Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the Public Works Department to report back in 30 days with an update on the current status of the e-scooter program and other mobility share programs.
Congratulations. Thank you. All right. Now we're going to go to item number 15. Communication from Councilwoman Allen, Councilwoman Zendejas, Councilwoman Price, Councilwoman Sara Recommendation to request City Manager to work with Public Works Department to report back in 30 days with an update on the current status of the E-SCOOTER program and other mobility share programs. Councilman Allen. All right. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I've heard from residents and a variety that have a variety of concerns about the e-scooters, and I'm sure a lot of my colleagues have signed on to this item, have as well. You know, we've people contact our office about safety and. Coming down the sidewalk. If you know any scooters, oleic acid is a concern. I'm also like how many scooters are coming into the city who operate them? Where are the drop zone? How are these drop zone drop zones decided? And and then how to report issues. So I would like for our residents to clearly see what the path forward for micro mobility looks like here in Long Beach. I'm also excited to see the go. Long Beach might be able to incorporate some of these issues into that app, so I'm happy to see that it looks like that's going to be happening. I want to thank the city staff, the mobility staff for working closely with my team on the side up and I'm excited to see what is coming up for our Micromobility and Mobility Share program. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Price. Thank you and thank you to Councilman Allen for bringing this item forward. It was just a couple of weeks ago, I don't know, time flying by, maybe a month ago that we voted on the item that I brought regarding a third party vendor being part of our future scooter contracts, e-scooter contracts, so that we can see an improvement in scooter pickup. I'm still hopeful that that study will come back and give us some feasible options. But I'm hoping that when this particular study comes back, it addresses a few things that we hear a lot about. The first is when this program was originally established, there was funding set aside for enforcement of safety violations and helmet laws. I'd like to see some information on the number of citations that have been given or safety related scooter violations that we've documented. I'd like to know if there's any information on injuries associated with scooters, including those left on the sidewalk that present a hazard for residents. I'd love to know if we have any information on the number of individual Long Beach residents that have accounts with various scooter vendors as opposed to tourist accounts. I'd like to know whether or not we've seen scooter companies fulfilling their contractual obligations to maintain scooters in the public right of way. Because it seems to me that they have been some have been negligent in that responsibility. Another question that we get a lot and I'm still very conflicted about what what's happening, because I don't quite understand it. And one of my staff members recently observed this. Who decides where scooter pickup locations are and where they're placed? Is that the traffic engineers or the company? One of my staff members was out doing field work last week and one of the scooter companies dropped off a whole bunch of scooters, right, in a residential neighborhood in front of someone's house and said that that was within their city contract, which was shocking to me. So I don't know if that's true or not. How often do residents contact the city, either directly or through the council office, requesting us to address scooter related issues as opposed to contacting the scooter companies directly? And so these are just some of the questions that I'd love to see included in whatever report comes back. Do we have any sort of metric for the success of this program? Initially, the intent of the program was to take cars off the street and allow for different mobility options. Are we tracking that data? Do we have any way to measure it? And and so I think for me, I'd like to get a sense of where we are with the E-SCOOTER program. Does it make sense for us to move forward with it? What enforcement options are available for contractual? Failure to follow the contractual terms and how can we basically improve the quality of life issues for our residents who who want the scooters but don't want the the scooters and the the results of the scooter companies that aren't following their contractual terms. And I know that this item also says other mobility share programs. So the other question that I had is what is the status of the item that we passed at council? Probably about a year ago, allocating funds to a ride a bus minibus program that would travel from downtown Long Beach to Second and PCH area and transport people. I haven't heard anything about that program and I'm wondering what the status of that is. Sure I can answer a couple of those questions, so I'll take the last 1/1. The mobility program, that was an item to do some research and looking to see what it would take to be able to fund some micro transport like we did a free pilot program that's going to be wrapped into the American Recovery Act money . So now we actually have money to do that. We can go back and check on the status of the report, but we're planning to be able to use some of the Funding and Recovery Act to move that item forward. And what we were planning to also report on is we we have another mobility program. It's our bike share program. It's been actually around longer than the others. So we were going to that's our other major mobility program that we would report on. When we first heard this item, we thought this was a pretty simple report on just the data that we currently collect. And so we have that available. We can get that within 30 days pretty easily. Some of the additional questions we can you know, those are good questions. We can certainly work on those. It's going to take us a little bit more time. So we took a lot of notes that those are part of the motion. We can put that together and work on a report. Thank you. And just to be clear, the item regarding the working with the bus company, my understanding is and I could be wrong, but I thought we set aside a specific amount of money and directed staff to engage with a vendor. And I believe it was eight months to a year ago, we specifically allocated specific amount of money from the 12 million extra that we had identified. So that I believe that the money that we had already received and identified and we voted on it. You know, motion was made specifically about that program. Correct? That was March 16th. There was about $2 million at the time that was allocated. And then just until you adopted your budget, that's when that budget got finalized. So that actually got reduced down to about I'm trying to remember, probably $1.6 million because every allocation had to get a reduction. Before we can start doing the RFP, we had to figure out what that actual amount is and then that will move forward. So there is funding associated with that project that we can work on. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Mongo. Thank you. I've had similar experiences. I really want to thank Public Works for their work on helping us when all of a sudden 15 scooters are dropped off next to a bus station in a place where they're blocking the walking path and or a wheelchair path of our residents, they shouldn't have to walk into the street to get to public transportation. So I appreciate public works responding, but I think that the questions that Councilman Price really bring forward really discuss the cost of this program on our taxpayers and the residents and the convenience and the inconvenience. I was in Councilman Allen's district the other day over at the park, and multiple scooters were blocking the parking opportunities. And luckily my husband got my daughter on to the grass and one at a time took every single scooter out of the paid parking spaces that were not paying for parking and would not then get a ticket taking up parking spaces that are critical and valuable in District two, especially on a weekend. And so I'm very interested. I opened my app at the time to go Long Beach app, and there's an opportunity to put a band in a shopping cart, but there's nowhere to say. Abandoned scooter, inappropriate area. We should probably allow community members to track that for us and help us with this kind of challenge. Because I would have gone out and done all 15 of those scooters that were blocking the bus stop. So I recognize we're already spending considerable resources. On the flip side, I do hear a lot of benefits. I hear community members that used to ride scooters to Long Beach City College and the such. I think during the pandemic that probably went down considerably and the utilization was very different. And I look forward to seeing this data and I support all the questions coming back to us. I think that they're really critical in our ability to evaluate if this is a good fit for us, and I would even be interested to see how it compares with our bicycle data. I really think that we need to be in a position to have one of our nonprofit partners, maybe partners of Park, look for us to get a sponsorship. When you go to Chicago, all the bicycles are all sponsored by, I want to say like Kaiser Permanente or Blue Cross or whatever it is. And that's I'd be interested in knowing how much money the city receives to contribute to health and wellness based on those sponsorship agreements. So lots of opportunities to improve the program. And that was a big risk when we took this on. And I look forward to hearing the report back. Thank you. So, Councilmember, I do want to add you had mentioned it and so did Councilmember Allen about the ability to report some of these. We have been working for the past probably two months, did add it to the Long Beach app so that we can actually have people be able to respond and get that directly to the vendors . So that should launch, I believe, this week if it hasn't launched already. Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman. And they her. Thank you very much again, Councilwoman Allen, for bringing this item forward and for those who have signed on. As you know, I'm a big supporter of alternative forms of transportation that are both fun and convenient and also more environmentally friendly. But we do need to be careful with the unintended consequences that they may have. And I do agree with a lot of the statements and requests that Councilmember Price has made tonight in regards to finding an exact data, making sure that we are that we have these mobility, you know, company in our city, but that it's actually doing what it's supposed to do and in making it more more friendly to be able to be on e-scooters. And I think that having that data will show if we're actually making an impact in the city as we as we begin to approach more and more citywide events like the Grand Prix and also the other Los Muertos celebration, I think it's very important that we are there, that our residents know where, that we as a council are addressing the transportation needs and concerns, both, you know, for parking and also for companies like for mobility scooters and e-bikes. I think that we we need to really, really keep an eye out on making sure that the these these companies that we're contracting, that they have some kind of responsibility to make sure that they're running an efficient and safe business in our city. Thank you, Councilman Cubana. Thank you. This goes back quite a while, but there was a request made at one of the early meetings on E-Scooters. And I'd forgotten about this until Councilmember Mongo mentioned the the carts. There was kind of a fundamental flaw in reporting abandoned carts and abandoned scooters. And that is still, if you call the phone number for an abandoned car, you'll be asked, what is the name on the cart or whose cart is it? And sometimes there is no identifier in it. So the cart remains abandoned. If they can't be processed and we've got them with the same gear and scooters that the average resident looking at their window or something may not be able to read the name of the scooter on there. So I don't know what's feasible. I just know it's been asked before. So if we could look into actually the possibilities on both issues, that'd be great. Thank you. Interesting. I'll just add a couple comments of support. Thank you so much to my council colleagues bringing this forward. I think, you know, we have to continue to refine this system and keep a close eye on it. And I also want to want to say just, you know, broadly, this is one system managed by the city. Long Beach Transit has its own governing authority. Metro has its own governing authority for our transportation system in the city isn't really. I think we can do a lot in terms of coordinating the way that we think about transportation and transit in our city. And we have to think I think we need to think a little bit bigger as it relates to how we manage and coordinate with other agencies to have one seamless experience for micro changing and public transit in our city metros looking at fairly systems. You know, there's there are things we can do to think about the overall system. That's not what this item is tonight. But I just want to keep in mind that as we focus on refining this program, we can't lose sight of there's no other agency responsible for convening all of these groups around the big picture of transit in our city, aside from the city of Long Beach. And so thanks a lot very public comment on this item. Okay. Seeing numbers members, please cast your vote.