April 25, 2022

What Seattle learned from its electric scooter pilot program

Electric scooters are an unsanctioned form of mobility here in Toronto, mostly because people think they're dangerous, but also because I think people are worried about them cluttering up our sidewalks.

The problem with this position is that electric scooters are also a lot of fun to ride and people seem to find them useful. The last time I rode one was in Paris and it seemed perfectly safe to me, though it may have been because there were two of us on it and we were kind of overloading the thing.

In any event, lots of cities either have them or are piloting them. Seattle just finished year one of its pilot program and here's what they learned:

From September 2020 to October 2021, Seattle saw 1.4 million trips taken by over 260,000 riders

April 25, 2022

What Seattle learned from its electric scooter pilot program

In any event, lots of cities either have them or are piloting them. Seattle just finished year one of its pilot program and here's what they learned:

From September 2020 to October 2021, Seattle saw 1.4 million trips taken by over 260,000 riders

Axios and Generation Lab have something new called the Next Cities Index. The goal is to track US work and culture trends through people's geographic preferences. For their first cities index, they asked over 2,100 students in the US, on two separate occasions, the following question: "Considering all factors that matter to you, where would you most like to live after college?"

The aggregate answer to this question is shown above. But they also collected people's incomes (anticipated since they're students?), political affiliations, and gender. The list of cities changes slightly when you sort based on these different factors, but not by much. Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles remain top cities -- at least in people's minds.

It is, however, interesting to note that about 45% of respondents had different answers to where they want to live and where they think they will live. For a number of reasons, the city of people's dreams isn't often a practical or realistic choice it would seem. Still, wanting a particular place still tells you certain things I suppose.

Given all the chatter over this pandemic, I would have thought that Miami would have appeared higher up on this want list.

Chart: Axios/Generation Lab

November 6, 2021

Largest US cities grew faster and became more diverse over the last decade

The last decade has been pretty good for many cities. Recent 2020 Census data tells us that of the 50 largest cities in the US, 46 of them grew their population over the last 10 years. On average, these 50 cities grew by about 8.5%, compared to 5.6% for the decade between 2000-2010.