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Since 2018, pedestrians in many U.S. cities have been sharing sidewalk space with dockless shared e-scooters. The introduction of e-scooters has received pushback from pedestrians. Complaints reported in the media include e-scooters blocking walkways and sidewalks when parked illegally as well as safety concerns from pedestrians who do not feel safe around moving e-scooters. However, little is known beyond a few initial studies on e-scooter parking and anecdotes about pedestrian perceptions of e-scooter safety. Our case study from Rosslyn, Virginia, helps shed light on these two issues. First, we conducted a survey of 181 e-scooter riders and non-riders asking about their perceived safety around riders of e-scooters and experiences of sidewalks blocked by e-scooters. We found highly divergent responses about safety and sidewalk blocking perceptions from riders and non-riders. Second, we conducted an observational study of 606 parked e-scooters along three mixed-use corridors in Rosslyn to investigate the relationship between the built environment and e-scooter parking. We found that 16% of 606 observed e-scooters were not parked properly and 6% (36 e-scooters) were blocking pedestrian right-of-way. Moreover, our survey showed that e-scooter trips in Rosslyn replaced trips otherwise taken by Uber, Lyft, or a taxi (39%), foot (33%), bicycle (12%), bus (7%), or car (7%).

This paper compares bicycling in Washington, DC and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, two car-oriented cities that had adapted their urban transport system to car travel during the 20th century. Our comparative case study shows that both cities have been successful in increasing the percentage of trips made by bicycle between the late 1990s and 2018: Washington, DC from 1% to 5% and Frankfurt from 6% to 20% of trips. Both cities had detailed bike plans and specific mode share goals for bicycling. However, those plans were only used as guideposts for a step-by-step approach to bicycle promotion that focused on integrating bicycling into everyday decision making in transport, traffic engineering, and urban development. This step-by-step approach successfully garnered political, public, and administrative support over time. The downside of this incrementalist approach is that bike route networks in both cities still have many gaps because bikeway infrastructure was built when individual opportunities arose and not as part of an integrated network. Bicycle promotion in both cities used a combination of bikeway infrastructure and soft policy, including marketing measures. In both cities, the quality of newly installed bikeway infrastructure increased over time from simple bike lanes to protected bike lanes separating cyclists from traffic. In contrast to Washington, DC, Frankfurt has a longer history of car-restrictive policies and overall has been more strict in limiting car use.