Scoot Lives in San Francisco and We Listen to and Help Our Neighbors

We have served San Francisco since we were founded here almost 8 years ago with a mission of Electric Vehicles for Everyone. Since then, San Franciscans have taken over 2 million scoot rides to every part of the city we call home. Our employees live here, work here, and scoot here, so we know what San Francisco loves about Scoot and what it doesn’t. But, we don’t know everything and don’t pretend to. So, we listen to our friends and family and neighbors who live here too. We love it when they tell us how great Scoot is, and we take it seriously when they tell us something is wrong or should be improved.

We serve many low-income areas in San Francisco, including the Bayview, the Excelsior, the Western Addition, and the entirety of the Mission, all of which are outside of the busy downtown. Each of these neighborhoods are distinct. We have taken the time to build meaningful relationships and support in all of these neighborhoods not only because San Francisco is our home but because it is what Scoot does.

When we expanded the parking area for our Kick scooter service a few months ago, we began to hear concerns from the community and neighborhood organizations we have maintained relationships with for years. Specifically, organizations and community leaders in Chinatown and the Tenderloin wondered what would happen if our scooters started parking on their sidewalks.

Each neighborhood in San Francisco is unique. Both of these neighborhoods have narrow, crowded sidewalks. While we believe there is a way to have our Kicks park on many of those sidewalks without impeding pedestrians, we wanted to be respectful of neighbors who aren’t so sure. So we listened and responded to the community and have designated some sidewalks in both neighborhoods as no-parking zones until, together with community members, we come up with a solution that takes into account their specific needs and concerns.

We are proud to participate in the city’s shared scooter pilot program and have made serving low-income communities a central focus of that pilot with the SFMTA. We were given a limited number of permits with which to show the SFMTA that this new type of mobility could be done well and equitably for all of San Francisco. We chose to use those permits not to make as much money as we could in the wealthy parts of the city, but to spread our scooters to different neighborhoods of the city, especially lower-income areas, so we could learn how to serve those neighborhoods before being issued more permits. We believe that’s part of the reason SFMTA selected Scoot over so many other companies to provide this service.

And I will be the first to admit that we didn’t get everything right at first. In the first few months of the pilot permit, we signed up less than 70 people to our deeply discounted Community Plan while signing up thousands of people to use our service at our regular rates.

What that taught us is that serving these neighborhoods wasn’t just about making our service affordable. It was also about meeting with and listening to the people who live there, learning about what we could help with, what they were concerned about, and how we could better serve their communities.

So that’s what we did. Since then, we’ve had over 100 meetings with community organizations, advocacy groups, elected officials, merchants associations, labor unions, and community benefit districts. And today, just a few months later, having listened to what these communities want (and, sometimes, don’t want) we have over 600 people on our Community Plan and climbing fast.

We want Scoot to be used by everyone in the city. And while we may not yet know what makes Scoot useful for everyone, we are learning. We enjoy talking to people, listening to people, and acting on what we hear.

That is what we have done in the Tenderloin and Chinatown. We will continue to do that in those neighborhoods and all the other neighborhoods of this city we call home, as we grow to serve the entire city in a way that meets the unique and specific needs of all.