BELOIT
Beloit’s Bird scooter program has been shut down, not by the city, but by the vendor who worked for Bird as a contractor for the program.
But if the future of the phone app-driven electric scooter program in Beloit is now in limbo, Bird still has a short-term foothold in Janesville via a program launched earlier this month by a different vendor.
But Janesville’s program, just three weeks into a three-month pilot OK’d by the city, has drawn fire from downtown business operators over a ridership they say is predominately underage.
Nick Yoss, a South Beloit, Illinois, paving operator who contracted through Bird to make the electric rental scooters available in downtown Beloit, said Thursday he nixed his agreement with the California tech company after a year. He said Bird was “non-responsive” to problems and made progressive cuts to his pay agreement as a Bird scooter fleet manager.
Yoss said he is not sure if Bird will relaunch a scooter program in Beloit, but he said that last week he returned all of Bird’s scooters, erased his contractor’s account with the firm and severed his relationship as an independent fleet manager, effectively curtailing the program in Beloit.
“Bird is non-responsive. They don’t respond to concerns from the city (of Beloit) or fleet managers, and they’ve then done things to make more work for the fleet managers. But they want to lower the pay for fleet managers. So they make it impossible for it to be sustainable locally,” Yoss said in a phone interview on Thursday.
Same problems
Alongside reports of scooters being left all over the sidewalks in downtown Janesville have been reports from downtown business operators of tire skid marks left from the rechargeable motor-driven two-wheelers.
Some of those same problems have played out in the Bird scooter program in Beloit, Yoss said.
He said it put a strain on business relationships he developed through other local companies he runs. Ultimately, Yoss said he decided a relationship with Bird, and problems Bird doesn’t seem interested in fixing, weren’t worth his trouble.
The last straw, Yoss said, came when Bird continued to allow scooters to be parked and used near a downtown Beloit bank property after he agreed with the property owner to keep the scooters out of the area.
Rider responsibility
The city of Janesville, meanwhile, touted in a Twitter post and in an email to The Gazette this week the popularity of Bird scooters so far, offering limited data Bird has collected on ridership. The city in those communiques asked riders to be responsible and follow Bird’s ridership rules.
And in an email earlier this month to a concerned downtown business operator, Janesville’s city attorney’s office wrote that the city doesn’t bear liability for misuse or underage use of Bird scooters within the city limits.
Yoss said discontent voiced by some Beloit residents, who he characterized as “Karens,” tend to pin the bulk of the blame on underage youth whom residents say ride the scooters irresponsibly, purposely leaving tire skid marks on sidewalks, among other misuse.
But Yoss said he thinks youth are less often than commonly believed the culprits of such misbehavior. He said it might be “four” riders of 4,000 users over a span of weeks who are responsible for damage and misbehavior.
Yoss said what he has become aware of is that adults—filtering out of downtown Beloit taverns late at night, some of them intoxicated—are unsuccessfully attempting to rent out the Bird scooters.
That often hasn’t worked, he said, because the scooters he rented all were programmed through Bird’s software to shut down at 11 p.m., a few hours before typical bar closing time. The erstwhile joyriders then just leave.
Yoss said he’s not familiar with Janesville’s nascent Bird scooter program, including the fact that downtown business operators have reported tire burnouts left purposely by riders in the ARISE Town Square, a multimillion dollar park space along the downtown riverfront.
“They should check (security) cameras in those (Janesville) parks to see who was doing the damage, who was riding those scooters,” Yoss said.
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