Portland's E-Scooter Complaint Process Is Under Scrutiny From Disability Rights Advocates

BRI BREY

The city of Portland’s recent decision to pass off its electric scooter complaint process to private companies during the second pilot period is a bad idea, according to a leading disability rights organization.

As Willamette Week reported last week, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) changed the protocol for Portlanders filing complaints about e-scooters. During the city’s first e-scooter pilot program last year, people could directly contact PBOT about rule violations and safety issues; now, for the recently launched second, year-long pilot program, people have to call the private e-scooter companies with their complaints.

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PBOT spokesperson John Brady told WW that the change is an attempt to "improve response time and put more responsibility onto the companies." But the attorneys who work at Disability Rights Oregon (DRO) say the move could have poor consequences for all Portlanders—especially those with disabilities.

“The purpose of a pilot is to try things on, and see what works and what doesn’t,” Emily Cooper, DRO’s legal director, told the Mercury. “We’re really concerned that the city has re-routed that process to private companies that lack the same attention to public safety that the city has.”

DRO first communicated its concerns about the new complaint process last week, after seeing the WW article. Among the potential problems DRO cited: Complaints sent to private companies likely wouldn’t be part of the public record, meaning the public would have less oversight. That’s particularly problematic during a city-run pilot program, the purpose of which is to determine whether e-scooters are an appropriate permanent addition to Portland’s transportation landscape.

From DRO’s letter to PBOT:

“Clearly, if an e-scooter company is taking the complaints, and knows those complaints are shielded from the public record, they would be incentivized to downplay the seriousness of any complaints when they transmit any ‘minimal’ required data to PBOT as part of the pilot. This would seem to undermine the purpose of the pilot, in so far as one goal is to examine potential impacts from e-scooters on the larger community, the rate of complaints, and how they impact people with disabilities' rights to equal sidewalk access.”

And the idea of e-scooter complaints is far from theoretical—during last year’s four-month-long pilot, the city received over 600 complaints. Many of those reports centered on two major issues: people illegally riding e-scooters on the sidewalk, and e-scooters being parked improperly.

Those issues are inconvenient for anyone who lives, works, or commutes through an area dense with e-scooters. But they are especially challenging for people with disabilities—an e-scooter parked in the middle of a sidewalk is “essentially restricting someone with a mobility disability from moving forward,” Cooper said.

One of PBOT’s stated purposes of the second pilot is to determine whether these accessibility problems can be mitigated or not.

In PBOT’s response to DRO’s initial complaint, PBOT transportation demand specialist Briana Orr said the re-routed complaint process was intended to help with expediency:

“In the first pilot, PBOT had its own complaint line, and the agency fielded thousands of questions, concerns, and complaints during the pilot’s four months. In analyzing our responses to these concerns during the post-pilot evaluation period, we determined that many of them could have been resolved more quickly had they gone directly to the companies instead of having to pass through PBOT first.”

Orr added that PBOT’s experience dealing with ridesharing apps like Lyft and Uber equipped it with the tools to properly audit e-scooter companies. Bolt, Lime, and Spin are the three companies with e-scooters on Portland streets right now, though more companies could join later on in the pilot program.

Cooper said that response didn’t ease DRO’s worries. In fact, the organization sent a second letter to PBOT on Thursday, reiterating its concerns. From the letter:

“DRO is deeply concerned that PBOT’s approach to monitoring complaints will result in less transparency, less accountability, and a less effective pilot that will leave the city with more questions about the impact of e-scooters than it will have learned answers. We ask that PBOT create and promote its own accessible complaint process as well as a response time from the city when a consumer makes a report.”

Cooper said that DRO is encouraging Portlanders to contact the city directly with their own questions and comments about the e-scooter pilot program and the complaint process. DRO isn’t planning any legal action at the moment, but it will continue to follow-up with PBOT.

“We’re continuing to closely monitor this,” Cooper said. “We hope the city will make appropriate changes.”