A new public service announcement has a message for scooter riders: Stop making life more difficult for people with disabilities.

One of the world’s largest electric scooter companies has teamed with two Pacific Northwest disability rights groups and the city of Portland to raise awareness about the dangers of riding scooters on sidewalks and illegally parking the mobility devices in places that pose a hazard to people with disabilities.

The groups released the video Tuesday, which is the United Nations’ International Day of Disabled Persons.

Lime reached out to Rooted in Rights, a video production team based at the nonprofit advocacy group Disability Rights Washington, to produce and edit the video. The scooter giant also contacted a disability rights group in Oregon and the Portland Bureau of Transportation to write, cast and produce the video.

Jonathan Hopkins, Lime’s director of strategic development for the Pacific Northwest, said the company hasn’t done something like this before. The company has heard “general concern” from the city about the issue, so it “saw the opportunity to do something meaningful here,” he said in an email.

Since the on-demand rentable scooters arrived in Portland last year, the top complaints from the public have centered on illegal riders on sidewalks and people not wearing helmets. Since April, the city has issued more than 700 penalities and fines for about that type of behavior.

The video includes real people with disabilities who describe what it’s like, in specific real-life instances- to compete with e-scooters for space on Portland’s sidewalks. A woman with vision issues said when scooter users park their devices around blind corners, that can make it tricky for people who use those corners as a navigation tool due to their vision issues.

The video is produced so folks with vision or hearing issues can absorb the content. It includes a person using sign language throughout, closed captioning and a person describing what is happening on scene in between narration.

One woman, identified as Johnnie, said scooter riders need to know one essential fact: “The number one thing an older person does not want to do is fall,” she said, “so when you come through at a fast pace, that causes us to stumble and if you’re on a cane like I am, that’s not a good thing.”

Last January, a group of disability rights advocates laid their concerns out in great detail to Lime representatives as well as officials from other companies.

Disability Rights Oregon, which partnered with the city on the video, also previously expressed issues with how the city is handling complaints during its ongoing one year trial run.

Dylan Rivera, a city transportation spokesman, said the video is an important way to boost public education about the practical risks of riding on sidewalks.

“We think this video will be one really compelling way to do that,” he said.

Lime said it plans to distribute the video online to all of its markets.

Here’s the video:

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

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