Tom Bailey

Memphis Commercial Appeal

Memphis streets will buzz with about 200 more motor scooters next year — and maybe thousands in years to come — if a new jobs campaign works.

Philanthropist Jay Martin has committed $3 million for the first three years to help remove one of the barriers preventing Memphians of limited means from landing and keeping a job: A lack of affordable and reliable transportation.

"I go to Europe a lot,'' the founder and head of Juice Plus+ said. "I saw so many scooters I said, 'Dadgummit we've got to try this'.''

So Martin recruited Andy Nix away from PeopleCap consulting firm, where Nix was a principal, to lead a new nonprofit organization called My City Rides.

The organization received its first shipment of 25 scooters Sept. 29, with plans to buy another 175 or so the first year.

"It's going to be providing affordable transportation to people who are trying to get to and from work,'' Martin said at his Juice Plus+ headquarters in Collierville.

The problem

About 15 years ago, Martin's $5 million grant started a jobs training center at the Girls and Boys Clubs of Greater Memphis at 903 Walker in South Memphis. The center has been effective in preparing young people for jobs that provide sustainable incomes, but one problem has persisted.

"Our ability to place people was very good,'' Martin said. "But we found people were having a hard time getting to and from the place we placed them. And so we started looking for ways to see if we could solve that problem and realized it was part of a much wider problem across the city.

"So we decided to try to do something about it.''

While informed by challenges facing training center graduates, My City Rides will go far beyond the Boys & Girls Clubs to serve workers and employers across the city.

A "spatial mismatch'' exists between where so many students and other Memphians live and the jobs that provide living wages, said Tiffanie Grier, career development director at the Boys & Girls Clubs' technical training center.

"And it is imperative that students get to and from work to get out of poverty. So I would say it's the No. 1 issue and barrier preventing them from keeping living-wage employment,'' Grier said.

How it works

Construction crews are renovating 2,000 square feet in Crosstown's Overton Park Commons strip center on Cleveland for My City Rides. Sometime between January and March, the organization plans to open its office and small showroom for a specific 169cc scooter model made by the SYM scooter brand of Sanyang Motor Co.

The site must be a "dealership'' since My City Rides sells scooters. But My City Rides will offer the bikes in a way that holds true to its nonprofit status.

The SYM Fiddle III model costs $2,899. My City Rides will provide that bike for $3 a day over three years as a lease-to-own deal.

The $3 daily for three years amounts to $3,285. While that is $386, or 13 percent, more than list price, the price also covers taxes, fees, any maintenance and repairs, liability insurance, driver training, costs to get a license, and even the helmet.

And here's another twist: Customers can only pay for the scooters with payroll deductions through their employers.

"Rather than just scattershot, we're going to try to do it by partnering with employers,'' Martin said. "Where they have skin in the game, too.''

Employers benefit by having a more reliable workforce.

So when a customer walks into the My City Rides showroom and wants to buy a scooter, "We say, 'Who do you work for?' '' Martin said.

"That's a lead for us to talk to an employer. The employer has the same problem the employee has: He's not showing up for work.''

Nix said that based on the fledgling organization's research, "we believe demand will far exceed supply. There's a great pent-up demand. We want to manage the roll-out.''

The scooter

Soon after starting work on April 1 organizing My City Rides, Nix started researching which scooter to offer. Having never been a "motorcycle guy'' before, Nix has logged about 10,000 miles on scooters over the last six months.

"I jumped on a bike and started riding it and using it as my primary means of transportation to understand how it works in Memphis and to learn about bikes,'' said Nix, who'd been an executive at FedEx and ServiceMaster before joining PeopleCap, a consulting firm for human resources.

"What's important, what's not important, what's a must-have,'' he said. He found there are about 40 scooter manufacturers globally. He traveled to other cities like Minneapolis where the scooter culture is stronger than in Memphis. He bought several different brands of scooters to test them.

"I got to learn more about bikes: What's going to be durable after three years and have value for folks; what's safe and will move with traffic,'' Nix said. He researched the size of bike that fit the most people.

He and the My City Rides team chose the SYM Fiddle III based on its durability, safety and value, Nix said.

SYM scooters have a small presence in the U.S., but "they are part of the transportation infrastructure elsewhere in the world,'' Nix said, adding, "One reason SYM wants to partner with us is they want to grow this market.''

The safety issue

Per mile driven, a motorcyclist is 30 times more likely to die in a traffic crash than someone in a car crash, according to a study published last year in the medical journal BMC Public Health.

Motorcycles comprise less than 3 percent of all registered vehicles but are involved in 14 percent of all traffic fatalities, the same study shows.

Safety is "absolutely'' a concern for My City Rides, Nix said, adding, "Safety is paramount in our mind.''

Scooters are not the silver bullet for solving the city's transportation problems, he said.

"It's not perfect. It's not for all. There are people who are not comfortable on these bikes. That's a given,'' Nix said.

Still, many Memphians will become comfortable with scooters once they are exposed to them and become accustomed to them, he said.

"I spent the last six months... being very intentional about covering the entire city from Frayser to Whitehaven to Binghamton to Collierville to Downtown... and all in between,'' Nix said of his scooter rides. "And I have been very pleasantly surprised with how I've been received on the roads.''

My City Rides headquarters in Crosstown will include a training room, and the program encompasses "a very serious safety training component,'' Nix said. "There's on-bike training and there's also some book work to do for a license.''

In many ways Memphis streets accommodate scooters, Nix has found.

Memphis has relatively few interstate miles, he said. The growth and popularity of bike lanes here has conditioned car drivers to be more aware of all two-wheelers. And the re-striping of streets for bike lanes often creates more space for scooters, even though motorized scooters do not use bike lanes, Nix said.

The 169cc scooter is street legal, but My City Rides will discourage program participants from driving it on interstates.

Early reaction

Kevin Woods leads the Workforce Investment Network, which helps about 14,000 job-seekers annually at its career centers. WIN spends a lot of money providing MATA bus passes as well as gas cards to assist job hunters with transportation.

Woods knows that the more people who use public transportation the more successful public transit can be. But he also acknowledges that in the meantime, the city's lack of population density is a challenge for effective public transportation.

"Public transportation, ride share, bike lanes or this idea about using scooters as transportation, I think it's always a good idea when we're being creative and looking at different ways to expand transportation options for our citizens,'' Woods said.

But Woods offers advice for My City Rides: Have a diverse ridership.

"I think this organization will have greater success if they encourage adoption of this mode of transportation across social-economic individuals of varying social economic backgrounds,'' he said.

"If this is a product seen only catering to the poor, I think adoption, while noble, will be stigmatized that it's a product for the poor,'' Woods said.

"Amen,'' Martin responded when told of Woods' comments. "... We're going to do all we can to keep it from being stigmatized.''

The bikes can only be purchased through payroll deduction, meaning the buyers are employed. And there will be a variety of employers, from businesses that have been hiring graduates of the Boys & Girls Club technical training center to local colleges and universities.

The future

The three-year start-up of My City Rides is secure with Martin's $3 million donation.

The nonprofit also has "strategic partners'' on board like developer Henry Turley, banker Johnny Moore, communications strategist Dan Conaway and business owners Charles Ewing and Mike Bowen.

"I'm not going to ask anybody for money until we've got this thing going right,'' Martin said. "That's what we did with the Boys & Girls Clubs (Juice Plus+ Technical Training Center).''