Supporting Orderly Scooter Parking in San Diego, CA
By: James Boshers
Tags: Lyft, San Diego, Transportation, Civictech, Scooters

In a car-dominant city like San Diego, scooters enable people to easily explore downtown without having to worry about the stress of driving and parking. But with thousands of scooters across the city, the City of San Diego converted over 500 parking spots into corrals designated for scooter parking.

A scooter parking corral in downtown San Diego.

The creation of corrals has proven to be an effective solution for cities looking to enforce orderly scooter parking in busy areas. To help support the City, Lyft is the only operator in San Diego to use pricing to nudge riders to park scooters in the right areas. Riders can save $1 off their trip for parking in a corral. Since establishing this discount, there has been a nearly 40% increase in the proportion of Lyft scooters being parked in dedicated scooter corrals.

While the parking corrals help solve parking issues, mobility operators like Lyft still need to manage their fleet of scooters in accordance with the City’s street sweeping schedule. To help manage its 3,000 scooters in the city, Lyft partnered with the mapping company Mapbox to develop a tool to manage scooter re-balancing operations.

Rebalancing Scooters During Street Sweeping

Unlike other U.S. cities of its size, the City of San Diego still oversees an extensive street sweeping program to minimize debris and pollution draining into its beaches and bays. It maintains a sweeping program with 20 power sweepers that cover over 2,700 miles, and a complex schedule of regulations that vary on a block by block basis. In order for the City to stick to its sweeping schedule, scooter operators are required to temporarily empty the corral and move their vehicle fleet so the sweepers can come through and clean the street. After the street has been swept, scooters can then be returned to the corral, and need to be re-balanced efficiently across the city.

Example of San Diego’s street sweeping schedule, which Lyft converted into a geospatial format as part of building this tool. With this, Lyft has provided the City the ability to map its street sweeping schedule.

Screenshot of the Real-time map the Lyft operations team uses to mark scooter corrals as “complete” after moving all devices out of the way for street sweeping. Sample summary metrics are displayed in the top left to track progress.

To keep track of the street sweeping schedule and help identify how and where scooters can be returned to corrals, Mapbox and Lyft developed a real-time tool that helps Lyft’s operations team rebalance their scooters based on the street sweeper schedule.

Screenshot of corral clearing tool to help the local operations team understand which scooter corral needs to be cleared for street sweeping.

As Lyft’s operations team navigates the streets, they have access to real-time analytics that display the percent of corrals and streets cleared. At the same time, back at Lyft’s warehouse, the team uses additional reporting tools to understand when scooters can be returned to a corral. To help minimize vehicle miles traveled (VMT) associated with its scooter operations, Lyft pioneered the use of cargo e-bikes to deliver the scooters to the corrals.

Lyft uses e-assist cargo trikes to help re-balance scooters across the city.

Delivering Impact to the City of San Diego

By developing parking pricing incentives and creating cutting-edge tools for field operators, Lyft has been able to manage its scooter fleet and ensure access to the public right-of-way. As a result, Lyft maintains a near 100% compliance rate with the City’s street sweeping program, which helps alleviate additional scooters parking challenges like illegal parking and blocked pedestrian access.

Beyond that, Lyft has created a strong partnership with the City of San Diego. Now both parties have transparency and visibility into Lyft’s scooter re-balancing operations, and additional city resources don’t have to be spent on moving rogue scooters.

Lyft looks forward to continue partnering with the City to ensure that San Diego residents and visitors have access to high-quality micromobility transportation.