down vehicles. But in any case, at least 25 percent of an operator’s fleet had to consist of e-bikes or sit-down scooters.

For the 2025 licensing year, the city is requiring that at least 35 percent of the operator’s fleet consist of e-bikes, with no provision for sit-down scooters.

Bloomington’s preference for sit-down vehicles is based on the idea they are safer because they have a lower center of gravity and they are more stable than stand-up scooters. Bloomington distinguishes between stand-up and sit-down vehicles for the scooter curfews that it has enacted.

Lime has disputed the merit of the reports on which the city relied to distinguish between sit-down and stand-up vehicles. In spring 2023, a Lime representative wrote to then-director of economic and sustainable development Alex Crowley that one of the reports  “has been prepared for marketing pitch purposes by an overtly biased competing party who is incentivized to make a differentiation between our vehicle models for their financial gain.”

The message from Lime continues: “Report #1 includes screen-shots of Google searches, homemade graphs, and lacks causation or corroboration for the idea it intends to prove.”

Scooter application process

It’s not clear why Lime and Bird have been allowed to operate after July 1 this year.

The licenses for Lime and Bird expired on July 31 this year, which meant that under the local law, which was enacted by  Bloomington’s city council in 2019,  the companies had to submit applications for a new license by July 1.

The wording of the law goes like this: “Licenses shall expire one year after issuance. In order to continue operating, a shared-use motorized scooter operator shall apply for a new license at least thirty days prior to the expiration of its existing license.”

Based on the dates of submission, mentioned in Jackson’s Sept. 12, 2024 memo, neither company submitted an application by that deadline. The memo gives submission dates that are around six weeks late: “Lime submitted their application on August 12, 2024. Bird submitted their application on August 16, 2024.”

Still, both companies were allowed to continue to operate.

Now, the stage looks like it is being set for the board or public works to approve a new license for Bird, but to deny Lime’s license application, provided the resolution issuing new directives is approved on Tuesday.