know if scooters are crashing at higher rates than bicyclists. Anecdotally, some of the staff at Walkbike Nashville, which Kay just mentioned, have told us that in the downtown area, scooter riders are out on a three or four to one in terms of ratio compared to bicyclists. So you can use that for what it's worth, but it'd be great to have more data on that. Okay, thank you. We had another question related to the e-mobility devices with those motorcycles. It seems that factors that elevate occurrence and severity of injury seem to follow those of motorcycles. Have these data been compared? The ITF report actually goes into motorcycle related crashes versus scooter and bicycle related crashes. And it found that motorcycles have about a five time crash injury and fatality rates as bicyclists. And of course it's all related to speed pretty much. So yeah, the point being is motorcycles have a much higher injury and fatality rate than scooters or e-mobiles for that matter. Okay, thank you. For Kay, I have a question for you. First, I'd like to applaud Spin's creativity and cooperative approaches to designing safer environments for microability riders in the public. I think it's incredible how many innovative approaches are taken to address the environmental considerations for these products and getting communities involved, certainly helps raise the awareness of the hazards and buying from the city. Did you run to any challenges? And particularly I'm wondering about complaints we have received that are reducing the number of lanes on roads and if somebody designs became distractions for pedestrians, riders or drivers? Yeah, certainly there's always some points of friction when you introduce new ideas. But I think the sense that the types of projects that we are funding and worked with is from the community with strong like support for local residents and businesses. So you already have that vacant support and then with the approval always. So you have those two taken care of. And I think the other thing that lends itself to success for our projects is that silence. So, you know, it's an opportunity to say, okay, well, if you're not happy with this, like let's do some, you know, speak counts. Let's do some observation and interviews and see what we like or don't like. And then we could adjust, you know, the project moving forward. So it's as much as a feedback tool as it is like information tool. Okay. We have time for one more question. I think this one is for Chris. Chris, can you comment on a disparity between instances of male and female rider injuries? Are there just more male riders? Yeah, that's a good question. So there's been some evidence that in the pilot studies that females that women are riding scooters at a higher rate than bicyclists that are represented among scooter riders and bicycle riders. So that probably captures that statistic, whether they crash at a higher rate relative to their proportion. We don't know. The scooter companies may know proportion of their riders or male or female. And I can't remember what it was, 30% or something. If 30% are crashing and are also the matching proportion of females than that's something. There's plenty of evidence out there that men tend to have a higher crash rate than women on motorcycles and bicycles and to females too. That would be interesting to explore. Thank you. That was a great presentation and questions. I'll continue to send your questions if you have any. We'll try to respond to those at a later time. Lawrence, thank you. I'll hand it back over to you. Hey, thanks everybody. All right, we'll break here for lunch. Everyone please join back here at 1pm for the start of our next panel, which will be on micro-mobility design and research. Okay, so for our first presentation in micro-mobility design and research, we have Benjamin Gribb. He will be doing the presentation called UL 2272 and 2849, mitigating risk of explosion fire electrocution. Benji has been with UL for over 20 years and is the North American Regional Technical Lead for micro-mobility for the UL Consumer Technology Division. Personal e-mobility devices, e-scooters and e-bikes are part of his responsibilities, along with batteries, electrical systems of e-cigarettes, e-cigarette products, optical radiation, IT equipment, and consumer electronics products. He observed standard development of UL 2849 and works closely with the UL Standards Division in both UL 2272 and UL 2849. He also leads the North America Eastern Region Engineering Team involved with UL Mark Services, evaluating, testing, and certifying products in meeting UL 2272 or UL 2849, as well as battery and charger safety. Benji, I will unmute you now and I will be pulling up your presentation. Thank you, sir, and just let me know if you can hear me. Yep, I hear you. Well, first off, I want to thank you for the opportunity to present in this forum on the topic of UL 2272 and UL 2849 as it relates to mitigation of risk of explosion, fire, and electrocution. So if we can go to the next slide, please. I've actually had the ability or the privilege of working for UL for the past 21 years on many different types of products in a lot of different industries, but in the context of this presentation, we are going to talk about UL 2272 and the inherent risks and mitigations that are needed for battery operated and UL 2270 products. I was able to observe during the STP panel meeting UL 2849 edition one how the different industries came together and discussed the specific requirements that were needed and that were specific to the e-bike industry. Also similarly, I support the standard technical panel and UL's aspects and enrollment in UL 2272. One thing that I want everyone on the call to take away from my presentation is to just remember that we have to consider these products as an entire electrical system. A lot of times, individuals or companies feel that they meet the requirements when their components and their component sub-assemblies are evaluated and they meet the requirements for those components, but oftentimes they don't consider when these various components are married together to create an end product. I would like to make sure that we keep that as forefront if anything else that you remember in the presentation. If we can go to slide three, please. If you look back and take a moment and let's think about the dramatic increase in all the battery operated products that we've seen in the past, you can see how standards and standards development has played a significant role in the mitigation of the fire, explosions and electrocutions from these products, starting way back to when, if you remember, the laptop issues with the laptop batteries exploding back in 2005, 2006. And it resulted in the industry change where we realized there were mitigations that were needed in these particular products. And as time has moved on, we've seen batteries installed and used in many different types of products across many different industries. And on the screen, really what we've got is just a small timeline of some of the products that you may be familiar with and some of the applicable standards that would address these battery related hazards and the mitigation factors that are required for a minimum level of acceptability. The hoverboards we've already discussed earlier from 2015 and 2016 timeframe that was the hot new gift of the year. It resulted in many occurrences of explosions, fires and electrocutions. And as Diana noted in her presentation, the industry came together in a phenomenal turnaround time of less than one year. They were able to publish a standard that helped manufacturers understand what are the inherent risks, what are the things that need to be considered for those particular products and how those individual components that come together, how they need to be considered at a system level and at a system level approach. And as you go through and look at these various, again these various products that are on the screen, the red box tells you what is the current applicable standard for that product type. So laptops, it's UL62368, e-cigarettes, it's UL8139, power banks, UL Outline of Investigation 2056, hoverboards again UL2272, which we're going to talk about in more depth later. Cell phones, UL62368, portable electronics also 62368, e-scooters also fall under UL2272 and e-box under the recently published UL2849. So if you can, let's go to the next slide. What I mean when we say consider a system level approach is that each component that's used in the system does have its own set of requirements that must be met, but additionally when you marry that component into a larger sub-assembly before it makes the final end product, each time you stage and stagger this together you're actually increasing the potential risk as you go through this. So in UL2272 and in UL2849, we'll look at the smallest level first. So the smallest unit inside is typically the cell. The cell is going to have mechanical integrity tests and electrical and environmental susceptibility. It's going to have specific ratings that the cell must operate in and it's not suitable for use outside of that operation range. Typically it's a voltage, a current and a temperature. When you begin marrying cells into larger and larger packs, as you put that pack together and that pack is then worked through its paces of its charge and discharge cycles, we have to not only make sure that the pack is acceptable, but the internal cells inside of that pack do not exceed their ratings, again, temperature, voltage and current. Because if it's operated outside of those ranges, there is the potential risk of either an explosion, a fire or an electrocution that could result. When we move up to the system level for the eBike or the eScooter, we have to consider the fully assembled device now. So you've got a cell that was tested more than likely in an open air environment. Then it's put inside of a pack and that pack is tested at a certain level with a certain enclosure size around it. And in certain cases the pack is then slid inside of a down tube or a frame or a footboard inside of an eBike or an eScooter. So each time you've got a change in how much temperature those cells may or may not be seeing. And if we do not consider that system level approach, then there is the potential of a hazard that could result. The last thing that is typically part of the system level is the charger issues. So when we look at the chargers, we have to know, is the charger going to be providing current voltage at a higher rate than the cells can demand? Is it going to be able to balance the charging of the cells? Is the pack going to be able to balance the discharging of those particular cells? And what we have found out is, in our experience at UL, when we begin reviewing customers' products and we go through a third-party certification, a lot of times they feel that their product complies because their individual components were evaluated to the applicable standards. But when we begin doing these system level tests, the efficiencies are identified and non-compliances are noted. And the good thing is the non-compliance is noted before it goes out to market and industry so that we can work with the manufacturers to ensure that their product meets a minimum level of acceptability as defined in the applicable standard. So if we can, let's go to slide number five. We've talked about definitions in many of the presentations today and I'm going to do the same. UL 2272, most people traditionally think of 2272 as that's the hoverboard standard. Well, in fact, you're right and you're wrong. It's actually the personal e-mobility device standard. It's not only hoverboards, but it's e-scooters, e-skateboards, e-roller skates, and other types of personal e-transporter devices. Normally you're going to have a single rider, you're going to stand on it, doesn't have pedals, and it's not made for over-the-road use. Your e-bikes are covered under UL 2849. You can have either pedal assist or non-pedal assist versions. Again, a single rider, but it could accommodate passengers if needed, could accommodate a load if needed for carrying groceries or things of that nature. Typically you're going to be seated and it does have to have pedals that are operational pedals to provide motive power. If we can go to the next page, please. So what I want to do here is let's talk about the system levels and the differences and a comparing contrast of UL 2272 and UL 2849. Many of the major components on this system level chart that I'm showing, there's a lot of overlap, but there are some differences. In UL 2272, which are our hoverboards and our e-scooters, your battery charger is typically going to be evaluated to UL 62368-1 as a component. Your traction battery pack, it can be evaluated as part of the overall UL 2272 evaluation and test program, including the evaluation of the battery management system. And for those looking at the screen, the blue notes are the actual specific clause references in that standard. So you can evaluate the battery pack for a UL 2272 product inside of the end product investigation. Potentially you could also use a UL 2271 battery pack and eliminate some of the testing that would occur. Versus if we look at the traction battery pack in a UL 2849 e-bike evaluation, it is required to go through UL 2271 or 2580. You can have a UL 2054 battery pack or a UL 6233 battery pack, but there are additional tests that must be conducted for the e-bike system itself when you're going through that. Similar to 2272, the battery management system must be evaluated for functional safety aspects in terms of both the hardware and software for any safety features such as controlling the voltage, controlling the charge and or discharge current, and or the temperatures observed on the cells. The electric motor is a consistent, it's a consistent requirement between UL 2272 and UL 2849. You are required to meet UL 1004-1 at a minimum. There are other series of motor standards that would be allowed to help negate some of the required testing, but as a baseline UL 1004-1 is required for the electric motors. Now when it comes to the motor controller in UL 2272, the motor controller in 2272 is evaluated in the end product, and we do consider single fault conditions and things of that nature, but there is a different approach in UL 2849. UL 2849 says we must consider not only how the motor controller works, but if there's any intended safety functions, such as when someone stops pedaling that the motor disengages, or if there is an electronic style break that the motor disengages. So we have to evaluate the safety functions to UL 198 or UL 991. And while this is a very high level overview of just the major components, when a product certification is completed, the other components used within the system also have to be considered and they have to be evaluated for their specific use. That could be the adhesives, the cables, the cords, enclosures, fuses, all the polymeric materials, everything has to be used within its intended rating and its intended function. If we can go to slide number seven now. So when we talked about the test program, one of the things that I want everyone to understand is that at a system level there are certain aspects that we have to look at, and it's consistent in both UL 2272 and UL 2849. So you've got a series of electrical tests that are required in the end product and those electrical tests are going to run that full system through its paces of charging, discharging, loading, overloading, the balance of the battery pack if you're doing the battery pack evaluation under UL 2272. You also have to consider the mechanical stresses that the system is going to see in its specific intended application. If you're doing the charging test, drop test, you've got your environmental tests that must be considered for its use case, thermal cycling between coming in and out of a garage, coming in and out of a cold and a hot location. How will that thermal cycling degrade the electrical systems over time? And the last one is how is your motor actually working? How does the motor perform when it's overloaded when someone is actually loading it down higher than the specifications? What happens if the motor locks up? Does the motor have the correct protective features for that? Does it maintain the maximum stated speed or does it cut off at that level? Do the materials used in the motor and in the motor system, does it have the correct flammability rating and are the markings and everything associated with the product permanent so that it's easily identifiable down the road? UL 2272 and UL 2849 are different than some of the other standards that we've talked about throughout the day or that we've had discussed in the panel. This standard addresses the safety features in terms of explosions, fires, and electric shock. It doesn't evaluate the performance or the reliability of the devices or the physical hazards as many others have addressed already in terms of the use of the personal e-mobility device. So again, many manufacturers feel that their product complies as they used components that were created and designed for the application, but they fail to consider the implications of when those individual components are brought together and it's when a manufacturer goes through the requirements of UL 2272 and UL 2849 and there's a third-party evaluation typically involved that those deficiencies can easily be identified. What other mitigations did they potentially overlook and how can they address the product to avoid the risk of explosion, fire, and electric use? And if you'll go to the next page, please launch. And if there's any other questions related to this standard, just let me know. Thank you, Benji. Our next presentation is on Bird Batteries Design and Development by David Tenhuten. Let me queue it up. So David is the Senior Director of Vehicle Engineering at Bird with 20 plus years of experience in electric vehicle automotive engineering, focusing on battery systems, functional safety and validation. David joined Bird to bring that expertise to market mobility in order to make an even greater impact on sustainable transportation than EV adoption. Thanks for being here today, David. All right, thanks a lot. Are you guys seeing the right screen here? Yep. All right. Cool. Well, thanks for that. Yeah, it'll be a... Actually, it's great to follow the UL, the 2271, because that's very relevant.  Thanks for introducing me. So, but just very quickly. So I'm Dave. I've spent a lot of time on EV development programs and a lot of that time in those programs on... specifically on battery systems and functional safety and validation. And I've been with Bird for a couple years now, and it's great to be part of this micro-mobility movement, which is a much, I think, better movement for the environment than EV cars. So with that, we could jump into some battery stuff. Here's a picture of a battery from a consumer e-scooter that was the first model used in e-scooter sharing called the M365 from the store that Bird started with. You can see the environmental protection is basically some plastic shrink wrap. And what you can't see very well in the picture is that the BMS on this battery is just a really rudimentary safety circuit. There's not much to it. And here's where we are today. You can see this right away. This is a more industrial and robust part. This is the Bird 2 battery pack, which is our current model or most recent model. Here's a little bit of a look inside the battery so you can have a look at its construction. It's an aluminum extrusion construction. It has a double wall skid plate on the bottom. It's just a lot more of a robust approach and a battery than where the scooters start the business were. Here's just a simplified graphic to explain a little bit about our design philosophy. You can see when we're balancing technical trades we're always backstopping against functional safety and ultimately physical air safety, which is probably the best way to go. With safety's priority number one, and that's why we elect to comply with non-mandated safety standards like the 2271 that Benji was just talking about and 2272 at the vehicle level. And UL991 which is inside of the 2271. We've gone really far out of our way to create multiple layers of analog protection features to increase functional safety by reducing reliance on controls where it matters. And we've also kind of set our internal specifications beyond the mandates and even beyond industry norms in terms of battery ingress protection and environmental durability. Moisture ingress can be a pretty significant risk factor in battery systems and this is a differentiator and example of how we're trying to raise the bar for micro-mobility, for robustness and safety. As Benji mentioned, safety really starts with the most basic component of the battery, the cell. And we've chosen well-proven platforms from pure one-automotive suppliers and these cells are all certified against UL1642 at the cell level and there are well-known platforms that have been widely used but even then we don't take the cells at their word of the spec sheets. We have extensive qualification programs internally where candidate cells are tested against their manufacturers ratings and beyond. We do all kinds of electrical and mechanical destructive testing and analysis of the performance to qualify them for our applications. Battery management our approach is to take the design and control methodologies from automotive BMS and apply it to scooters. We're making a small version of a passenger vehicle battery, not a giant version of a toy battery or a cell phone battery. We can talk a little bit about charging. It's one of the higher risk modes for batteries and we have a highly managed charging approach so every time a charger is plugged into our vehicle we measure the voltage of the charger to ensure it's rated for our vehicle and if not we won't even attempt to charge using it. We won't connect. Once charging is begun we monitor current to ensure we don't exceed the maximum the battery is rated for. To protect against extreme abuse scenarios we have a fuse, a physical fuse and since the charging port is a customer facing connector our fuse is rated to a voltage of 250 volts AC to deal with anything all the way up to AC mains voltage being put on our charge port. Our charging systems also disallow charging with measured cell temperatures that are too high or too low and other constraints. We have temperature sensors placed throughout the cell stack to know the specific cell temps as well as the temps of our MOSFETs and we can suspend operation or derate performance dynamically to prevent our exceeding our limits. If battery is ever passively exposed to extreme heat for example like in a storage or a transport situation the battery has the ability to permanently disable itself so it cannot be used later when the temperature cools down. Just in case there was any cell damage underlying from that heat exposure because the cell can have like an additional hidden risk after that. To keep the battery working within its optimum envelope we use cell balancing array to keep all of our cells at the same state of charge all the time and if a cell delta has ever exceed thresholds we can disable the pack and mark the skeeter in our back end for pickup to get looked at. To protect the battery from abuse while driving we calculate a maximum allowable charge and discharge current rate and send this to our motor controller so it can adjust maximum power levels dynamically never exceed the ideal range of our battery and these limits will adjust on voltage, temperature and state of charge so when bringing a pack online we use a pre-charge strategy that will allow us to charge up our motor controller in a controlled manner to prevent current spikes. This also allows us to detect short circuits that may exist beyond the battery before we ever close our main fence so this allows us to keep from ever exposing our primary fuse to high current situations should a motor controller or wiring or anything ever become damaged. On diagnostics our batteries also have advanced diagnostics mostly borrowed from automotive that will alert our back end if batteries are ever damaged or risk of becoming damaged. Here's a small excerpt from our actual diagnostics table the actual table is hundreds of things but this is just a little snippet to give you an idea. Vandalism turns out to be more prevalent than you might expect at least in the sharing business maybe not in the direct on business through our experience as an operator we've come to learn that it's one of the biggest risk factors to our vehicles and as well as like extreme mechanical abuse and to address these are the batteries housed in all metal enclosure that features double wall skid plate like I mentioned at the beginning and the seal to IP68 rating and all the connectors outside the battery are IP67 or BMS also incorporates humidity sensor that allow us to know early on if the seals have been compromised or if the battery has suffered water ingress and we can send that right up to our back end and collect that scooter. To address the risks of theft we use security hardware and we now have tamper detection logic that will detect when the battery has been unplugged unexpectedly from the vehicle we can disable access to the power and all the outward facing connectors if that happens our battery uses a security encrypted communication making it as difficult as possible to repurpose into an unauthorized application that may not be safe so our pack designs are put through shock and vibe testing and to basically battery industry standard profiles as well as profiles gathered from a data collected off scooters we have instrumented and ridden over rough terrain on our internal accelerated durability track and that's generally called RLDA or road loading data acquisition those kind of loads can be used as design inputs and loading profiles for validation testing we do submersion testing and thermal cycling thermal boundary behavioral testing system level destructive testing fault insertion testing as well as all the performance and life cycle testing and we're a little bit obsessed with testing and just beyond the safety aspects of our battery we also focus on performance of our battery and use multiple strategies for calculating state of charge and we can track the capacity of the battery as it ages and this lets us use tune the performance of the batteries that degrades over time to maximize its usable life that keeps each battery on the road for as long as possible reducing the number of batteries that need to be recycled and replaced and by maximizing the use of each battery we can minimize our impact on the environment which is kind of why we're here the kind of smarts of our battery communicate continuously with our servers which enables us to have a very clear picture of what's going on with our fleet and the more we know about our scooters while they're on the street the better we can optimize vehicle utilization to ensure public safety and that's about it, that's all I got for this Thanks a lot Thank you David Up next we have Scott Rushworth with the presentation Evolving Safe Reliable and Durable Bird Vehicles So Scott is the Chief Vehicle Officer at Bird where he oversees everything pertaining to bird engineering and manufacturing Coming to Bird, Scott led an engineering consulting firm that specialized in high profile projects ranging from cloud computing to hardware and product development for many Fortune 500 companies There we go Great Thank you for the intro I'm really grateful for the opportunity to share today Today I'm going to tell you about Evolving Safe Reliable and Durable Bird Vehicles I helped start Bird in 2017 so it's been quite an interesting adventure for the last three years working here really helping micro mobility evolve and we've certainly learned a lot along the way So I'll tell you about why we decided to build our own vehicles I can get to the next slide here There we go So why do we build our own vehicles? So we started the company and we're not really sure whether this would take off at all and immediately we found the demand was very very high which is fantastic and very validating but the vehicles were not as good as we wanted them to be and so we had kind of a challenging decision of do we decide to build our own vehicles or not and so we figured we needed to really answer the why why would we build our own vehicles and to do that we really needed to look at who our customers are but we've really kind of built a mental model and business framework that starts with our customers and we need to listen to the voices of all these customers so obviously riders that rent our vehicles are our customers but Bird itself is a customer so riders want a vehicle that's safe but they want a vehicle that might accelerate gently or some of them want it to accelerate fast or stop well Bird wants a vehicle that's easy to maintain that's affordable that's a manufacturer that's a sustainable vehicle and of course safe cities also want a vehicle that's safe they want a vehicle that emits enough data back to them so that they can keep tabs on how things are going in their city and help us comply to city ordinances and things so there were some themes that really started to emerge safety as I mentioned is a theme for all three customers and so that's as much as we try to move fast and scale we don't cut any corners of safety it has to be number one sustainability is vital to our core mission if we don't have vehicles that are sustainable then we're not actually doing our part to not just create transportation that's convenient and fun but we're not really making the world a cleaner transportation if they're not sustainable reliable vehicles are no fun for anybody obviously they're you know if the vehicle is not reliable it also is not sustainable or safe but you know that means that the vehicles are not available for riders around the city that means they could end up looking like clutter if they fall off line and things like this we also wanted a vehicle that was modern easy to locate responsive to city rules and fun to drive and then finally we wanted a vehicle that's serviceable so as we were looking at what's available in the market there was really no vehicles that checked all these boxes so we set out to build our own vehicles so in the next section I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we approach vehicle design and it's fun going after my colleague Dave because there's a little bit of overlap between our discussions but not too much so in terms of you know taking our three customers and looking at their common names and sort of their wish list of what they'd like we really started to get some requirements boiled down and here's a few very high level examples and we have many many many many more of these but one that I'll kind of a couple that I'll talk about must have state of the art electrical safety even given extreme use cases in harsh environments must last 24 months of daily use so to talk about those two for a little bit we thought about you know how do we go this turning these requirements into a vehicle and so as Dave alluded to this we actually use the the V process which is extremely very very common in the automotive space and so from the very beginning we decided to hire a team of automotive engineers some aerospace that are familiar with this process because this is how we wanted to go about it we feel that because there's humans on these vehicles we need to take safety very very very as our highest priority that we didn't want to cut any corners we wanted to design and build things in the same way that you would a car or monorail or train or anything like that so the V process basically means that you gather system level requirements and then you distill those down to subsystem level requirements then you distill those down to component requirements so in the case of having a vehicle the last 24 months and having a state of the art electrical safety basically you would have that is the system level requirement the last 24 months but then for the subsystem of a battery you might decide that it needs to have a certain level of vibration testing in a certain level of water ingress protection in a certain level of charge cycles and so let's say that you decide that the battery needs to have 700 charge cycles for the system to last 24 months which is actually giving it a gracious amount of buffer there so then you need to look at the battery cells and I saw the presentation earlier that alluded to this too just because you have a battery cell that will last 700 charge cycles if the system lets water into it the battery cells not going to last for 700 charge cycles so as you can see you work your way down the V from the most macro requirement to subsystem requirements to component and so we have requirements for everything that you could imagine in terms of every screw nut bolt has its own less to requirements in terms of how long it should last what the testing procedures will be and so once we get all those really agreed upon and written down then we go into the fun phase which is designing and building and once we start to get prototypes whether they're of just samples of components or subsystems that we've finished we do validation on each of these going back up the other side of the V until we get to the point of being able to test the entire system as a whole and so that's this is just to give you an example of sort of how we sort of approach making sure that if we have a vehicle that will say it lasts X number of months or this many charge cycles that we actually have the homework to back it up and so this does take a lot of time it takes some investment but I believe that the results will speak for themselves so the last section I want to talk about in this well the last slide in this section that I want to talk about is our R&D facility so in our R&D facility which is located in Los Angeles you can see in here we design things as we've been talking about we also analyze things so we determine weak points we do calculations run theoretical loads we work on ongoing updates so if we determine that a part didn't last as long as we thought in the field for some other reason we'll work on a revision to it we also do a lot of live updates to our vehicles in terms of their software which they're able to download over the air and we can roll those out and then we do all of our validation and testing here well I shouldn't say all of it we do a large portion of it we still do of course much on-road and real-world validation and testing as well in the upper left you can see our double E laboratory where we have some desk birds as we call it and some oscilloscopes working away there in the right we have a test track that we've built and you can see that we've actually modeled services we found in the real world around the globe so you'll have your cobblestone from Europe, your average pay-up sidewalk, some things we found kind of in areas where there might be construction and so we actually have a 250 step design validation process so once we get down to the bottom of that V it actually is over 250 different tests that we run for every vehicle or every revision of a vehicle to reclassify it again is complete and so we're going to be doing all of our criteria in the lower left this is one of my my favorite rooms we have an environmental chamber and inside there we have a dynamometer which allows us to put different workloads on the motor and the electrical systems of the vehicle and also change the environment so it allows us to see what it might be like driving uphill in San Antonio in the the summer or driving downhill in the winter and so this allows us to really tune the system and as you heard Dave mention our system automatically adjusts in real time based on the environmental conditions to make sure that everything is operating within the operating envelope that we specified in the bottom right you can just see one of our designs in CAD there so this is certainly a lot of fun but it's a lot of work and we take it really really seriously and so the final section I'll share with you is just some of the results of all this hard work and currently we believe we have the safest battery technology on the market Bert has industry leading IP67 and IP68 waterproofing in batteries with each generation gets safer and safer we believe we have the safest rider experiencing on the market from accelerating, steering and going over bumps to a base of braking riders are safer on a berm we believe we have the most durable vehicles on the market and durability equals sustainability and safety we believe we have the most serviceable vehicles on the market, Bert's vehicles are repaired faster which means they're available to customers quicker we have state-of-the-art vehicle diagnostics and I like to call this a check engine light picture a check engine light on steroids we weren't the ones to invent this in fact the consumer-grade vehicles that we started with they actually had vehicle diagnostics from the very early days and we were the first ones that started sending them up to the cloud and analyzing those and using those to take actions on vehicles we've since learned a lot in these three years and have iterated a whole lot on that system so Bert 2 which is the vehicle that you've seen the most of in this deck has over 200 different fault codes and we add to those all the time depending on what we learn from the vehicle and so the vehicle has different severities of fault codes it can send those to us in real time it can send them to us over the cellular network it can send them to us through a customer's phone there's a lot of different data that comes off of these things and we use that to continually tune the system some of the fault codes can be solved automatically some of them will take the vehicle out of service automatically some of them will trigger operations teams to service the vehicle in a non-urgent manner and some of them are just data collection points as Dave mentioned earlier you know even if water gets into a place it's not supposed to be in we'll immediately take the vehicle out of service and give data on that right over the at the real time and then finally we have continual improvement over time so as I mentioned we're always working on both the hardware and the software of the vehicle and software updates go out very quickly usually after they pass our validation and then hardware updates can go out at a slower pace but if we decide that we have a better version of kickstand or something we will end up stocking those parts in our repair centers and then as those need to get swapped out we'll make sure that we put the newer version on so lots of challenges but we certainly take safety very very seriously and try to keep listening to the voices of our customers and I think at the end you know it's very fun to see where micro mobility has come in three years and it'll be really interesting to see where it gets to in the next three years so and here's a picture of our latest creation I think this is in Milan or wrong but thank you for having me it's a pleasure to present and really enjoyed all the other talks so far thank you thank you for presenting Scott okay up next are fourth speakers for today in the design and research session will be Dr. Tina Garmin and Steve Coma with Ryder Kinematics and Vehicle Dynamics testing of electric scooter riding thanks Lawrence so as Lawrence said Tina and I work at X Bonin and recently we've conducted some research regarding Ryder Kinematics and Vehicle Dynamics testing of electric scooter riding and we will skip over our bios because Lawrence just did that for us so thanks for the introduction and I'll turn it over to Tina alright thanks guys so just really quick this is a quick history of electric scooters in the United States and I think this is a little known fact that the first stand-up motorized scooter was actually created in 1915 quite some time ago by a company called the Auto Ped Company of America there was another design in 1919 with a seated design by a company called or with a device called the scooter motor and scooters really didn't see much happening until about 60 years later in 1986 we have the reintroduction of a gas powered stand-up scooter called the GoPed and then between 1986 and 2009 that's when the advancement in battery technology really exploded and by 2009 we had a company come out with a scooter called it was a garage project it was called My Way and after that scooter companies started to join the ride share program and by 2020 we have like over 350 cities that have ride share programs now and scooters have hit the market running and we all love them and we're excited to sort of share the research that we've done with them here at ExpoNet today and so I'm going to kind of skip over these ones a bit because this morning we heard so much about all the regulations and all the committees going on to try to regulate everything so as we saw this morning there's a lot of uncertainty and not necessarily a lot of commonality between different states, cities municipalities and so that's what a lot of these committees are trying to solve right now and so Tina and myself are members of the ASPM committee and you guys heard from all of these other committees today so I'm not going to really speak too much to those ExpoNet has conducted a lot of micro mobility research recently we've got a few publications here that we've submitted to SAE and earlier this year Tina and myself authored this micro mobility vehicle dynamics and rider kinematics in regards to electric scooter riding which is what we're going to focus on here today and so what we did for our testing we had a rider, a number of ExpoNet riders that we instrumented with these IMUs that Tina will get into a little bit. We instrumented a scooter and we designed the test course meant to simulate an urban environment and we were able to collect a lot of data throughout this testing and so here you can see the instrumented scooter that we had we had a number of different things measuring some interesting data so we've got a strain gauge that was measuring the load on the stem as the rider was riding. We had forward and rear facing cameras that was able to show the terrain to correspond to the data as well as the rider foot position. We had a potential measuring steering of the scooter GPS unit that was capable of measuring accelerations, velocities roll pitch yaw of the scooter and a number of other parameters and we also had we tapped into the break and throttle positions that allowed us to look at the rider inputs as testing was ongoing. So not only is it important to instrument the scooter but it's also very important to instrument the rider. So the rider is essential when evaluating performance. This is not like a motorcycle rider system where the bike is two times the weight of the rider. For scooters the rider is the critical mass in the system and we need to be able to understand rider performance in order to develop the test methodologies and metrics that help inform best practices and encompass a broad variety of riders. And so because of that we need to instrument the rider and we do that with these little wireless wearable inertial measurement units and what these can do we can put these on different bony landmarks on the rider and we can characterize stability by evaluating accelerations. Accelerations in angular rotations and even positions. So these IMUs are great. They fit in the palm of your hand. You put them on the rider and you go. They're not attached to anything. They collect data that's 1200 Hz. They can do tri-axis accelerations, rotations in each direction. They're great. So we instrument the rider fully with that. And Steve, you can go ahead to the next slide. The testing environment that we did is we wanted to simulate more of an urban environment. So we have our startup period where they're starting with that push off. They slowly go to a stop sign. At the stop sign they stop for a little bit and they make a left hand turn through a slalom course. The width of the slalom course was 5 feet and we're using that to stimulate riding on a sidewalk and sort of weaving in and out of pedestrians. The next thing we had them do was an unexpected stop.  So we had the rider stop as fast as they could. Once they came to a complete stop they kept going and then they performed a variety of low speed U-turns. All right, next slide. Okay, so first a very easy thing to analyze is we put a GoPro down at the foot well, I'm sorry, at the face of the scooter and we're trying to analyze different foot positions. So as it turns out, each rider that we, or a variety of riders had a variety of different foot positions. For rider one, for example, he had a little bit of larger feet.  For rider seven, this was a smaller female and she chose to ride with her two feet sort of right next to each other. Rider two and rider three, interestingly, both have their right-handed and right-footed dominant but they chose to put different feet forward when they were riding in this tandem stance. So this just really tells us that the base of support for these riders are going to be very rider dependent and we cannot just say that the riders are going to all riders are going to ride in a dominant foot forward tandem position. So go ahead and move forward. Now I can't get into all of the metrics that we looked at but if I were to choose my two favorite and the two most important I think is rider lean angle and scooter roll angle. So the manipulation of these angles is what is going to control the scooter. If you were to turn left you need to roll the scooter to the left but you also need to manipulate your body either to make the turn or to stabilize yourself on the scooter. So if we look at these charts, the highest lean and roll angles we saw were during the slalom and U-turn course which makes sense. The scooter achieved angles up to 48 degrees so that's a pretty decent angle and the rider up to 24 degrees. Now in order to determine some of the temporal behavior of the lean versus roll angle we actually have to look into the data a little bit further so Steve you can switch sides and I know this is kind of intimidating but let's just look at that first square that I've highlighted on the top graph. Yes, so if we look at that what we see here the roll angle of the bike which is highlighted in red and goes about to negative 45 degrees is achieved at the same time as the maximum lean angle of the rider. So what's happening is as the rider is moving or as the rider is rolling the scooter to its extreme values to the left and the right they're leaning their body in the opposite direction in order to maintain balance on the scooter and we actually we see this during motorcycle riding as well which is a correlation between doing some of the low speed motorcycle riding. You can go ahead and change slides. The next one that I wanted to talk about is the braking data and like I said the task here was to brake as fast as you can when you hear someone yell stop and you can see the variability in the rider brake timing. For example if you look over at rider 8 on the plot on the right the rider 8 stopped in .8 seconds whereas if you look at rider 2 it took rider 2 1.65 seconds and it took rider 2 almost 20 feet to stop from the initiation of the brake signal till he was fully stopped. So depending on the rider, depending on where they're putting their weight on the scooter when they're initiating the brake depending on if the brake is in the front or the back all of these brake timing brake distance are going to be very variable. Now you can change slides and then this is just to show you what the actual brake data looks like. So a quick representation of that because I think brake testing is going to be very important when establishing standards. And the key here to brake testing is tapping into the brake system so that you actually get a signal when the brake turns on so you can evaluate this data. You can see the purple circle over here we have the brake turning on and from that point forward we can go ahead and we can look at the acceleration that the device is seeing. We can look at the IMU data for the acceleration the rider is seeing. We can look at brake distance and we can also look at things like stem load right after the brake occurs. Alright so you can go ahead and move on. And so kind of going off of that you can see here some of the brake data that we collected and so basically on this chart what you'll notice is that there's a variety of velocities at brake initiation as well as a variety of braking distances corresponding to those depending on the rider and depending on the surfaces that they're on. And so obviously for the higher brake initiation velocity you get larger braking distances which we're seeing up to 17 feet. Over here we're also looking at decelerations on three different surfaces which you'll notice is consistently less on dirt which makes sense with what we would expect compared to asphalt and concrete. However we're getting very similar values between the asphalt and concrete and somewhat varying depending on the riders. Understandably it's hard to generalize any of this type of data when all of these scooters that we're seeing out there have so many different designs within their wheel systems as well as their brake systems. And so in addition to the research that we did for this one paper we've also done work for a number of micro mobility companies that have that exponent. And so we've utilized our terrain testing including cobblestone forces, potholes parking brake hill that has about an 11 degree angle to it as well as some rough road with some cracks in the road. We've also utilized some data collection tools like this dewy soft backpack that we've rigged up which has an umbilical connecting to the instrumentation on the scooter which the rider can wear and this can actually collect at a thousand hertz which I'll show you on the next slide and actually has the capability to stream data during our data collection. This is a pressure clipboard that we designed using some strain gauges that will give you the pressure on the front and rear of the deck and this is also the GPS Plex unit that we were showing on our research scooter that can collect at a hundred hertz and collects all kinds of different vehicle dynamics such as position velocity, acceleration, etc. And as I mentioned this is our dewy soft system which is capable of recording at a thousand hertz we have our terrain cam here our foot position cam here we're measuring shock displacement, pitch and roll of the scooter, steer angle, throttle and brake position velocity, handlebar load amps from the motor using a shunt at the motor, front foot and rear foot pressure and also acceleration and launch to no lateral vertical. And then one more quick thing that we can do also with those IMUs is we can look at different riders across different devices and this is a simple study where we just slapped one of those IMUs on the back of one of several different riders and just had them ride around town on different types of scooters and here we're evaluating their movement so this is as if you were looking down like on a bird's eye view and the wider the larger the heat map the more movement their torso has on the device so you can look as you're going from scooter one so take subject two on scooter one he has a very tight torso movement he's not moving at all he seems to be very balanced on the device he goes to scooter two he's got a little more movement and then he goes to a bike, a manual pedal bike and he's got a lot more movement so that's one of the simple things we can do in order to determine rider stability and next slide alright so that's basically all we have research and testing is essential to help further our understanding of performance and safety there's variabilities in rider variabilities in scooter design so we really need to determine what metrics can help define these safety standards and hopefully we presented a few metrics that maybe you guys can think about and add too thank you again, thanks for joining us and please feel free to reach out to either of us with questions and comments thank you Tina, thank you Steve okay up next we have Morgan Lommely and Alex Lognan with e-bike market demographics and standards so Morgan is the director of state and local policy for people for bikes she manages the bike industries present across the US to ensure that new and existing laws and policies benefit bike riders and Alex is the policy counsel for people for bikes he provides policy counsel for state and local monitoring programs thank you guys for being here today thank you so much, hi good morning or good afternoon everyone this is Morgan Lommely and thank you for that brief introduction we are here Alex and I are here to provide just an overview specific to electric bicycles I understand and I've been fortunate to listen in on a lot of helpful information regarding scooters and micro mobility devices and I'll give you all a quick overview of people for bikes and the areas that we work in specifically and wanted to kind of preempt this whole presentation with a caveat that Alex and I are bike and e-bike policy experts and certainly can't speak to electric scooters and hoverboards and the variety of other devices that are addressed today and hopefully this is helpful to you all so I'll move on to the next slide please hey Morgan sorry to cut you off I'm not seeing your screen right now go ahead and ask me to share again are you going to control the slides or shall I let me try asking to share again was there a little pop up perfect all right we should be ready to go here wonderful sounds like that works so I'll move on here you'll hear from my colleague Alex our policy council in just a few minutes will be tag teaming this presentation and then our subsequent one later in the day I promised a quick overview of people for bikes people for bikes bike industry trade association are actually equal parts of 501c3 foundation charitable foundation and Alex and I work squarely on our 501c6 coalition side so we're the bike industry trade association people for bikes has been in existence for about 20 years and we represent nearly 200 members of the bike industry that make and sell bikes, bike accessories, electric bicycles all of the major brands that you know of all our ones are mostly represented in our coalition so we speak on behalf of the bike industry today and as I mentioned our members make complete bicycles complete e-bicycles, parts, accessories and components anything that's on a bike or that is a bike in its complete form it is manufactured by our members so I'll get into demographic sales data and research around electric bicycles and Alex will cover the existing federal product safety standards and regulations voluntary or not that govern the manufacturing of electric bicycles low speed electric bicycles so thanks for bearing with me as I kind of go into a few of the details around who currently rides e-bikes and what we know is much different than or kind of what we know and what we've observed is much different than some of the demographics around e-bike riders only five years ago if we had had this discussion five years ago we would have noted that e-bike riders in general are primarily folks who currently ride bikes who are looking to continue to ride bikes in older age or to overcome any kind of physical or cognitive limitation currently today we're seeing electric bicycle riders of all stripes, of all ages of all types of physical and cognitive abilities couples currently ride e-bikes to overcome any kind of limitations that one might have in keeping up on a bike we're also seeing a number of different uses for e-bikes for transportation and mobility purposes in cities primarily increase as well as people are looking for either a replacement for a vehicle or something to supplement the way they get around town for trips that are primarily within one to five miles and we know that the most trips that people take in the country are under five miles and very easily accessible by bike but even more it's easily accessible by e-bikes since e-bikes help overcome any of the barriers to bicycling including terrain carrying cargos and kids maybe some of the barriers to car ownership so the demographics of e-bike riders are very broad and we understand that that's growing as well as more types of e-bikes enter into the marketplace that overcome any of the barriers to bicycling or even the barriers to car ownership sales so the 2018 e-bike market was more than $15 billion and if you look at e-bike units so that's an individual e-bike that was sold at the store that number has over the last five years has grown almost 1000% so in 2016 when people for bikes really started doing some in-depth policy and regulatory work around e-bikes the e-bike unit sales at a local bike shop were about 17,000 and in 2020 only in the first six months that's 115,000 so you can all infer that this growth is tremendous and unprecedented within the bike industry and only set to grow more these are numbers that we source from the NPD group which is a consumer experiment provides data to the bike industry and these numbers are sourced from independent bike retailers and don't cover online sales either and online sales account for I would say at least 25 to 40% of e-bike sales too so these numbers are generally understated but do paint that picture that e-bike sales are growing very rapidly we're going to get into some studies and speed issues and you heard from Dr. Chris Chair already today you have or will hear from John MacArthur and a number of other experts who are anticipating the form are the experts on speeds and some of the usage studies are on electric bicycles but I wanted to highlight a few aspects of the body of research that's already out there that paints the picture of the relative safety of riding a electric bicycle compared to riding a bike and other micromobility devices so e-bikes in the not in federal statutes but in 28 states and counting are classified within three classes a class 1 and class 2 e-bike the maximum assisted speed is 20 miles an hour that's not the average speed that's just the speed at which the motor will cut off and what we know from the body of research that's been conducted in the last few years is that e-bikes of course travel slightly faster than regular bikes on flat and uphill surfaces but in terms of on downhill surfaces and some flat surfaces but the average speeds of e-bikes are very similar to that of the bikes but it really depends on the desired experience of the e-bike rider what we know is that many of those folks who ride e-bikes within the demographics that presented aren't looking for speed they're looking for a bike-like experience and of course they're subject to the same statutory or post in speed limits so many of the preconceived notions around the speeds of electric bikes are anecdotal in nature and not supported by that body of research so all that to say that the average speeds of an e-bike rider are similar to that of a traditional bike rider and very much subject to the terrain the type of e-bike, the type of rider and that desired experience so I always caution against a wholesale statements around the average speed of an e-bike it really depends on the number of factors one study out of Israel shows that riding the riding speeds of e-bike riders compared to regular cyclists was about three to five miles an hour faster and very broadly speaking I think that's representative of the research that your uphill speeds and your flat speeds are just a little bit faster to the tune of three to five miles an hour faster than a traditional bike rider I will speak to some of the research that's been developed by a number of the folks who are participating in this form but again kind of paints the picture of a survey of about 1,800 e-bike riders this survey was conducted and I believe 2018 and some of the results that came out of it showed that what we know from crash severity of bike riders versus e-bike riders is that the severity the number of crashes is generally similar but the severity of an e-bike related crash is generally a little bit higher the crash risk between class 1 and class 3 e-bikes is similar like I said but the severity is a little bit higher there's a note here on speeds, average speeds of a class 3 e-bike is of course a little bit faster than a traditional bike and we are finding that the conflict rates and kind of safety oriented maneuvers of e-bike riders in general are different than those of bike riders that we examine separately oops I want to point out a couple studies that were actually conducted, gosh it seems like a long time ago but in 2014 the city of Boulder, Colorado thought an onset of e-bike riders on shared infrastructure so generally separated bike infrastructure and what they decided to do was plant not plant but survey the types of bike riders and e-bike riders that were using our shared infrastructure here in Boulder, Colorado and for a year long study and what they noticed was back in 2014 already about 1% of all bike riders were e-bike riders and there were no noted issues of conflicts or crashes or issues related to passing or speeds as e-bike riders and bike riders and other trail users used that shared infrastructure together so again gosh we're looking at something that's already 6 years old now but those studies kind of carry true forward today as well we're seeing that e-bike riders and bike riders are able to use shared infrastructure with relative minimal hazards to each other Jefferson County, Colorado represents about 7 million unique users every year on their shared bike infrastructure and Jefferson County also saw a number of e-bike riders starting to use their shared infrastructure and decided to study that and what they, the two major takeaways from this research is that a lot of the first is that a lot of the perceived conflict around e-bike riders from the perspective of a bike rider or other trail user were just that were perceived and when they asked people what their opinions were before an e-bike ride and after an e-bike ride, those opinions are generally much more favorable after they actually got to test one out about 2 thirds of park visitors had a more favorable opinion of e-bikes after they had ridden one for the first time so there's a lot of emotion around the perceptions of e-bike riders and then when asked whether they knew they were sharing the trail with an e-bike rider, if they weren't riding an e-bike you know more than 2 thirds of those folks did not realize they were sharing one with them but might have a kind in a survey that that shared experience was not something that they desired so again it goes to show that there's still a lot to learn and to kind of prove in terms of how e-bikes and bike riders share a trail from a human dimensions perspective but there's still also a lot of emotion and unjustified angst around the sharing that infrastructure that I think we can overcome as more people do share infrastructure and more people ride e-bikes for the first time so again I won't go into too much detail here because I imagine that Dr. Cherry and John McArthur might have covered this already in terms of e-bike research but there is a fascinating and very in-depth survey of e-bike owners that was published in 2018 that looks at really the different segments of demographics of types of e-bike riders and organizes that into kind of older adults, younger adults and females and families and their desired experiences and their reasons for using an e-bike and it covers everything from the desire to stay active older in life the desire to stay mobile without a car in urban areas and the desire to carry cargo and kids around town to replace shorter car trips and the safety findings within that survey are fascinating as well just showing that people generally feel safer riding an e-bike than a traditional bike as they move around town people are able to get where they need to go faster but also taking a longer route to avoid what they would consider unsafe assignments of road or intersections and also to receive safety plays a really big role in whether someone will ride an e-bike or a bike instead of other modes of transportation, so I would recommend everyone review that for more information on demographics and the types of people who ride e-bikes and why so with that I'll turn it over to my colleague Alex for some information on some of the federal safety standards around e-bike manufacturing Thanks Morgan Alex I'm happy to do that Great, just do a quick audio check to make sure you can hear me I can hear you Yep, I can hear you Thank you very much and thanks for having us today. I'll move quickly here since I know we're a little bit short on time and I want to make sure we can take some questions for all the presenters on this panel I just want to do a quick overview of some of the federal safety standards that do apply to electric bicycles in the United States and an important caveat to starting here with 16 CFR section 1512 this is the section of the Code of Federal Regulations that specifies what the requirements are for both bicycles and electric bicycles but there's something kind of in the background of this section and that is a federal statute that actually specifies what an electric bicycle is and only devices that meet the requirements of that federal statute in fact are subject to these bike regulations here and that has a few parameters as well so essentially the e-bikes must have a maximum wattage of 750 watts and a maximum throttle powered speed of 20 miles per hour so when we focus on bicycles and the needs of our members that people for bikes were really thinking of the e-bikes that meet that federal definition and are in fact regulated as bicycles within the context of the CPSC regulations here so bicycles do have a very comprehensive set of regulations that apply to regulated broad range of their structural the structural integrity of the frame in the fork, their component functionality and then also they relate to things like use so I won't go through all these in detail but I will give you a few examples the frame and fork will have to meet certain strength requirements to ensure that they won't fracture under certain types of loads, that they don't have sharp edges on them, that things like candle bars have caps on them to prevent against something like an impalement in the event that there's a crash they regulate things like drivetrain strength so how strong the chain is going to be and how much load it can take in terms of components obviously braking is a big one you must have front and rear brakes you have a specified stopping distance that bicycle and an e-bike both need to meet and then there's also regulations pertaining to where the brakes need to be brake levers need to be located in order to be accessible to the bike rider and in terms of functionality there's some use related things like pedal clearance so that when you're cornering the user isn't likely to clip a pedal and have a crash as a result of that impact between the bike and the ground and then also things like toe clearance so that the wheel doesn't get stuck behind the rider's toe and fixed out at a turning angle and in fact the rider wants to go straight or when the rider is trying to turn it doesn't bump the foot and prevent them from turning so there's a these are pretty in-depth in terms of regulating the bicycle itself but they don't in any way address the specific features of an e-bike in terms of the drive unit the battery management system the charger things like that those are not addressed in 16 CFR part 1512 one important thing to note is that on e-bikes the electrical system doesn't control the braking the brakes may interact with the electrical system through a brake inhibitor meaning that if the rider squeezes the brake it will cut off the motor as a safety feature but brakes are either cable actuated or they're typically on a separate cable actuated system or a hydraulic line that is independent of the electrical system. Next slide Morgan you've already heard a lot about UL 2849 today so I'm not going to go into a lot more detail here but suffice to say this is the voluntary standard that the bike industry work together to create that addresses those aspects of an e-bike that are not addressed in the CPSC regulations for bicycles so the drive unit the battery the battery management system wiring the power inlet the charger these types of issues are all addressed in UL 2849 so between these two between the CPSC standards that are in 16 CFR part 1512 and UL 2849 I think the bike industry feels good that there's a pretty comprehensive set of standards in place to deal with the various structural and electronic and battery components of an electric bicycle. Next slide Morgan you know I think the things that's unique about bicycles in this conversation is that they have been regulated for so long we're an old industry and the consumer product safety commission regulations go back I think more than 40 years at this point so they have a very long history and a very very long standing set of regulations that the bike industry has invested a lot of resources into complying with as a result of the CPSC regulatory structure all bicycles and e-bikes that enter the U.S. also are equipped with certificates of conformity to demonstrate their compliance with the CPSC standards so I think the bike industry feels that it's in a little bit of a unique position and that it already has a lot of these legal requirements in place and so it doesn't really want to reinvent the wheel as we have this evolving technology of e-bikes kind of layered on to a very mature regulatory system for bicycles that's been in place for a long time. And next slide Morgan I think that wraps us up thank you and I'll turn it back over to our friends at the CPSC for questions I think. We got one more presentation but thank you Morgan and thank you Alex. So there was a slight change to our agenda Ben LaRocca will be speaking in place of Paul White for the intelligent shared mobility presentation awesome you got it up. Okay so Ben has more than 15 years of experience in government relations and public policy working on Capitol Hill state capitals and city halls across the country as a staff communicator and lobbyist and tech transportation manufacturing and consumer products he was an early employee at Lyme and now leads government partnerships for super pedestrian which is an engineering and robotics company based in Cambridge Massachusetts and also he works for their shared scooter brand link. Hey thanks so much I'm gonna get started by telling you guys a little bit of background about super pedestrian as my guess it's a little bit less of a household name and maybe some of the other scooter companies that you guys have heard from today we were founded in the early 2010s by a gentleman named Asak Biderman he was a physicist by training and he was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. He founded a lab called the sensible city lab in the late 2000s and the goal of this lab was to use big data to solve hard urban transportation problems so this was everything or you know could be things that are mundane how do you collect trash more efficiently but also was involved in things like early micro mobility projects like how do you rebalance station based bike shares more efficiently so they did like a bunch of work on the believe system in Paris which is one of the largest and earliest station based bike share systems so he did a lot of work on a lot of different things one thing was shared shared transportation to reduce congestion right so cities are cities are getting more dense and there's just ways that you know we're going to have to move more people and we're not exactly sure what so his thesis was that in order to do that we really needed smaller vehicles so he developed a technology called the vehicle intelligence system which I'll get into in a little bit more depth in a minute but it is really about how do you create affordable safe electric vehicles when you don't have ownership so if you own your own bike or you own your own scooter you know that it's charged you know that the tires are properly inflated you know that it's been maintained appropriately because you did all that yourself when you step on a shared vehicle or sit on a shared vehicle you don't have any of that same knowledge so and from just a cursory look you might not know clearly that the person that wrote it before you you wrote it downhill too fast and shorted out the motor or something like that so so you might not know some of those inherent unsafe issues that have been discussed at length by many of the many of the presenters today so we did this yes I'll get into it his first product was an e-bike called the Copenhagen wheel so superpressure is spun out of sensible city it produces Copenhagen wheel that was about seven years ago so this is an e-bike that the the motor the battery everything is in the rear wheel of a bike so it can be retrofitted on a normal bike or you can buy it as a system it also had one of the first graphical interfaces with a phone so the e-bike is controlled by an app so you can set you know how fast you want to go you know only have it provide power when you're going up hills etc those sort of things so about three years ago when scooters started started on the scene they said they saw some scooters you know they were probably not as robust as could have been in the beginning and they said hey we can make a scooter as safe and efficient as anybody so we should do that so they spent two years they bought every scooter they could find on the market in our D facility in Cambridge where they broke them down we saw earlier about the test that you can put scooters under where you do how many newtons of force can be on the stem or on the floor board or the handlebars before you have issues so they put them through a bunch of torture tests in their facility in Cambridge and they came up with a scooter you can see it on the screen here it's called LINC the scooter was released in late 2019 and at that time we paired with a bike share company called Zagster they've been around for about a decade doing a lot of scooter bike and e-bike deployments with colleges and cities and corporate campuses and our first market was Fort Pierce Florida so we've only been in the scooter sharing business for a little less than a year even though really our technology has been around for about a decade in the making so going on and just click the next slide but it does not appear to be advancing oh there we go here's the scooter you can see some safety features on here which I'll talk a little bit about it has two mechanical brakes and an electrical brake it's got a fairly large floor board so again we heard that different people like to stand in different ways on the floor board so we want to make sure that they that they're comfortable and it was designed to be used with a 5 percentile female and a 98 percentile male any of which would feel comfortable on the scooter and from a mechanical standpoint that it can withstand those loads and the forces that can be felt going over a bump or hitting a pothole etc this photo is in Columbus, Ohio where we are deploying with a number of our competitors so talking about vehicle intelligence system it monitors over a hundred common failures and so this can be used for multiple different fault levels you know if it detects that a single battery cell is not performing the way it should be it can shut that battery fault down if it detects a stuck throttle or broken brake lever those things are very common in the shared in the shared space because of vandalism or a scooter getting kicked over or something like that so it can detect those issues and then it will either shut a ride down if it needs to if it's not safe or it can prevent a ride from being sent and because it self monitors it will provide messages to our operations team that says hey come fix me hey I have a problem hey get me off the street because I shouldn't be out here and you know I don't want to my battery is low and I need somebody I don't completely go dead and and then become a hazard in the street for somebody to trip over so that does a couple things one it allows us to have a pretty low operational costs on two different fronts one it allows for a long lifetime of a vehicle based on our eight months or nine months in the field we think that our scooters are going to last about 2,500 rides a piece so our depreciation is quite low and then also it allows us to it knows when we need to fix scooters so we don't have unsafe scooters out in the field that need fixing without being fixed and we're not spending money on fixing scooters that should be out being written and being able to provide a service to the citizens of the city that we serve so this slide is a it is a demo that we did of a very high temperature day at our test market in Florida we on a very hot day we rode our scooter and a couple test scooters it was very hot and tested how the motor and the battery system was able to dis-pay heat so the blue line is the baseline of how the motor would normally function the orange line was another scooter as a demo and you can see the heat the peaks are a hotter temperature the yellow line was our scooter and the black line is the goal for heat dissipation and that VIS system was able to dissipate that heat safely with much lower peaks than the test scooter so even though we are a new scooter sharing company we have been at this a long time we have been thinking about this and really perfecting the technology for a long time so we have a patent portfolio that is quite extensive across the world and really dealing with some of those ways that the vehicles themselves can keep riders safe so I think something that is important to think about is we have heard about this today some of the most serious scooter accidents are generally with a collision with a motor vehicle a car hit somebody or something else happens it is a high percentage of serious serious injuries but a lot of the middle injuries the broken arms and the sprained ankles can be traced back to rider error or scooter malfunction and I think that is where we think we can make a big difference through VIS we can ensure that and basic vehicle design as well that the scooter we are putting out on the ground is going to minimize the ability of someone to get into any of those minor accidents that might happen and there is a much broader safety philosophy that goes behind that and if anybody is interested in having Link come to their city definitely happy to talk about that but anyways I know I will wrap it up there if anybody has any questions we would be happy to answer them Thanks Ben, thanks for speaking and thanks for being ready I know on short notice let's go through some of the questions that we have here let's see we got the two part question here I think seems to be directed for UL and maybe people for bikes but do you know how many explosions, fires or electrocutions have occurred with consumer e-bikes and not the shared e-bikes? This is Ben G as far as I know the data could be as accessible and available but I don't have it with me right now and it's something that we can definitely look into the data on that but I don't know the number off the top of my head between rideshare and consumer purchased devices and more than likely that would come from the NEISS system that was previously discussed earlier today This is Alex at People for Bikes I think we'd have to defer to that question we don't have any independent data that addresses that issue Okay, thanks and I guess I'll just ask the second part of the question or answer but how many injuries or fatalities have occurred from use of consumer e-bikes not shared e-bikes that were due to known product failure or defect as opposed to user error infrastructure or traffic motor vehicle crashes? This is Ben G, again it's going to be also going back into the CPSC NEISS system and looking at that data to analyze how many specifics there are differentiating but I don't know, we don't know the breakdown right now between rideshare and consumer products it would be a matter of analyzing the data Alright, thanks Ben G Okay, this question is for Exponent Did the riders comment on their experience riding on pavers and cobbles during dynamic tests? Did they feel stable? Was there discomfort? There was some comments we basically took surveys of all the riders following our testing the cobblestone and pothole riding was for something else, it wasn't for SAE research, that being said Tina was actually one of the people doing some of that riding and she had to drop off this call but she did talk about the discomfort riding on cobblestones cobbles and things like that the scooter and you can see in the data as well you can see all the vertical acceleration jumping drastically you can see all the shock displacement data and it's pretty apparent that it's not a very comfortable environment to ride on Okay, thanks Steve It looks like we have another question for Exponent but I think it can also be opened up to the group of thoughts on tire size and how it relates to transitioning between different kind of floor surfaces I'd be happy to start with that one that's actually some additional testing that we are looking at doing we have looked into doing more research with different tire sizes and a few different designs that being said the testing that we were doing focused on a single scooter it didn't have a number of different scooter designs within it but that is some testing that we are hoping to pursue in the near future Yeah this is Scott from Bird we've done an extensive amount of testing with different tire sizes and different tire materials and we've actually deployed vehicles that have everything from hard tires to kind of in between tires that do not have a tube but have an air pocket in them and we've kind of settled back on really an automotive grade tire for an e-scooter size vehicle and we found that with that combination of actually having a chamber with real air in it and not a solid tire gives the best performance over cobblestone and things of this currently we are using a 10 inch tire and don't feel there is a big advantage to going much larger Great thank you I think we got another question let me open up to the group what are your thoughts on a new CFR being written for e-scooter and e-mobility devices that reference the requirements similar to 16 CFR 1512 and also reference UL 2272 for requirements of e-scooter and e-mobility devices This is Benji and when it comes to that aspect of it if there is a mandate that would apply to the applicable standard if you look at other industries that have followed that rationale and that logic it makes it a more of a requirement then to comply with the full system level of evaluation so that would be one of the benefits of having such a consideration in place is that you would then have the aspect of each product on the market that it would comply with a adopted and known safety standard and would potentially result in a reduction of the potential explosions, fires and electrocutions that are addressed in the UL standard 2272 and or 2849 Great thanks Benji Ok Ben it looks like we got a question for you here Um It was mentioned that many minor injuries are caused by rider error. Is there data that indicates what types of errors riders make that leads injury? Um So I think there's a lot of decent sources out there Austin did a great study with the CDC I know Portland has done some work as well and it's been a long time I'm just putting out a really interesting and I thought really impressive safety safety sort of a data set out yesterday or the day before and I think what most of that data says is that a huge number of injuries are on like the first or second ride and so dealing with that is a big deal so like city of Seattle awarded permits last week one of the things that they are requiring is that all first time riders cap their speed at 8 miles per hour instead of the normal speed of 15 miles per hour and in hopes it will reduce that first time and then I think the other real main risk factor is so I think those two factors in general are two that are pretty important things like good vehicle design can help on a lot of other things like if you have been riding scooters for a while the difference between the 6 inch wheels, 8 inch wheels and 10 inch wheels make a huge difference and a 10 inch wheel with a good shock absorber with a good vehicle and sort of the first 6 inch wheel scooters that were being used a couple years ago Thanks Ben I think we have time for maybe one more question here a question for people for bikes I believe it's for people for bikes how do the e-bikes hazard scenarios differ if at all from the bicycle hazard scenarios I think this is a good opportunity to point out that the way that e-bikes are used and bikes are used is very similar and hazards and risks which are completely separate conversations really are dependent on not primarily dependent but what are the major factors availability of safe infrastructure for people to ride and I mentioned I talked a lot about desired experiences during our presentation the desired experiences are very similar between e-bike riders and bike riders the availability of safe connected comfortable infrastructure and I can't answer that question directly but I think we really need to point to the fact that e-bikes and bikes are similar in their operation and in their desired experiences and the relative safety of a rider is primarily dictated by the availability of safe and connected infrastructure Thank you Morgan So our last session of the day and our fifth session is policy and consumer safety and the moderator for this session is my colleague Jay Kadawala and I'll be handing it off to him now Thanks a lot Lawrence My name is Jay Kadawala I'm an electrical engineer working in the electrical group of engineering sciences at CPSC I've worked with the agency now for about four years and around the time that I started was when the UL 2272 outline of investigation was being becoming a published standard so since that time I've worked on lithium batteries and micro mobility products as they have evolved over the last few years and I'm also a Virginia licensed attorney but here really just doing this work in a technical capacity so have done quite a bit of testing work in this product area so that's my experience what I have to contribute here so with that I wanted to introduce the first speaker in our policy and consumer safety panel I'd like to introduce Sherry Schaffelin from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Sherry Schaffelin has 34 years of public service standing tribal state and federal government and non-profit she has led leadership positions in the federal highway administration office of planning, environment and realty for 16 years currently as director of the office of human environment she supervises three teams with responsibilities that include advanced, multimodal safety by addressing bicycle and pedestrian networks mobility innovation environmental justice and economic development so with that I'll turn it over to you Sherry Thank you very much I just really want to express my appreciation for all the great presenters thus far today there's just tremendous professional and high quality work going on and I really hope that we at the federal government can help apply and be partners in continuing to roll out mobility options that are safe and effective and give people of all abilities a choice to get where they need to go in an equitable way so everything we can all do to pull together to help that end we certainly appreciate it and look forward to working with everybody on that I am trying to represent today the high level overview of the work that my office has been facilitating and coordinating primarily with federal highways but across USDOT and that's going to include NHTSA our office of secretary and FTA and others that are all pulling together our subject matter expertise and resources and programs to try to be responsive to this growing and emerging mobility option so let me first start with I'm not getting the slide to move let's see there we go as you can imagine in a large organization we are trying to all speak with the same voice as we've had with many presentations already today but we are somewhat bound by a very long list of federal laws policy regulations and definitions that have kind of put pedestrian and bicycling activities into a box so it is not as easy for us to just rename and start calling things different things so we are all this is our current working definition to generally say micro mobility refers to any small low speed human or electric power transportation device including bicycle scooters electric assist fully electric bicycles scooters and other small lightweight and wheeled conveyances okay the reason that we are quite interested in this is micro mobility has been able to grow because of the gains that all of our partners local state federal land management agencies have made in implementing their bicycle and pedestrian networks and we have a large support and acknowledgement of all the efforts that have gone in to make all of these networks more ADA compliant particularly with the curb ramps so by virtue of having safer more complete streets trails sidewalks really the multimodal foundation of the supply is what is generating the demand that is provided by all the various micro mobility options we have heard about today and our contributions just in the bike ped world are about a billion dollars a year from various programs that leverages other monies all the planning activities that are accomplished under these resources at the stage for people to be opportunistic to figure out how to finance fixing completing gaps in their network so that people can actually get where they want to go and so let's that's the greatest thing that I think federal highways and us DOT is bringing to the table is to build out the bike and pedestrian network system and all the things we have that go with that so with this rapid evolution of micro mobility which we've heard about today let me share with you what it looks like through the eyes of a Fed certainly our challenge is how do we keep up in a conservative moving transportation planning project development design standard and financial management kind of world when we have a rapid evolution of micro mobility we care because these new travel modes are becoming a growing part of the picture of urban mobility I'll provide a few numbers in the next slide again to see how it looks through our eyes but basically the data and research are showing that these micro mobility services and devices can help improve mobility and service areas and also improve the effectiveness of transit systems and it will help us hopefully reduce the demand for vehicle trips and parking and even reduce traditional congestion and activity centers not just for passenger travel but also for goods delivery and the growing demand for last mile logistics with the use of e-cargo bikes deliveries and robots of various sorts we fund quite a few of these programs through a variety of federal aid funding sources so we certainly have an incentive that this investment fits in a sustainable transportation system that the economics work out the subsidies combined with the user fees you know create systems that have lasting value and lasting time to them because they are planning their lives their ways to work and other means around it and certainly from our perspective we start to figure out how many you know a new mode is introduced so now what's the mode shift look like who and why are people shifting from one mode to the next and how are people starting to trip train and move through space and urban areas and that all starts to fall in our planning and modeling and data management kinds of issues we also of course need to understand the design of these vehicles and how each of them interact with our various multimodal facilities because we have responsibility to design and provide guidance on how to design streets bicycle facilities and marketing and obviously deal with the safety data information and most importantly how to address the policy goals we have to make services more equitable and available to all users of all abilities another unique aspect is managing the operation of the fleet of vehicles so that they don't create accessibility barriers along sidewalks and congested pedestrian areas we've made a big investment in retrofitting facilities to make them compliant with ADA needs the sidewalks, the transit stations access to buses and to have these areas rendered inaccessible with dockless vehicles is just not going to be a win-win for anyone so kudos to everyone trying to make it work for all users and many of the aspects of the micro-mobility devices use innovative technologies from various technology to manage software used to identify service locations and the message certainly in this administration and from our secretary, Elaine Chao is that we need to engage with emerging technologies to address legitimate public concerns about safety, security and privacy without hampering innovation so that is our posture moving forward so many folks have shown some of these slides and growing numbers and the increase as a manager how it looks to me is the feds have to engage we have to build our capacity to be ready to answer questions that our agency leadership is going to have that our stakeholders are going to have primarily for Federal Highway for example the state DOTs and the Metropolitan Planning Organizations and then certainly Congress we are seeing an increased demand and technical assistance request as reauthorization proposals are moved forward but a couple of the stats that are impressive and referring obviously to the NACTO data in the United States in 2019 people took 136 million trips on shared bikes e-bikes and scooters and that was 60% more than 2018 and since 2010 the numbers show about 342 million trips on shared bikes and scooters in 2019 109 cities had DOCLA scooter programs 45% increase from 2018 and it contributed to an over 100% increase in trips taken on scooters nationwide so what this tells me is that managing a program to build out infrastructure is the demand for having higher quality comfortable infrastructure to accommodate the variety of users that are trying to squeeze into the available space is going to be a challenge and how they're going to move through intersections becomes a challenge but I think that demand for more comfortable infrastructure will certainly expect it to amplify as we look at the post pandemic user needs and perspectives that have changed so one place to keep track of this and I want to do a great shout out to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and USDOT I hope folks have had a chance to visit and see some of their data they released in 2019 a new interactive map that documents the rapid growth of docked and dockless bike share and e-scooter systems across the country and it shows by city the name the system and you can see trend video from 2015 to 2019 as the data symbols grow come go away and come back in various graphical ways so the total bike share and e-scooter systems had reached almost 300 communities serving more than 200 cities as of July 2019 they also released a new map that shows docked bike share ridership has fluctuated during the recent pandemic months and we've included a second link down there for folks to click on to see some of that and please stay tuned to this site because we'll be releasing some data that shows detailed comparative months to comparative months trend for 12 of the major cities that have public data available and ways to play with that data that are of great interest to researchers and advocates and industry and practitioners so moving on to the work that we're doing in research in regards to working with folks on federal applications we have an interagency agreement with the Forest Service that will include a research project to assess and evaluate emerging trail users and uses it will identify micro mobility options and include e-technologies such as e-bikes or other technology and assisted devices for people with disabilities and this project will begin in out another year our federal lands office we are working with them to research the future of e-bikes on public lands and how to effectively manage a growing trend this will identify the inventory of existing and potential impacts related e-bike use on public lands and be followed by an analysis of the data to inform science-based decision-making and the management process for land managers we have also joined the national park service emerging mobility working group to share best practices and all this information coordination is really important because as many of you may know the department of interior is getting ready to finalize their e-bike regulations and that really starts to send national signals that were ready, willing and able to support the US traveling public to use these devices in increasingly different places and once folks start using them in recreational sense they'll start using them to get to parks or visit nearby gateway communities and so we start to introduce and send signals of safety and use and ability to handle these devices on the system that we have available so we will continue to be working with all the federal land management agencies to share best practices and help with safe rollout so moving on to our kind of laundry list here of work that we have underway and let me check the time and move through this pretty quickly we have a number of internal working groups that include people from safety infrastructure our operations that deal with MUT CD planning and subject matter experts that are all trying to work together to kind of lump all the new activities going on in mobility innovation into a micro mobility group, a mobility on demand and a mobility innovation workgroup so the point here is that we are quite able to push and pull information as people want to work with us, have request invite speakers in and keep the good body of knowledge going as we all come up to speed and try to help in these issues we also with our growing capacity building our position now to support a number of external coordination activities and I just give a few examples here and we're certainly willing to hear other key places where we should be involved but working with APTA and a number of organizations in the DC area to have conversations about moving micro mobility forward the large transportation research board has a number of committees that are addressing this but a prime one is the mobility management committee that tries to figure out how to integrate all the shared mobility activities and certainly National Science Foundation we've been working closely with them with their smart and connected communities and helping to review proposals and provide technical assistance on innovations for what kind of new mobility devices solve and communities with the university community working very closely with community organizations so that the research is applied it's great program and certainly the larger associations that are the ability to bring a wide variety of stakeholders together to share information we've recently got staff membership in the North American Bike Share Association on the right hand side you'll see a number of research projects products micro mobility memos and I note these are internal so they're not going to be publicly posted but they are what we try to produce to bring everyone on the same page in a really large organization which we've done with kind of background and perspectives on what the federal role is and then there's a phase two memo that is addressing status of research all of the well nine different federal agencies where we interviewed federal agencies on what their needs and issues and research issues were and we'll be sharing that so that we can coordinate amongst the feds working in this space and perhaps move to an informational sharing body in the near future and with our safe routes of school program we wanted to get some insight into if children are starting to use micro mobility devices what you have externally available is this report on the basics of micro mobility and devices for personal transport that we have worked with the pedestrian bicycle and information center from University of North Carolina we are significantly fun them to do a lot of bicycle and pedestrian work and have extended some requests for services to keep track of a lot of the micro mobility issues and help us synthesize and package information and one of those is e-scooter management in mid-sized cities we also are working on a case study to that was described the evolution of micro mobility in Santa Monica California as it's gone up and down and they've responded to challenges as they've rolled out their program coming soon so keep an eye on our livability website our micro mobility fact sheets on our activities and research underway for both Federal Highway and US DOT and then of course I've mentioned the BTS maps so I will end with that and be happy to answer any questions I think that's where we are double check with those are the pictures of the resources that are up at the pedestrian bicycle information center and sorry my slide was stuck and then really just the final closing slide here this is the work that we have under development as well working with how multimodal networks will fit in our connected and automated vehicle future and integrating emerging mobility and a transportation management for all the planners out there and with our curbside management work what we're building on from some of ITE's work is we'll include how we manage the curb for micro mobility devices as well and through our ITS JPO office working on special studies about opportunities and challenges for shared mobility infrastructure so keep an eye on these sites and this information and then closing with the transportation research board information it's a big sign that state DOT's and transit agencies are supportive in trying to figure out how to manage micro mobility by through these very competitive research programs picking research topics that have to do with micro mobility and you can see those listed there and we have summarized a lot of this again a attachment that you will see in the handouts and access for contacting any of us that we can so we can help you with anything that I brought up today. Thank you. Thanks a lot Sherry really really great insight so that last document that she was referring to is in the handout tab on the right side if you have any issues opening that up you can contact any of the the contact the points of contact and we can provide that for you even later on if there is any issues so with that let's move on to the next speaker so the next presentation is safety of shared micro mobility systems by Edward Foo and Lawrence Willse Samson so Edward leads the policy legislative and regulatory functions at BIRD he led the creation of nearly every state law governing the micro mobility industry and is a frequent speaker and lecture on micro mobility policy and regulatory issues prior to joining BIRD Ed was a litigator at Davis Polk and Wardwell in New York he holds a JD from NYU and a BS in computer science from Rutgers thank you Ed Lawrence Willse Samson is a senior manager for policy research at BIRD he holds the position of senior research fellow at the Center for Competition Regulation and Economic Development at the University of Johannesburg he has a doctorate in economics from Columbia University so with that I'll turn it over to Edward and Lawrence hey guys thanks for that introduction Lawrence my name is Ed and I'm here with a different Lawrence today to talk about the unique safety considerations associated with shared micro mobility devices a lot of the discussion today including from our much smarter coworkers at BIRD focused on the safety considerations associated with the physical hardware especially for the scooter which is a new physical mode for riders but what Lawrence and I want to talk about today are the safety considerations associated with the shared ecosystems that these devices belong to it's one of the very unique aspects of scooters and micro mobility generally which is that they are overwhelmingly used as part of shared systems and not as privately owned devices and this pattern of usage introduces its own safety considerations that have to be considered as part of the broader micro mobility safety discussion so today we're going to look at four major areas policy governance interface and adoption and Lawrence is going to speak to policy thanks Ed and thanks to everyone for the opportunity to talk today so in terms of policy I think the first observation I'd start with is that unlike more mature modes policy is set locally and it varies considerably from city to city and I want to talk about three aspects of policy as they relate to scooters today but before I jump in I think I'll note that this doesn't encompass policy for other vehicles on the road and I think as others have mentioned probably the most important factor for preventing severe crashes is to be the network of protected bike infrastructure or controls or speed limits on cars and trucks but in terms of scooters actually just to stop there I think one of the things that makes it really hard to study the impact of different policies across cities is that cities are very different from each other both in terms of the bike infrastructure but also in terms of the set of policies that they have around our vehicles so you're not just changing one policy as you go from one city to the other the comparisons is really hard to tease out the impact of the different sets of policies so there's lots of confounding factors so in terms of the policy things that are important that we see in terms of how we're regulated I want to focus on three aspects the first is speed limits so this can be controls on the speeds that we can go the controls on where we can ride so both in terms of the operational areas but also in terms of geofencing and then in terms of availability which is limitations on the times when scooters might be available so for speed limits generally speed citywide speed limits are capped at 18 miles power we also see some cities with 15 miles power and then there's one city at least that I know of that has 10 miles power speed limit in addition to the city level controls and speed there are geospeding limits as well so there might be different speeds applicable across different parts of the city then in terms of where where scooters can go there's both the operational area but there's also parts of the city that are maybe closed to scooters or parts of the city that might be pedestrianized and closed to motor vehicles to cars both of those things might have implications for safety outcomes and finally there are choices about whether or not to have a 24 hour service seven days a week or to limit that service for certain hours and both cities and operators might have different approaches and that also has different implications for safety so in short this is a rich area for research there's lots of variation across cities and there's lots of work here to be done so passing it back to you Ed so in conjunction with what rules the city sets it's also important how they enforce them and to take the policy dimensions that Lawrence was talking about for speed limits and for locations and availability these are enforced electronically for shared microability which means that a rider on a scooter in a 15 mile per hour city can't go faster than 15 miles per hour no matter what if the GPS detects that the scooter is in a certain area the scooter will slow down and shut off automatically and after a certain time you just can't unlock the scooter at all and this is kind of a new enforcement paradigm private cars, bikes they don't do this your car doesn't slow down when you turn on to a different road you reach a certain street and it doesn't get disabled after midnight and I know David Zipper has a great article in CityLab about what such an impact might have what this paradigm might have the impact it could have on car safety but the point is that we don't do this for anything right now except for shared bikes and scooters and so this is a new area and I think there's a lot of opportunity and also some risk and the opportunity I think is obvious to all of us which is that there's a lot more compliance it's one thing to educate riders on what they should do but it's another to take that discretion away from them because when you get into the hands of the vehicle you get a lot higher rates of compliance as a result but I think when you phrase it that way you can also see the risk inherent to it which is that one, people aren't used to their vehicles being enforced like this and two, is that policy makers aren't always used to setting policy under such expectations so I'll give two examples one is speed limits a lot of the road speed limits for cars are set at the 85th percentile so the idea is that 15% of drivers will exceed that speed for various reasons at any given time like passing or so on but a speed limit on a scooter when you put it on as part of the speed governor is absolute your scooter can't go faster than that even if you need it to and so from a policymaker perspective the question isn't what's the speed we should recommend people travel at or what 85% of people should be driving at the question is really what is the absolute maximum speed anyone should ever be allowed to travel on one of these devices no matter the situation and that's a very different approach to setting speed limits geofences is another example so for starters it's kind of a strange experience to have your scooter just slow down and stop as if you hit some kind of invisible wall there's not often a lot of signage that tells scooter riders or shared microability riders generally what's going on and so there's some challenges with rider education and awareness that we have to tackle but GPS is also isn't a perfectly accurate system once I was I was riding a competitor's scooter when it suddenly came to a stop in the middle of a busy intersection right as the light was turning and it turns out that the scooter thought that I was at the pedestrian plaza at the quarter of the intersection where the city had set up a very sensible geofence but obviously it didn't intend for the geofence to start right in the middle of the intersection and so I'm thankful that everything worked out okay but it's a good example I think of the limitations of automatic compliance that we have to take into account when we start enforcing things with this new kind of paradigm and I'll pass it to Lawrence to talk about interface thanks Ed so another safety tool that's unique to shared devices is the app interface that our riders use to access our devices so we can layer into that some safety nudges and training that might not be available always on private vehicles so obviously there's an art to this you don't want to overwhelm the rider too much information or too many things at the start of when they open the app that's going to overwhelm them they're going to ignore and skim through or not use the service at all so you want to just tailor to be exactly the right amount one of the set of things that we do is around rider education you open the app and you'll get an education on the rules of the road for the city that you're in before you're able to ride actually before we even launched in Chicago last month we pushed a safety quiz in the app which riders could take to learn the rules of the road and earn ride credits there's a few more opportunities to be innovative one is warm-up mode that's an option available to riders to choose to ride with reduced acceleration you open the app and you select the warm-up mode and the acceleration is automatically reduced another feature which we've implemented is helmet selfie so riders can choose to take a picture of themselves wearing a helmet and receive ride credits at the end of the ride that's also something that we've done and finally there's also in addition there's also end of ride messaging if riders have ended the ride in a no-park area or something like that you might send them a message or a warning to try and encourage better behavior so the app interface which is on our shared vehicles is a safety level that isn't always available to private devices or not implemented in private devices and it's something that we encourage other riders to work with us on and develop and perhaps eventually for us all to come to some consensus on so just now handing back to Ed Great and so this is the the last thing that I wanted to talk about is the same slide that I guess everyone had the same idea of presenting today this slide is the reason I guess why we're all here and shared micro mobility and scooters in particular are really really really popular I don't think most of us anticipated a year or two years ago it's just exactly how popular this would be and it's particularly the fact that shared scooters went from zero to 88 million in pretty much two years because they were shared and not something you had to buy and so it's hard to find a kind of precedent for this in transportation modes or even in a lot of consumer products more generally and so this rate of adoption you know obviously it's very exciting for a lot of reasons but it also brings some risks of course when you introduce so many new rides you have a lot of new riders that are riding a brand new mode sometimes for all intents and purposes just didn't exist a few years ago drivers aren't as familiar and people are going to be riding in neighborhoods and cities without a lot of adequate bike infrastructure and all of these factors affect safety and risk but I think there's also opportunity here there's safety in numbers, the sheer number of car trips that are being eliminated and I think in tens of millions of car trips off the street and that's a meaningful safety impact that's maybe hard to quantify but it has a real impact most importantly as I think people before me have said many times more eloquently but infrastructure really is the single most important thing we can do for bike and scooter safety and this isn't a new idea it's not something that anyone's just discovered recently but the harsh reality is that it's one of the hardest things for us to do because of politics and like it or not we just remain a dominant mode of travel and they don't particularly like their parking or their lanes being taken away from them but I want to tie this to what Ms. Schafflein and Dr. Cherry mentioned earlier which is that when there were those tragic fatalities in Atlanta I think last year the city one option for the city might have been to shut down the program and said look we don't want to deal with this you should get back in your cars surrounding yourselves with several tons of metal makes you safer but they didn't do that and they took a different tack the city of Atlanta recognized that the real underlying issue here was that their citizens wanted to ride bikes and scooters but that their transportation network was designed for cars but that more importantly now thanks to this massive demand for shared microability there's also overwhelming demand for bike lanes and safe places to ride and so the city now had enormous political will and momentum to triple their bike infrastructure and invest millions into their streets to make them safer for everyone not just bike riders and scooter riders but pedestrians and other cars and drivers too and so that's the long-term change I think we're most excited about a bird these kinds of structural changes that creates safer streets for all of us are ultimately I think have a bigger impact than almost anything else we can be doing and so we're really excited about that possibility thanks alright thanks a lot and Lawrence I really appreciate your participation today I know getting late in the afternoon here so really appreciate everyone's patience so for the next presentation I'd like to introduce Jennifer Huddleston with a statement on safety and continued innovation in micro-mobility Jennifer is the director of technology and innovation policy at the American Action Forum where she focuses on the intersection of emerging technology and law her work has appeared in a wide range of outlets including USA Today, the Chicago Tribune Business Insider Slate The New York Daily News and The Hill Jennifer has appeared on media outlets to discuss technology-related issues she has also testified before Congress and state legislatures and has been a regular panelist on issues such as transportation innovation data privacy and liability for content on online platforms including Section 230 Jennifer has a J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law and a B.A. in political science from Wellesley College Welcome Jennifer and please continue thank you Thank you Hopefully all the technology is working right now Thank you for the introduction as was said I am the director of technology and innovation policy at the American Action Forum where my research broadly speaking covers the intersection of law and technology the topic of micro mobility has certainly been an exciting one when it comes to that intersection as we've continued to see innovations and transportation technology occurring more rapidly and in ways that many of us could not have anticipated In my statement today I plan to make three key points first when considering the safety related to these micro mobility products particularly e-scooters that policy makers should consider making regulations that don't deter future innovation or improvements in safety Secondly that when safety policy is at hand we must be cautious that policies don't unfairly distinguish based on the nature of the ownership of these devices whether they're shared or private devices and finally what some of the opportunities for non-regulatory actions that can improve safety might be so to begin with I want to discuss a bit about how policy makers should consider approaching safety in such a way that doesn't deter innovation or future improvements and there are two main issues that can arise either standards and descriptions can be set in such a way that are too narrow or too broad and in both cases they can actually deter innovation in some ways we can look at what's happened in some states to see how this might play out particularly in the micro mobility realm for example in Pennsylvania scooters were initially not considered street legal in part because of a very narrow definition the definitions and regulations had been updated earlier to account for subways so they were imagining a scooter that riders rode upright that had large wheels and that the wheels went side to side when the current e-scooters came on the market most of them had wheels that went front to back, they were much smaller and you could have a variety of designs so as a result there was a lot of questions about what exactly categories of safety regulations and of existing regulations regarding road deployment these fell under in Alabama though scooters encountered a different problem the definition of motorcycles was so broad that there were actually arguments that it included dockless e-scooters and e-bikes as we heard about in some of the other presentations now I think most of us would say probably there are significant differences in the safety risk between a motorcycle and an e-scooter or e-bike but under the way the law was constructed riders would have been expected to have to be subject to the same requirements and innovators would have been subject to the same regulations regarding their devices as much more powerful motorcycles when considering these regulations as well we also want to make sure that the description of the scooters does not deter potential safety improvements so for example right now most scooter designs have two wheels but it's possible that an innovator may come up with a safer design that involved four wheels but was still something that would be basically considered a scooter it might be possible that someone comes up with an adaptive device that is designed for people who may need to sit while using an e-scooter but that would still be classified as a form of micro mobility with this in mind policy makers should consider how a more flexible approach to these regulations can allow such improvements to continue and not just so narrowly define a transportation innovation such that we aren't able to have those improvements particularly ones that may promote future safety with we've seen such rapid change in the transportation environment in part because we've seen policy makers signaling their desire for more transportation innovation and recognizing that we're seeing people think of creative ways to help everyone get from point A to point B in a safer more efficient and more enjoyable manner now when it comes to these safety standards we want to make sure that they are applied in a way that actually addresses safety and aren't used for other purposes so my second point extends from that first point in that we want safety policy to be to not be dependent on whether these are shared devices or whether they're a private device as has been mentioned in some cases we've seen cities implement speed limits this seems like a reasonable safety precaution at times but they're typically only applied to devices that are shared devices only applied to devices that are part of a memorandum of understanding or a pilot program in a way so a private scooter isn't subject to the same speed limit in some ways this might be the same as having one speed limit for taxi cabs and another speed limit for private cars if the policies at play are actually about safety then they should be applied equally to these devices unless there is a specific reason why the safety concern does not apply to a private device as well as a publicly shared device so with that in mind and that there are certainly a lot of ways to address this but we should make sure that they are applied equally and that we are not over regulating shared devices which have become increasingly popular while allowing private devices to have the freedom to innovate and explore finally we also consider what non regulatory elements might be able to improve safety we've seen a lot of growth early as scooters have gained popularity when it comes to the public this includes companies that have offered safety days and other informative things that we just heard about like safety quizzes and apps that can improve safety without regulation additionally we've seen social norms evolve in such a way as people integrate these devices into the existing transportation ecosystem other things that could help include perhaps signage in areas where these devices are new to alert motorists as well as pedestrians that they're now in the area and to be aware of them it can also include public education around things such as helmet wearing or how to ride safety done by government officials as well as by the private companies and including things like safety days where new riders can learn how to properly operated device what sorts of things they may encounter in their neighborhood in a lot of ways though these are very community specific and innovators and policy makers should consider working together to determine how best they can go about serving that particular communities needs particularly when it comes to what a rider might encounter in their neighborhood but also to what other issues may arise for example if you're in the DC area that a lot of us are in even in the broader area issues can be very different if you're in old town Alexandria you're dealing with a lot different landscape and a lot more narrow streets versus if you're in other parts of the city where you may have bike lanes or broader streets where it may be more easy to operate so working with those communities and working with both the riders and the policy makers and the innovators can help provide a safe environment for everyone and also can help make other people in the community more aware of how to approach these things we've seen transportation changing more rapidly than ever before and it's an exciting time in this space it's also important to everyone that we have a safe mode of transportation scooters have shown that they are a way of safely getting from point A to point B and an enjoyable way for a lot of people of solving that last mile problem in that way we've seen an incredible growth and popularity has been discussed multiple times today and so we're in addressing these issues and considering potential safety regulations we want to ensure that we allow innovators to continue to solve problems in creative ways I don't think many of us would have predicted in 2010 that we'd be sitting here in 2020 discussing e-scooters as the next mode of transportation so whatever that next spark of innovation is we want to make sure that we allow it to continue as well thank you thanks a lot Jennifer really really great presentation and comments there so now we want to move on to our next speaker I'd like to introduce Rachel Weintraub with a presentation on consumer micro mobility safety issues Rachel is the legislative director in general council for consumer federation of America her primary focus is advocacy on product safety issues representing CFA on behalf of consumers before the consumer product safety commission congress state legislatures and within voluntary standard setting organizations she frequently talks to the media about product safety and other consumer issues and has spoken about product safety issues at numerous national conferences Rachel also serves on the F-15 executive committee of ASTM and is a past president of the international consumer product health and safety organization and previously served on the board of ANSI Rachel is a graduate