If you planned on commuting via e-scooter today or tomorrow, you're out of luck.
The Town of Brookline Department of Public Works Transportation Division has ordered all e-scooters currently operating within the town's borders not to deploy as a result of wintry weather. That comes just days in advance of the end of the e-scooters' trial in Brookline, one of the only places in Massachusetts where the vehicles are currently running.
Boston and other cities have taken steps toward allowing e-scooters, but they remain technically illegal at the state level. That means a lot is riding on Brookline's pilot program. It has the potential to shape e-scooters' future across Massachusetts—and its last day is Friday.
Less than an inch of snow is expected in Greater Boston on Tuesday. The National Weather Service does not predict any snow on Wednesday, but the high will be just 31 degrees, putting Beantown at high risk for black ice.
Bird, Spin and Lime all operate in Brookline. All three e-scooter companies plan to comply with the no-deployment order. It's not their first rodeo—most of them have been active in cities with wintry conditions for some time now. A Lime spokesman said in an email that the company typically pulls its scooter fleet from the streets when heavy snow is forecast, regardless of whether a government body orders it.
"When it comes to snow storms and ice, the benefit of having a flexible fleet is that we can pull and re-deploy scooters as needed," the spokesman said.
Bird has a similar policy, along with a group of people specifically tasked with monitoring weather conditions in various markets where the scooters exist.
"We have a team dedicated to closely monitoring all conditions, and they adjust our operations accordingly," a Bird spokesperson wrote in an email. "This includes pausing our service when weather does not permit safe riding, and can sometimes lead to removing Birds from the road during periods of inclement weather caused by snow storms or hurricanes."
Because of the pilot program's schedule—it launched in April, when Boston begins to see the first signs of spring—Greater Boston has yet to see how e-scooters will interact (or not) with a New England winter. In other cities, including Denver, Ann Arbor, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis and Washington, D.C., e-scooter programs continued throughout the winter, although companies expected a significant slowdown, as CityLab reported last year.
Spin is prepared for the slowdown. "We expect ridership to become less frequent during the winter months and will slowly ramp down operations to account for this," a spokesperson said in an email.
Snow and ice are not the only challenges facing e-scooters. Lithium batteries don't do well in extreme cold, and fewer "chargers"—the people who collect scooters and charge them in their homes on a freelance basis—work in the winter. E-scooter tires have yet to be winterized.
As the future of e-scooters in Massachusetts remains foggy, Brookline will take things one day at a time this week.
A full report from the pilot program is expected to be released in January.
"We are monitoring the weather this week and consulting with the company managers to plan deployment around weather events as we have throughout the pilot," Brookline Transportation Administrator Todd Kirrane said in an email.
