Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Ashken Kazarian. On today's show, we're going to talk about scooters. Have you seen one of those on your streets? I definitely have. I'm scared of them. I think they're going to knock me off or they're going to crash into someone. And I'm just always scared. But a lot of my friends have said that that's a very convenient and new way of

transportation for them. So I brought in the expert of experts on scooters, Jennifer Huddleston

Skies, research fellow at the Mercado Center at George Mason University, who has written about this

more than you can even imagine.

So, Jen, thank you for joining the show.

Thank you for having me here today, Ash.

Well, it's a pleasure.

Jennifer, so let's start by the basics.

How did scooters even start getting deployed?

What was the initial reaction? Is this comparable to when

other type of transportation technology was getting just started in cities? So it's really cool how

they were deployed because they just popped up overnight. When Bird and Lime and some of the other

scooter companies started

out on the West Coast in Santa Monica, a little over a year now, all of a sudden people just

woke up one morning, basically, to these scooters being available. So what you said earlier about,

are they like the other tech companies? They have a lot in common with kind of Uber and Lyft when they started. So

coming into places that needed transportation options, starting, building that consumer

interest, and then going from there and really taking off. In the first several days that they

were in Santa Monica, we saw over 100,000 miles on scooters. In D.C., where we are now,

they've been here for probably about six months. And again, we've seen over 50,000 people riding

them and over 100,000 of miles ridden on them. I think it's really a case where entrepreneurs saw something that consumers

could potentially respond to and found a way to fill it. They saw that a lot of people were

...