 All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Lawrence Noah, and I am a mechanical engineer here at the CPSC. I work on micromobility safety, specializing in e-scooters. On behalf of the commission, I want to thank you all for your participation in today's forum. Before we get started, I want to highlight that this presentation and all of CPSC staff's participation in the forum has not been reviewed or approved by and may not reflect the views of the commission. Neither the commission nor its staff endorses any particular micromobility product. Today's forum is looking broadly at the product category of micromobility and not any specific products or manufacturers. We request that questions or information be provided with that goal in mind. Additionally, I just wanted to make clear that this forum will be recorded and it will potentially be made available to the public. So we have a number of participants with whom we have some long-established relationships with, but we also understand that there are attendees with a more limited experience with the CPSC. So I just wanted to take a quick moment to introduce you all to the agency. The CPSC is an independent federal government agency with a health and safety mission to protect the public from unreasonable risk of injury or death from consumer products. With over one trillion annually in societal costs attributed to incidents with consumer products, we play a crucial role in helping the U.S. economy and keeping consumers safe. The agency is led by a presidential appointed Senate-confirmed commission which presides over about 500 engineers, scientists, attorneys, enforcement professionals, and other safety-focused staff. CPSC has more than 15,000 products in its jurisdiction, including consumer apparel, toys, furniture, and almost any other consumer product that you can buy in a store and interact with on a day-to-day basis. For today, we will be focusing on micromobility products. So what is micromobility? When people talk about micromobility, they usually are referring to a single-rider, small-form factor mobility device. These products can be powered or not and tend to operate at relatively low speeds. So why do consumers love these things? Consumers find these products convenient, accessible, and relatively inexpensive. Many of these products allow consumers to have enhanced mobility in areas mostly accessible to pedestrians. And in some cases, these products can help consumers who have limited physical mobility. For today's forum, we're focusing on three specific micromobility products. And they are e-scooters, e-bikes, and hardware boards. So an e-scooter is generally described as having the following characteristics. It usually has a foot platform to stand on, a center column with a handlebar for steering, a speed control, speed is controlled using an accelerator and brakes. It's powered either partially or fully by a motor, and it's usually composed of two or three wheels. E-bikes are usually two or three-wheeled vehicles with fully operable pedals and an electric motor of less than 750 watts. The electric motor can either provide a pedal assistance or fully propel a bicycle. Hoverboards can be described as having foot platforms to stand on, may have a self-balancing mechanism, and is controlled by either a control unit or the rider distributing their weight. And usually it has one or two wheels that are in parallel. All of these products are electrically powered, typically with lithium ion batteries. Consumers interact with these items both as products they own or as fleet ride share products, where a company owns and maintains the products and consumers can rent them for short periods of time. So the CPSC has jurisdiction over consumer products, which includes micromobility products that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does not consider to be a motor vehicle. NHTSA guidance advises that the following micromobility products are not considered motor vehicles. So one, the scooter is lacking seats that are operated in a stand-up mode. Two, scooters that are incapable of a top speed of 20 miles per hour or greater. And three, electric bicycles with operable pedals and an electric motor of 750 watts or less, whose maximum speed on a paved level surface when powered solely by a motor while ridden by an operator who weighs 170 pounds is less than 20 miles per hour. So these micromobility products fall within CPSC's jurisdiction. Also, by statute, CPSC has jurisdiction over low-speed bicycles, which is codified in CPSC's bicycle regulations. Pedal-assisted micromobility products, even if they can exceed 20 miles per hour, that are not capable of continued self-propulsion, also fall within CPSC's jurisdiction. So how can we enhance micromobility safety for consumers? So we have engaged stakeholders across a broad spectrum of the industry, creating academic consumer advocates, manufacturers, and rideshare fleet. We will highlight the importance of a multi-pronged approach to addressing micromobility safety. While the CPSC is a regulatory agency, we recognize that there are a number of avenues that want to coordinate to provide a more robust safety outcome than only using regulation alone to address an issue. So research and data will give us information about hazards, risks, and mitigation strategies. Census standards will establish best practices and safety requirements developed by a broad group of stakeholders. Safety-focused design and manufacturing from the product development stage can result in improved safety outcomes. Education and outreach transfers, information on safe operations to consumers. Policy provides a construct that can promote safety by establishing baseline expectations or requirements, and regulations can help establish a set of legal requirements codified by law. As we move through the panels today, I ask all of you to keep this holistic approach in mind when thinking about how best to enhance safety. So I put the form agenda in the handout section of the GoTo webinar. It should be available there to download. The agenda for today includes five panels. We have a panel on data, standards development, best practices for enhancing safety, micromobility design and research, and policy and consumer safety. So we're starting today at 9 a.m. and we expect that the panels will conclude around 4.30, where we'll have a short closing to end the day. Before concluding this introduction, I just wanted to go over some administrative points. So once all speakers in a session have completed their presentation, there will be a discussion period of about 15 minutes to address questions that come up. There's a question box where you can type in your questions and you will be collecting them there and presenting them to the panelists by the moderator. The moderator will be asking the panelists the questions. We're going to have three breaks. There will be two 15-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And then around 12, 15, we'll break for lunch for about 45 minutes. All of the presentations and form have been cleared for public distribution. Slides and other meeting documentation will be included in the official meeting laws that will be posted to the CPSU's website. Again, I want to thank everyone for participating in today's forum and being a partner in consumer safety. My colleagues and I were pretty excited for today. We're looking forward to the discussion and the potential safety enhancements that can come out of this forum. All of the good ideas. So thank you once again. So we can get started on session one. On session one, we'll be moderated by my colleague, Carol, and I will hand it over. Hi, good morning, everybody. My name is Carolee Hillard and I am the program analyst within the data operations branch directorate for epidemiology here at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. And I will be moderating this first data section. I've been with the agency for about a year and I work with coders and hospitals in support of the NICE program. We'll start off the webinar today with our first panel on micro-mobility safety data. Our speakers today are members of the CPSC epidemiology staff and will be presenting on agency studies of micro-mobility incident data. Mafa Glazer is a program analyst within the data operations branch directorate for epidemiology at CPSC. Her role is to work with coders and hospitals in the management, operations, and quality control aspects of the NICE program. She holds a master's in public health from the University of Michigan as well as a bachelor's in environmental health from the University of Georgia. James Tark is a mathematical statistician in the division of hazard analysis, directorate for epidemiology, Office of Hazard Identification and Reduction at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. At CPSC, he supports EPHA, the technical center of the commission in the area of injury statistics and special studies. In addition, he evaluates and analyzes data on potential hazards. Thank you both for getting us started today, and I'm now going to hand the controls over to Maka so she can begin. Okay, hi, all. Sorry for that. Maka lost connection, but I'm actually going to start. I worked with Maka a little on this, so I'm going to start the presentation and get us going until she can get back on. So our presentation is about the micro-mobility products. We're just going to go over a little bit about what that is. So micro-mobility is the last-mile solution, and we focus on e-scooters, self-balancing scooters, hoverboards, and e-bikes. Some of the trends include advancements in battery technology, shared-use commercial products have increased, and issues around sharing the road. I believe Maka's back, so Maka, if you want to unmute, you can continue. So CPSC data use. We set priorities to identify emerging product hazards, evidence-based for mitigation actions, such as creating and evaluating product standards, product recalls, and develop information and education campaigns. The agency informs voluntary standards, development organizations, like develop performance requirements, and develops effective labeling, warnings, and instructions. I'm going to talk a little bit about the NICE program. NICE is the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. It's more than 40-year history collecting emergency room data, and supports CPSC and many other federal agencies. It nationally represents 96 U.S. hospitals, and the qualifications to be a NICE hospital are to have at least six inpatient beds and 24-hour emergency service. The hospitals that participate code injury data involving consumer products, anything that falls within our jurisdiction. And we have a subset of hospitals that code all trauma injuries, including CPSC jurisdiction, including the non-CPSC jurisdiction. So the system collects over 400,000 product-related CPSC injury reports each year, and an additional 350,000 non-CPSC injury reports. You can see more about the NICE data at this link, CPSC.gov, to learn more about this injury data. If you're interested in seeing NICE data, it is available to the public at this link, the CPSC NICE query. And I can talk a little more about that. But the information, the data that we use for our presentation is right from this, right from the query. And usually each year's NICE data becomes publicly available the following April. So April of 2019 became available on April of 2020. So coders enter a standard set of surveillance variables for every NICE case. And a coder may be instructed to enter more variables on an additional screen. And those are what we call our special study cases. Responses in certain surveillance variables trigger an additional second screen. So if the child is under the age of five and had ingested a drug, then that would incur a second screen, which is called our child poisoning screen. So we have a number of these cases that open a second screen where we can collect even more in-depth data. We also collect information through telephone internet investigations. And we have investigators who do on-site investigations. So as I said, you can use the query to download NICE data. And these are some examples of what the data would look like once it's gone through our cleaning process. So some of the examples for e-scooter and hoverboard are what we pulled here. So this is an example of a seven-year-old who was on a hoverboard and doing circles when she lost balance and fell. And then it will always have what the diagnosis, what the hospital diagnosis was. Another example, there could be multiple products involved. So a 19-year-old state, they were riding their bicycle when an electric scooter ran in front of them in order to avoid crashing, they had to break hard and fell. So this is an example where there are multiple products involved. You also see once the data is cleaned, there's asterisks where there's possibly a product named or a company name. So we remove all of that. So we just want to get at what the injury was and what was involved, not what the product, not the brand name of the product. Some of the other surveillance databases are the Consumer Product Safety Risk Management System. This is injury and potential injury incident data, death certificates, and in-depth investigation. Death certificates are another way that we can collect this information. And we have separate contracts with all 50 states. We purchase 8,000 certificates annually in certain ICD-10 codes. We read all and code 5,000 certificates. Some will be outside of the CPSC jurisdiction, but we still go through those. There's lag issues with death certificates. We don't always get them really timely for a number of reasons. And their brief narratives usually not much information about the product. There are limitations of CPSC database. Nice specific. Under estimate death, they only include if occurred in an ED. No non-emergency department treatments. Doctors' offices, school nurses, athletic trainer, urgent care are not going to be collected in this data. There are national estimates only. The sample is not designed for regional estimates. And for the CPSRMS, it's not statistically sample and not nationally represented. We have underestimated deaths and they might have a lengthy lag between event and data collected. So I believe Malka is back on. I'm going to try and pass this over to her. Malka, can you unmute yourself? Yes, hello everyone. I'm back. My router went out at the exact wrong, sorry about that. So I'm here to talk about how nice data can be used to analyze e-scooter-related injuries. Next slide. So we started to look at the 504-2 nice product code. This includes a number of things, such as the hoverboard, the skateboard, the mobility scooter segue, as well as your classic powered scooter. So for the purpose of this study, we decided just to look at the powered scooter. We defined this as having two wheels, handlebars, a floorboard that can be set upon wall riding, and a motor that powers the vehicle. We also decided to exclude patients over the age of 65 in order to differentiate between mobility scooters and a powered scooter. We also will be focusing on power scooter-related e-d visits for 2015 to 2019. Next slide. So as you can see here, the e-scooter-related e-d visits per 100,000 increased dramatically between 2015 and 2019. The rate shifted from 1.75 per 100,000 in 2015, all the way up to 8.49 in 2019. This is over a 400% increase in injuries. In addition, as you can see, there is a wide variance in the 95% confidence interval over time. This indicates that injuries are occurring unevenly across the country. This is because some cities have scooters while others don't. In addition, some scooters used to have scooters and they got rid of their scooters. Also, some of our hospitals are very rural while others are very urban. Next slide. We also decided to look at e-scooter-related e-d visits by sex and age groups. One of the most interesting things I think is how the age shifts from 5 to 14 in 2015 to 2016 all the way, which was 55% of the injuries, while in 2018-2019, the ages 5 to 14 only made up 18% of the injuries. But in 2018-2019, it made up 27% of the injuries where ages 25 to 34. In addition, there is a trend towards male-dominated injuries in 2015-2016. Males represented 6% of the injuries, but by 2018-2019, males represented 67% of the injuries. In addition, there's also a higher variance level that we saw previously. Now onto James's presentation. Hello and my name is James Tarr, statistician within Epidemiology at CPSJ. I had an opportunity to work on Epidemiology at CPSJ. I will be posting on the research injury stats web page of CPSJ.gov in the near future. Let's go through the disclaimer first. This presentation was prepared by the CPSJ staff and it has not been reviewed or approved and may not necessarily reflect the views of the commission. Okay, now onto the presentation. I would like to share some examples from the report. Next slide. So first topic I would like to talk about is in-depth investigations from CPSRMS. So what is it? It is more comprehensive look at how incidents were happening. So based on reports of incidents in CPSRMS that occurred between 2017 and 2019. So we completed around 140 follow-ups related to all micro-mobility products. Here are some of the hazards identified in each of the product types. So the break problem was the top hazard identified in e-scooter. A number of investigations show that breaks not engaging at all, sporadically engaging or engaging excessively following a delay. Followed by unexpected power losses caused the riders to tip over or get thrown out. Lastly, the fire hazard occurred while charging the e-scooter. Fire hazards was a top hazard for hoverboards that report describe fire sometimes after an explosion, smoke or sparks emanating from the product. Some reports describe the product overheating or melting. So there were around 60 out of 93 incidents occurred when the board was being charged. Other electrical hazards include unexpected loss of power resulting in the rider losing balance. And for e-bikes, an example of hazards related to break problems such as the user constantly needed to tighten the brakes repeatedly until the brakes fell completely. Next slide. Now, I would like to discuss the fatalities involving micro-mobility devices. We are aware of 41 fatalities from 2017 through 2019. Number of fatalities were 5, 10, 26 in 2017, 2018, and 2019 respectively. While data reporting is ongoing, we see that there is an increase in overall number of fatalities. E-screw related fatalities represent 27 of them, 41, or 66% of total fatalities. Increasing substantially from 2017 to 2019 as you can see on the chart. E-bikes account for 10 fatalities or approximately 24% of total fatalities. All four fatalities involving hoverboards occurred in 2017. Next slide. So we estimate that there were 132,800 injuries related to all micro-mobility products treated in U.S. emergency departments over the period. The annual estimated ED visits were 34,000, 44,000, and 54,800 in 2017, 2018, and 2019 respectively. The ED-treated injury estimates for overall micro-mobility products reflect a statistically significant increase from 2017 to 2018, as well as 2018 to 2019. Next slide, please. So this slide shows the distribution of injuries by product type and sex. Overall males experience higher percentage at 56%, a micro-mobility-related ED-treated injuries. Specifically for E-screwers, it was around 66% during that period. In contrast, females had higher percentage, 56% of hoverboard-related ED-treated injuries. Next slide. Now on to limitations of micro-mobility annual reports. We weren't able to report separate injury reports for Douglas or rental E-screwers and e-bikes. States did not meet minimum reporting requirements or criteria for NICE. Next slide. So data improvements at CPSC. Replace old codes. For example, 5042 was used for scooters, hoverboards, skateboards all together in the past. And 3215 for E-bikes more pets. So in 2020, we want to improve classification of micro-mobility devices. So we are using 5022 for power scooters. 5024 for unspecified scooters. And 5025 for hoverboards and power skateboards. So we are doing a survey on possible E-screwer-related incidents involving power scooters and unspecified scooters treated after January 1st 2020 to understand if it was power versus non-power and also to understand information on such as whether it was for Douglas, rental versus personal and also to understand the environment they were riding in and also the event when the incident took place. Next slide. So that is it folks. Thank you so much. Thank you, James and Malca. Okay, so next we're going to have a presentation by Dr. Katie Harmon. Dr. Katie Harmon's presentation is titled, Injury Surveillance Considerations Regarding E-Scooter Micromovility Devices. Katie is a research associate at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center. At UNC SHRC she applies epidemiologic methods to the study and prevention of injuries among users of active transportation. Katie holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and MPH with a joint concentration of epidemiology and environmental and occupational health from St. Louis University and a BS in Environmental Health Science from the University of Georgia. In addition, Katie is a graduate of the CDC Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Applied Epidemiology Fellowship. With that I'll pass the controls over to Katie. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, thank you for having me. Can everyone see my slides okay? All right, well then I'll get started. So, thank you for the introduction. My name is Katie Harmon and I'm a research associate at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center. And today my presentation will be focusing on injury surveillance considerations regarding E-Scooters as well as other micromobility devices. As you are all aware, E-Scooter, E-Bicycle and other micro-ability ride-chairs are emerging in many cities across the United States and the globe. As of September 2020, more than 120 U.S. cities contained at least one micro-ability ride-chair. While some cities halted their programs at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have now returned to active status. Even some cities that have previously banned E-Scooters, such as Seattle, are reconsidering programs in order to address the need for a sustainable, physically distant modes of transportation. In addition to the growth and the number of programs, ridership has also skyrocketed with a total of 136 million micro-ability ride-chair trips in 2019. Over 60 percent of all these ride-chair trips were made using E-Scooters. While initial reports have indicated that 2020 ridership has decreased in many cities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ridership levels are beginning to return to normal and in some cities have even surpassed 2019 levels. While micro-ability ride-chairs offer many benefits, increased ridership has come with a cost. Since the launch of the first E-Scooter ride-chair in September 2017, there have been more than 30 fatalities worldwide involving E-Scooter riders as well as pedestrian struck by E-Scooters. Four of these fatalities occurred in Atlanta, Georgia, including the death of a 34-year-old nurse and mother or two who was killed in a hit-and-run incident. This screenshot is of the intersection in Midtown where this fatal collision took place. In injury epidemiology, we often use the injury iceberg or injury pyramid to represent injuries and fatalities and their respective data sources. Deaths are represented as the tip of the iceberg because these events are the rarest, although the most severe. The levels below deaths are wider because more people are affected by non-fatal injuries. And just below deaths are disabling injuries such as trauma activations or injury injuries. Below that level are medically attended injuries that do not result in hospitalization or hospital transfer. These include emergency department visits, emergency medical service transports, et cetera. In general, the nice data that was mentioned earlier falls into this category. Below that are minor and might medically unattended injuries, and these include urgent care and other outpatient visits as well as injuries that are treated in the home. These events are typically the most common events, but often are the least likely to be documented. We obtain information about these events from observational studies, surveys, self-reports, et cetera. It's important to note that few of these levels are completely independent. For example, a person can be transported via EMS to the emergency department, where they are subsequently admitted and later die from complications related to their injuries. So I'll start at the tip of the iceberg. At HRC, we are keeping a running list of activities that are reported in the media. As of August 1st, 2020, we have tracked information from 24 U.S. e-scooter fatalities as well as several more fatalities from around the globe. To date, we have not been tracking any deaths related to other micro-ability devices. However, considering recent fatalities involving e-bike and moped ride chairs in Chicago and New York City respectively, we may expand our project scope in the future. So what we have learned so far from the 24 e-scooter fatalities is that 80% involved motor vehicles. And this picture is very different from e-scooter involved non-fatal injuries in which the overwhelming majority are due to falls or from striking against stationary objects. Since we know the number of e-scooter fatalities, we can compare these counts to other modes of travel. In 2018, for example, there were four U.S. e-scooter fatalities involving ride chairs. 857 bicyclists fatalities. 6227 pedestrian fatalities. And 22891 passenger vehicle occupant fatalities. However, as you're probably aware, accounts are not the best comparisons because they don't account for the differing levels of exposure. And while we have national estimates of exposure data for e-scooter riders as well as motor vehicle occupants, our national exposure data for bicyclists and pedestrians, the modes of travel most suitable for comparison to e-scooters are lacking. I am involved in a new project, BTS-CRP-10 along with Dr. Chris Cherry, whom you'll hear more from later, in which we are planning to better contextualize e-scooter injuries and deaths by comparing them to other modes of active travel. Currently, we can obtain information describing e-scooter fatalities in data gathered from media reports, medical examiner and coroner reports, death certificates and crash reports. To date, there is no real national surveillance system in place. While NHTSA's fatality analysis reporting system also known as FARS is often used for studying fatal transportation events, it has several limitations regarding e-scooter mortality surveillance. For one, FARS only includes records or for fatal events involving motor vehicles on public traffic ways. Therefore, FARS would not have any records for the 20% or so of e-scooter fatalities that do not involve motor vehicles. Second, FARS data are not particularly timely. Third, until recently, FARS did not contain a specific code for e-scooter fatalities making them difficult to identify in the system. I have been informed that e-scooter fatalities will be coded separately in future editions of FARS. For the last two years, FARS has categorized e-scooter deaths under deaths of persons on personal conveyances, which is a very broad category. FARS is just one of several data sources that have struggled with classifying adverse health outcomes related to e-scooters and other micro-ability devices. I will return to this problem later. Moving on from fatalities, I will talk about FARS non-fatal e-scooter injuries. As part of our BTSRP-10 project, we are building an inventory of e-scooter-related epidemiologic studies as well as other literature that pertains to e-scooter safety, and we are posting many of these resources on our Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center website. I'm not going to spend too much on this slide because we've already had a wonderful overview of the nice data and how it's used for e-scooter injury surveillance, but it's important to note that since 2014 and 2018, there was a 222% increase in the population-based rate of e-scooter injuries, and in this study by Namiri et al., such a large increase of rate is not particularly surprising considering it went from zero e-scooter ride shares in 2016 to a handful of ride shares in 2017 to more than 100 e-scooter ride shares in 2018. It should also be noted that the case definition that was used was not exclusive to standing e-scooters used in ride shares and likely contained injuries related to other types of scooter-like devices. As mentioned earlier, regarding the fatality data, this problem with case definitions is really common at the moment and one that the CPSC as well as other data sources are in the process of rectifying. And the old nice code for dockless ride-jerry scooters was under code 5042, and in the future, dockless ride-jerry scooters will be under code 5022. Because of the challenges associated with national data sources, most of these have been performed at the community or hospital level. And this slide displays some of the results from the first three e-scooter descriptive epidemiologic studies that were performed and were based in Santa Monica, California, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon. From these three studies as well as numerous studies by differing setting locations, east coast versus west coast versus south, differing geographies, hilly versus flat terrain, different study settings, hospital versus urgent clear clinics, and differing study methodologies in injury surveillance studies using a hospital administration data versus data studies used data abstracted from the electronic medical record. As an example of this convergence, we see that three very different studies with very different approaches all determined a medically attended e-scooter injury rate of approximately 20 injuries per 100,000 e-scooter miles traveled. Other trends that have emerged from the literature include that most e-scooter riders with medically attended injuries are male, are working-age adults, are injured on sidewalks, as opposed on-street, are injured due to fall or collision with non-moving objects, although many riders with severe or fatal injuries are injured due to motor vehicle crashes, are injured during the day time, although many riders with a severe or fatal injuries are injured at night, are not impaired, but impairment is more common among riders with severe or fatal injuries, are not wearing helmets at the time of injury, are likely to have a head injury and or a fracture, and are somewhat likely to be admitted to the hospital. Similar to death and NICE data, many researchers have struggled to identify e-skitter-related injuries, including myself. Hospital data typically contains ICD-10-CM codes that can be used to identify mechanisms of injury. Unfortunately, ICD-10-CM does not contain a code specific to e-scooter-related injuries. Therefore, many of the e-scooter epidemiologic studies have had to perform rather laborious, non-standardized keyword-based searches to identify injuries related to these devices. This rather simplistic example of health data demonstrates why. All three of these emergency department visits involve scooters of some sort. Two involved e-scooters and one involved a mobility or rover scooter. One of the true positive cases contained an ICD-10-CM code for a fall from a mobility scooter. The other true positive contained a code for a motorcycle crash. The false positive contained a code for a fall from a mobility scooter. The same code that was used to indicate one of the true positive cases. In order to address ICD-10-CM coding issues, our UNCHSRC team developed a poster providing guidance for clinicians and medical coders to flag e-scooter and other micro-ability-related injuries. We worked with our North Carolina Division of Public Health and our North Carolina Trauma Registry to create this poster. We then distributed to more than 1,500 individuals and organizations within North Carolina as well as individuals from numerous other states and one other country. You can view a copy of this poster on our CRS website. Meanwhile, we worked with a 50-plus member group to develop a proposal to the National Center for Health Statistics to add e-scooter and other micro-ability-specific ICD-10-CM codes. The good news is that our proposal was accepted with minimal revisions and these codes will go into effect on October 1, 2020. A copy of these codes are posted on the NCHS's website. In addition, we will be developing a new poster highlighting these codes that we will post on our CSCRS website. The bad news is that we also introduced a case definition for e-bicycle codes that was not accepted by the NCHS. I know that several of my e-scooter injuries surveillance work group colleagues are interested in developing a new ICD-10-CM proposal for e-bicycles, but since many of these individuals work in public health, COVID-19 has delayed these plans. If anyone attending this forum is interested in revisiting this proposal, please let me know. Although I should add I don't have any intention of leading this effort in the future. I'd rather be a supporting player on this one. Why are micro-ability injury surveillance and other safety states important? The reason is that cities and states are implementing policies and procedures with limited understanding of the problem and limited capacity to evaluate the safety effects of their actions, including implementation of curfews, geofencing, requiring helmets, restricting ridership to sidewalk and or traffic ways and enforcement measures. To include eSCRC under the leadership of Dr. Lara Sont, this leading a multi-organizational team including project team member Dr. Chris Cherry from the University of Tennessee to better understand e-scooter safety issues. While this project has several research aims and objectives, research aim number two is to characterize the relationship between e-scooter crashes, injuries, fatalities, and contributing factors both behavioral and environmental. And at the conclusion of this project and a bit more of a year's time, we should have a better understanding of some of these safety issues. And that's it. Thank you so much for that presentation, Katie. We are going to go ahead and roll into questions. We had a few come in. So I'll invite Katie to unmute as well as Malca and James. So the first question comes for both presentations. Do any of the speakers think that there are data gaps or opportunities for using different data sources that could provide a more robust view of microability safety issues? Well, this is Katie. I guess I'll go first. Yes, the answer is that no one data source provides all the answers that we need. And so by looking at different data sources we can have a more fuller understanding of the problem. A good example is I often use emergency department visit data as well as trauma registry data for some of my projects. And while emergency department visit data gives you a more complete picture of injuries within a certain geography trauma registry data although limited to more severe injuries gives you a much more in-depth look. And then other data sources are needed to say if you want to calculate exposure based rates, for example, you need both the numerator data, the number of injuries and the denominator data, which is the number of trips, miles traveled, etc. Great. Thank you, Katie. Katie, I have another question for you that came in since we have you unmuted. You indicated that most e-scooter injuries involve sidewalks rather than streets. Do you recall any information relating to micro mobility devices injuries on street intersections? I actually, I don't know the answer to that question off the top of my head. I'll have to, what I can do is I can get back to you later. But that's a great question. Thanks for asking. Absolutely great. This is James CPSC. James, you okay? Yep, I can hear you James. So we had a question for 240 IDIs. What is the source of the names those interviews and stuff. That was a really good question. I don't know top of my head at the moment. So I need to get back to you in the future. Thanks, James. And James, we had a question come in that just to read it so the audience knows what was the source of the names of those interviewed reports, newspapers, lawsuits. So that is what James was referring to. Another question for Malca and James from the Effie department. You reference, I talked about it a little bit and I can answer this as well, but there was a link where others can query this data. Can you speak a little bit more about this process for those who are interested in reading this data themselves? Malca, are you able to answer that? Yes, I can answer that question. Okay, so if you would like to go, you could just go to Nice Koryana website and you could go as a researcher or as an individual and decide how you want to look at it. You could pick any product that you like to look at. Say you want to look at injuries involving regular skateboards, not just powered skateboards. So you could pick that product and then you could pick the years where you want to see. Say you want to see 2015-2019, you could look at that and then you could download that data in Excel spreadsheet and use it however you want. You also could choose the age range you want to look at as well as the outcomes. So you really could design it for however much you want where are the specifics you want or as how generally you want. In addition, you could request it from us. Great, thank you Malca. Another question has come in for you. Is there a generic form of the injury pyramid distribution that can be applied to consumer products in general to estimate under-reporting? That's a very good question. I know that those ratios have been calculated for specific injury types and for specific injury mechanism types. Not for micro-mobility devices as far as I know and not in general injury overall. Because the distribution can vary quite a bit depending on the lethality of the mechanism. For example, if you're dealing with say something like poisonings that involve drugs, oftentimes it's a much narrower pyramid because the base isn't as large as it would be for say sports centuries. It really is injury mechanism specific. Thank you. We had another comment about the incidence on sidewalks. The insight about incidence on sidewalks was interesting. Do we have a way to understand where scooters are using bike lanes? Are crashes occurring mostly at conflict points such as intersection and crosswalks? As you mentioned, that's definitely something that we can look into at. Yeah, I will get to it. I also got a notice from my colleague, Dr. Chris Cherry and he's actually going to address some of those questions in his presentation. Okay. I have one more question that we'll get to. We had actually a lot of questions come in, but unfortunately we are trying to get back on the timeline. So I have one more that we'll share. Our shared systems like bird lift and other better sources of data that privately owned e-scooters could be safer too. I'm not sure if I completely understand the question. The data could be safer. Do you mind repeating it one more time for me? I think these go together. Which databases would be best sources for injury data like e-bikes are systems like bird, lift and others like e-bikes? I don't know. Okay. So your ride shares are your best sources for exposure data. And those companies are often sharing data with local cities. It's often built into their agreements with those cities. I know that some of the ride shares are collecting injury reports from users. But those are self-reports and people have to volunteer like they have to choose to report their injuries to those organizations. And so I would say that healthcare data sources are probably a better indication of medically attended injuries which tend to be a little bit more severe. With, you know, and obviously ideally you would have injury data from all levels of severity. So everything from outpatient clinics urgent care to emergency department, hospital, etc. That's often not possible in many cities. But I would rely on those sources first. And also because those sources are just going to have better information about the injuries themselves. Like the location, nature, severity, procedures done, etc. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much Katie and Malca and James for these presentations. That was a great way to start our day. We are going to now transition into our 15 minute break and I'm going to pass it back to Lawrence for directions on this. Thank you again everybody. So our first presentation is Standards in the World of Neumability by Dr. Chris Cherry, John McArthur and Dr. Ryan Yeath. Chris is a professor in civil engineering at the University of Tennessee. He is the chair of the SAE Powered Micromobility Vehicles Committee. He's conducted transportation system research on e-bikes, scooters, and other micro-mobilities for the past 15 years. John is a research associate in the Transportation Research and Education Center at Portland State University where he leads a robust micro-mobility research portfolio. He's the vice-chair of the SAE Powered Micromobility Vehicles Committee and the document sponsor of SAE Standards J3194. Ryan leads vehicle compliance at BIRD and is the document sponsor for SAE J3230. Previously, he was with LIPS Level 5 self-driving division in a safety and compliance role. And prior to that he was an engineering consultant with Exxon. Thank you all for being here and I will now give Chris sharing. I'm muted. There we go. Now I'm not. Here we are. Slide show. I think I'm up. Okay. So I hope everybody can see and hear my slides. As mentioned, I'm Chris Cherry. I'm a professor in civil engineering and on standards for the new world of mobility. Okay. Here's how the speakers are going to go. I'll be giving an introduction to the work that we're doing and hand the mic off to John MacArthur in about four or five minutes. We will talk about our first standard that came out of SAE micro-mobility group. SAE before a taxonomy standard. And then we'll pass to Ryan Yee, who will talk about 3230, which is our kinematics, basically breaking acceleration and speed standard. I want to acknowledge while I'm here that Annie Cheng was throughout all of this process up to very recently, the SAE staff member who drove a lot of this forward and she moved on to a micro-mobility company line. And so she has a lot of credit in this process, okay? So first of all, we'll talk about standards and we're gonna talk about standards for the next few presentations, of course, but this is a agreed upon way of doing things. If there's one thing we've learned is that we've had a hard time even defining what a scooter was. We heard that in the last several presentations and if we can't understand how the terminology and how we're going to measure things, then it's very difficult to come up with any way to manage or regulate or even measure things that we are interested in measuring like safety. So what we've done, the idea here is working under SAE, as SAE I should say, we're trying to enhance this safety, we're trying to create this common language that we can use across operators, across jurisdictions, across academic domains or safety or epidemiology or whatever. And permit common interfaces that we can use, promote uniform testing and performance. And all of this is to essentially harmonize the market, the industry, so that we all are at least going in the same direction. Our SAE-powered Micromobility Vehicles Committee is one committee at SAE that is in this emerging area of shared mobility, of new mobility, and we spent a bit of time right when we started trying to figure out what our name was gonna be and what our scope was gonna be. So we brought together a lot of experts from around the industry, around academia. You can see some of them here. And really got to thinking about how we're gonna define, for example, the key features of a scooter, of a hoverboard and so on. And we'll talk about that in a minute. If you wanna try to kind of think of scope keywords, that's the best way. I can remember what we're talking about. We're talking about powered micromobility in this committee. Not, you could say human powered, but actually electrical or gasoline or other combustion powered. They have to be low speed and we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute. They have to be lightweight. And for now, we're talking about personal ground transportation. We're not talking about freight. We're not talking about delivery drones. We can expand our scope into that area once we get our arms around personal ground transportation. But those are sort of the four keywords that dictate where we're going with this. So there's this big area of vehicles, a big class of vehicles that are what we'd call powered micromobility vehicles. Our scope includes all the vehicles that fall into this yellow box. And this yellow box generally is under 30 miles per hour. This is where you enter into different NHTSA designations for vehicles and FMVSS designations. And then the real challenge was 500 pounds trying to land on a number that was meaningful and not arbitrary. And some people would say that's not very micro. Other people would say that's not micro enough. But the idea here is we still have this size envelope and speed envelope which ultimately leads to like kinematic energy and so on. So we're not low speed cars that are much heavier and we're not passenger vehicles which are both heavier and faster. So with that, I'm gonna pass over to John. He can tell me when to advance the slides and we'll talk about our first standard. Hey, thanks Chris. Can you put it back one slide? Yep. Yeah, and I just wanna add here. So hi, I'm John. It sounds like everybody can hear me okay if Chris could. And I'm the document sponsor for J3194. This is the Taxonomy and Classification of Powered Micromobility Vehicles. And as Chris said, our charge of the committee was to start the process of both defining what these vehicles are, but then to start creating standards for the industry and the industry in general as being the OEMs that are creating the vehicles, but also the people that are using them that are creating policies around them. And so we really felt because of a lot of, I guess, confusion or broad use of terms related to these devices that are used all over the place. We felt that we wanted to do a taxonomy and classification of what we're looking at. So this box was created to kind of help us to find where we're gonna go with this standard and what we're not gonna focus on for this first part of the standard. And Chris kind of talked about it's really a weight and speed classifications, but it was also what devices are out there already and what are being regulated within this space. So top speed was kind of really pushed on the e-bike side of things, also a little bit on what you would traditionally call a scooter or like a Vespa type of device that kind of was low speed, but also the curb weight of 500 pounds, which is really kind of like, we were kind of looking for justifications for this, but it's kind of three times the weight of a average male, but also what we were seeing within the landscape of devices out there. So, and then one thing Chris did mention that this was not freight vehicles and they were really for personal passenger use, but they're also primarily for on-road purposes. Chris, you can move it on to the next slide. So the committee, which Chris showed you a bunch of their names and the logo's up there, but really was a nice mix of industry in city and policy, nonprofit groups kind of working together to kind of classify these devices. So we came up with six types and I'll go into that. And then four classifications that we use to classify these types and those were speed, weight, power, source, and width. Next slide. So these are the types of vehicles that we kind of came up with and you notice that they are powered bicycles, powered standing scooters, powered seated scooters, powered self-balancing boards. And I noticed there was a use of the term hoverboard before. We chose not to use that term because there's a trademark with that term. So we wanted to provide terms that are generic and easily used within the industry without a trademark infringement or other things. Self-balancing boards, this would be what some people would consider a skateboard and powered skates. Now, one thing that is key here is that all these are powered devices. We obviously have skateboards that are non-powered and even standing scooters that are non-powered. So we're looking at ones that have a powered element to them. And we were able to kind of use these five components of center column seats, operative pedals, floorboard, and self-balancing as a way to distinguish between these six types. Next slide. So then we went about devising these kind of ideas of classification. So how do we classify these devices and with a naming device to kind of determine how these devices or vehicles are different from each other? And we use weight, vehicle width, top speed, and power source. So in most cases, I think people have been talking about electric for power source, but we didn't want to exclude another type of engine that could be put on these, like typically a gas-powered device. But as you can see, we kind of had a top weight of 500 pounds. And then we had some classifications types within those vehicles with, we kind of felt this was important because of how devices, if they became larger than what you would think of a typical scooter, like three feet, that a city may want to differentiate between them to kind of say where they are able to use or how they should be used. And then obviously top speed was a big issue. So to the right of the slide is I think a good way of showing how we would use the classification. You can see there's a standing powered standing scooter. And if in this case it is 40 pounds, two feet wide, at top speed is 18 miles per hour in electric. So we would call that an ultra light weight, standard weight, standard with low speed electric standing scooter, a mouthful. We recognize that, that's probably not how the person's gonna be describing their vehicle to some other friend. Hey, this is what I'm riding right now. But it's a way in which I think the industry, but also policy makers can differentiate these devices from one another. And so the other example is what people would traditionally considered a seated scooter that has 190 pounds, two feet wide goes about 30 miles an hour. And that would be a mid-weight standard with mid speed electric seated scooter. So I think that's kind of a good summation of where we got with the standard. And I will move on to Ryan to talk about our next standard that we're working on now. And just to note, this standard is available. You can go and get it from SAE right now and it's freely available. So you can read all about it there, okay? Go ahead, Ryan. Next slide, please. Yeah, so Ryan Yee here on the document sponsor for J3230, which is an emerging standard around kinematic performance metrics for powered micro-mobility vehicles. So jumping right in here, the rationale behind J3230 is to one, provide practicable vehicle level performance-based metrics. Two, provide test methods and conditions. And three, ultimately provide meaningful metrics for industry consumers and public agencies to evaluate safety and performance. Next slide, please. The development of the standard really is currently largely focused around test procedures and metrics for top speed acceleration and deceleration slash braking. And as you'd expect in such a standard, consideration has been given to things like initial vehicle conditions, so things like upper bounds on accumulated mileage of the vehicle being tested, tire condition, as well as things like battery state of charge. In addition, we've thought through as a committee things like operator anthropometry and positioning on the vehicle when testing as both these criteria are expected to have an impact on performance that's measured during the testing. And also important for repeatable measurements, there's been a good discussion around environmental conditions as well as test track conditions, as well as conditions that would consider performance on an incline as these can be quite important from a safety perspective. Now, in terms of timeline, we're expecting that we'll be able to finalize and publish J3230 by the end of this year. We're working on getting comments on the current draft by the committee this month. And of course, in addition, I'd like to recognize other committee members who have participated in this work and draw from their experience and their roles at Lyme, Lyft and a few other organizations that have really contributed to this work thus far. Next slide, please. Finally, to give folks a sense of how we've been thinking about things, I thought it might be helpful to describe some of the test scenarios being considered as well. So currently for decel or for braking, there's really three scenarios as you'd expect. The first one is around nominal braking performance where all brakes present on the vehicle are intended to function as expected. We have a second scenario here that addresses brake redundancy. So what happens if one brake potentially fails? What does braking performance look like then? And finally, deceleration around geofence boundaries. So is there any potential operator instability that could be introduced around these boundary conditions? So that's it for J3230 here. Looking forward to getting all the comments, like I said in this month so that we could move forward with a committee vote on this work and hopefully get this published by the end of the year. Okay, thank you, Ryan. This is back to Chris. That's it for our SAE presentation and we look forward to comments and questions from the audience. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, John. And thank you, Ryan. All right, up next we have Diana Poppins-Jordan and I will grab her screen real quick. Lauren, sister Diana, you're gonna load the slides, correct? Yep, I'm loading them up for you right now. Okay, great. So that's what you can hear me. Can you see the slides? Yes. Okay, so I'll introduce you real quick. So Diana is a standards program manager in the UL Standards Division and has been with UL for over 30 years. Diana graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. She's held various positions at UL, including the conformity assessment area as well as standards. Diana is currently responsible for the UL standards technical panels for batteries, e-mobility devices, e-shooters, e-bikes, drones, alternative energy, and other products. Thank you for joining us today, Diana. Good, thank you, Laurence. Well, good morning, everybody. As Lauren said, I'm a standards program manager for Underwriters Laboratories and I'm here today to talk to you about the UL Standards for e-mobility products. Next slide. Also, first let's talk about UL standards just quickly at a glance. We have over 400 UL STPs. That stands for our standards technical panels. I'll be talking a lot about our STPs throughout the presentation. We have over 1600 standards published at UL. We've been developing standards for over 120 years. I think as long as UL has been in existence, we have been developing standards. Over 30 countries are represented on our STPs and committees. We have dedicated standards professionals around the world and we have over 4,000 unique volunteers on our standards committees. So we have quite a group of people that help us develop our standards. Okay, next slide. A little bit more about our standards development. We support public-private partnerships, platforms. We collaborate with other SDOs. When we develop a standard or we revise our standard, we wanna make sure that those requirements are based upon research and they're science-based. So we do testing in our labs at times. Other manufacturers perform tests. So we wanna make sure that there's data behind a lot of our safety requirements that are in our standard. A couple years ago, we have a new feature for standards. We now offer free online view of our UL standards. On the bottom left there, we wanna make sure that we respond to market demands in short development time as quickly as possible, especially when there are critical safety issues. We wanna try and turn around the safety requirements as quickly as we can to help the industry. We also promote and we collaborate with IEC and ISO. We have some standards that we have harmonized and adopted with IEC and ISO. We sit on some of the IEC and ISO committees and a lot of the people on those committees are also on our standards committees. And lastly, we support national and regional adoption of our UL standards globally. Next slide. Okay, so we'll talk a little bit about our process. So we have a consensus process. Our process is accredited by both ANSI and SCC. So ANSI is the American National Standards Institute. They're the accredited body for the United States. So if a standard is designated as ANSI, that means it is the national standard for the United States. In Canada, there's SCC, which is the Standards Council for Canada. They're the accredited body, accreditation, the accredited SDOs in Canada. So if a standard is designated as SCC or CAN, that means it is the national standard for Canada. Our standards are developed with, through our STPs. Again, we'll be talking, you'll hear me talking a lot about our STPs throughout this presentation. There is no cost to join our committees or STPs. It's all volunteers, so we have no membership fees. And also our procedures align with the WTO-TBT agreement with respect to consensus, openness, transparency, and due process. In the bottom right there, there's a link to our accredited procedures in case of anyone would like to know more information about that. Next slide. Okay, now let's talk about our standards process, how we develop our safety standards. So we collaborate with our industry, with industry to develop our standards. We have STPs, again, we've talked about that, which are our standard technical panels. They're really a central part of our standards process. They're the heart of how we develop our standards. We collaborate with industry. The STPs serve as the consensus body for developing, reviewing, and maintaining our standards. So the STPs, that is our voting body. So if you're an STP member, you're able to vote on our standards. Our STPs are made of a balanced group of individuals. I'll be talking a little bit more about the makeup and the structure of our STPs in a minute. Participation in our standards development is open to anybody. So we have an open process and we encourage everyone to participate. So even if you're not an STP member, you can still submit comments. You can attend STP meetings. You can be part of working groups. You can ask that a standard be revised. Really the only difference is that a non-STP member, unfortunately, would not be able to vote. Proposals can be submitted at any time. We have an online system called CSDS, which stands for Collaborative Standards Development System. It's an accessible 24-7. So if someone is reading a UL standard and maybe there's a gap or maybe something isn't clear, or more information is needed, or we need to address new technology, you can submit a new proposal in CSDS and that will move forward to the standards STP in the future. Again, it's accessible for anybody. CSDS is also the system where all of our proposals are posted to. So that's where all commenting is done, voting is done. Our STP meetings are posted and everything is open. Everything is transparent so anyone can see what's posted, you know, what comments are received, how people vote, things like that. Next slide. So now let's look at the structure of our STPs. So at the top, you'll see there's a UL staff who's the STP chair. I'm the STP chair for all of the e-mobility, the micro-mobility products. There's also a standards project manager who will work very closely with me and the STP. Along the bottom, you'll see the nine interest categories. So when someone applies to an STP, they would have to designate one of these categories. So, you know, the producers, supply chain, commercial industrial interests and so on. The goal is for these for one group not to be over one third. We need to keep our STP balanced. However, keep in mind that if it's not everyone has to be represented. So for instance, if it's not a consumer product, we would not expect there would be a consumer on that STP. Due to balance, we might have to limit our membership. So if someone applies and the balance does not allow us to add them, we would place them on a pending list and then at such time when the membership changes, you know, people change jobs or, you know, they retire, we look to the pending list to see if we can add additional members to our STP. We also need to limit our STP membership to one person per company. That doesn't mean that multiple people for the same company can't participate. It really means that only one person per company can be a voting member. So other people from your company, we would encourage them to participate. They still can participate, but they just would not be able to be a voting member. Next slide. Oops, okay. So let's talk about Hover Boards now so you can go to the next slide. Okay, so Hover Boards. Hover Boards were pretty much the holiday crates for the 2015 holiday season. Unfortunately though, after those were a lot of holiday gifts, we saw some incidents. You know, there were some fires, there were a lot of the battery charging, things like that. So there were obviously concerns from consumer groups, CPSC, retailers, even UL. We wanted to look at, you know, into the safety issues around the batteries. So we quickly developed a set of requirements that was published in January, 2016 to address a lot of those safety issues. Next slide. So the next slide shows a lot of what our response was with respect to Hover Boards. We formed a technical team. We looked at a lot of the issues and the incident reports that was happening. We developed a draft standard. We published an outline. We held STP meetings. We formed the STP. There were some recalls. We achieved consensus on our standard. Singapore had adopted our standard. And we also collaborated with ASTM and CPSC to hold a workshop in China. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next couple of slides. Okay, next slide. So STP 2272 is the STP for Hover Boards. There are currently 33 voting members on that STP. STP 2272 is responsible for UL 2272, which is the standard for electrical systems for personal e-mobility devices. And it's also important to note that 2272 is the standard for both the United States and Canada. So what does 2272 cover? So the scope is really it covers the electrical safety. And when we talk about electrical safety, we're really talking predominantly about the fire and electrical shock hazards. So it covers the electrical safety of the electrical system for e-mobility devices. So 2272 takes a system approach. So it's not just the batteries. So if you look at that, it's the battery, the charger, the motors, the controls and the wiring. So it is a system approach to the e-mobility products. In some examples, you know, 2272, the initial focus was hoverboards, but it does cover more than just hoverboards. It covers electric skateboards, skates, electric scooters, electric personal transporters and electric unit wheels. Next slide. So here's the timeline of 2272, how it was developed. So we published the first set of requirements in January, 2016. Again, just shortly after the 2015 holiday season, then we published another set of requirements in April, 2016. And then we continued to work with the STP and we published the first edition consensus standard in November, 2016. That standard again is the standard for the United States and Canada. Those of you that work on a lot of standards committees, you probably are aware it typically takes many, many years to develop a standard. So in this case, you can see that a UL standard was published in less than one year. So that was, you know, almost record time. It was very aggressive. So there was really a great collaboration with the industry on this standard to develop the standard really to address the safety concerns that we saw out in the industry. So that was really great. The next standard, or I'm sorry, next slide, thank you. So, you know, UL standards, they complement other standards that are developed by other SDOs such as ASTM. So I have a few ASTM standards listed here. I believe ASTM is going to have a presentation after me. You know, our standards, UL standards typically cover electrical safety. But there are other standards that exist in the industry that could cover other scopes, you know, other performance issues, things like that. We do our best to try not to overlap with other standards developers. So we want to have a very collaborative, you know, relationship with these other standards developers. But we also want to be aware of, you know, other activities, the other standards activities. You know, many stakeholders are on our committees, are also on other committees. So it's, you know, a lot of people that are on the same standards committees working together. Okay, next slide. So let's talk a little about the workshop that we had in China. So a lot of these products are manufactured in China. It's important, so we felt it was very important to collaborate with China to discuss these safety issues. So in 2016, we partnered with CPSC and ASTM to have a workshop there. Since then, we've signed an MOU with SAC, which is the Standardization Administration of China. We signed an MOU in 2018 to agree to establish common requirements for hoverboards. This MOU also laid out the framework for forming a working group, a joint working group. That joint working group has the goal to harmonize the requirements between US and China. And they will identify the differences and the goal is really to reduce those differences. Once those standards are more closely aligned, the US and China will work together to develop a joint proposal to the IEC as appropriate. Next slide. So let's look at e-bikes. Next slide. So e-bikes is under STP 2849. It's comprised of 21 voting members. UL 2849 is the standard for the electrical systems for e-bikes and it is also a national standard for both the US and Canada. So the scope of UL 2849, it covers the electrical system of e-bikes powered by a lithium-based rechargeable battery. So again, just like 2272, it is also a system approach for safety. And 2272, I'm sorry, 2849, it includes electrically powered e-packs and non-pedal assist e-bikes. Next slide. So here's the timeline for 2849. This is probably a more traditional timeline that you'll see. The first issue outlined was published in 2013. Then the next set of requirements was published in 2014. And then we published the third set of requirements in November 2016. If you look, that date is very close to the date where the hoverboard standard or the 2272 standard was published. And we pretty much changed this. We published the third set of requirements really because of batteries. We had a lot of lessons learned about the battery requirements for 2272. And we wanted to make sure that the e-bike standard had really the same level of rigor and safety requirements for e-bikes. So that's why we published a new set of requirements in November 2016. After that, we continue to work with the industry. And then we published the first edition standard 2849 in January 2020. So earlier right at the beginning of this year. That is also a standard for both United States and Canada. Next slide. Okay, so other related standards. So there are other related standards for e-bikes. There's a CFR. There's an EN standard and there's an ISO standard. Again, just a few examples here. Again, it's important to be aware of other standards activities. We want to continue to collaborate with other standards developers. As I said before, a lot of people that are on some of these committees are probably on our committees and vice versa. So, you know, we want to make sure that we continue to work together with the industry to promote the safety of these products. Next slide. So really later today, there's going to be another UL colleague talking later that he's going to be providing more technical details on the standards requirements for e-mobility products. So he's going to go into the standard of the technical requirements in more detail. But hopefully today I was able to provide you with a good overview of the standards process and the development of the e-mobility standards for UL. Thank you very much. Thank you, Diana. Thank you. Okay, up next, we have Dr. Robert Whittlesay. And he will be giving us an update on the ACM Safety Standards Task Group for e-Sputters. Robert is a program manager at Bird in Vehicle Engineering where the next generation of scooters are deciding testing. He previously worked as a consultant for six years at exponent, dating companies from a wide range of industries, such as renewable energy, game parks, and marketing ability. He received his PhD and MS from the California Institute of Technology. Thanks for presenting today, Robert. There we go. Awesome. Yeah, thanks, Lawrence, for the kind introduction. Happy to be here today to share with you all about the work that's going on in our ASTM task group. So again, as noted, I work for Bird, but I am the task group chair for this ASTM task group that's focusing on powered scooters. So I just want to give a little bit of safety in context. I think that it seems like a lot of this material has been carried by others in this session. But so safety and standards. So standards help industries by giving a consistently safe products. So that way everyone in the industry is delivering products that are safe enough for all to use, or at least all that it's intended for. And it ultimately helps elevate the industry and ensure that customers always have a safe experience, regardless of what manufacturer or what product they're actually using. And I think it's interesting though, because there was a study on safe micro-building by the International Transport Forum that showed the ER visit risk of summer from bikes and scooters. But I think as an industry, the question is, can we do better? Can we do better than that and make the safest mode of transportation possible? And hopefully we can. But with respect to the ASTM, just so everyone's aware of the ASTM, much like we have a little intro on SAE, a little intro on UL, the ASTM International is formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials. They're a very old organization and they currently issue about 13,000 or more standards. They're built by all sorts of volunteers around the world and much like with these other organizations that are presented today. Anyone can join a committee, you can get involved and share your thoughts and critique or contribute to all sorts of different standards across a wide range, you know. ASTM doesn't cover just to my credibility, they do everything from metal alloys, cement, leather, plastic, cannabis, forensic science, nanotechnology and everything, you know, it's quite a wide range. And all of their standards that are developed follow a process and this is what I think helps make sure that the standard, once it's formalized and approved, has been given a lot of thought and consideration. So there's a main committee that throws a broad topic and each main committee has a subcommittees that they're focused in on different topics and narrow down to more specific issues. And just to be absolutely clear, I'm just an AST member, I'm not speaking on behalf of the ASTM, so whatever I say are my own thoughts and ideas and what are my experiences with them. So to give our transcript in context, so I am heading the ASTM Task Group WK 70724, it's a really sophisticated name, but really what it is, it's just a designation that we give us that was given to us for our specific activity. And this is one that Diana actually mentioned in the last presentation referred to. But the way that it works on ASTM is you have the consumer products, which is F-15 and that's the main committee, which covers a wide range of consumer products. So you have toys, you have bunk beds, shopping carts, anything that a consumer may interact with. Under that main committee, there's a subcommittee, it's specifically F-15.58. This covers powered scooters and skateboards. And as we've also seen today, there's a lot of complications in the language that we're using because scooters can be confused with a mobility scooter or a kick scooter or whatever else it may be. We thank the SAE for helping with that taxonomy. But nevertheless, these subcommittee F-15.58 was around before that taxonomy came out. And so they're issuing standard F-26.41 and F-26.42, which cover recreational powered scooters and pocket bikes. That's for 26.41 and then 26.42 is specifically the same topic, but on the labeling side. The scope of these are primarily aimed at, I'll say more like kids toys. They're aimed for younger people, not intended for adults and kind of low powered. And so as a consequence of the development of this industry, the ASTEM has started this task group WK70724, which is specifically looking at creating a standard for commercial electric powered scooters for adults. Doesn't have a number yet, unless we get to that process it'll get its own number like other standards get. But we got to first work on our standard and get it into the voting stage. So just to give you a little history of our task group. So basically in November of last year, it's already coming up on almost a year, but it's still less than that. So I think we made quite a amount of progress. Byrd presents ASTEM along with others to advocate for scooter standard, basically saying that we need to have something that covers scooter safety and mechanical design. And so Dave Dick of Bureau Veritas, he was the initial task group chair who was inaugurating the group. And so basically he starts out the discussions by taking a draft of F2641 is just the starting point. A lot of work had gone into that standard and it seems reasonable to use that as our template, so to speak for creating our own standard. In January of this year, we had our first online meeting. It was over two hours to discuss the standard over WebEx. And subsequently we found out that one challenge of this industry is that these rental vehicles are only deployed in certain markets. So if you live in Los Angeles, you live in Atlanta, you live in Portland, like those are all cities that have scooters. And so it's reasonable that you would have access to a device and go out and actually use it. But unfortunately, if you live anywhere else in the country, there's just not scooters easily that will people get familiar with. And so we had a lot of people that were interested in this topic, that were interested about consumer safety, but also just had not had a chance to even ride with themselves. And so we had planned a scooter showcase with different manufacturers that were gonna come and bring their scooters so that the different participants in the work group could have a chance to take a ride, test it out, see how it feels. But ultimately, that was scheduled in April. It had to get canceled because of we were unable to travel and meet in person. And so since then there's been this kind of delay, but we're kind of trying to rekindle the effort. And so we had another meeting in August, just last month. And basically to get the group kind of reclaimed to the standard and just kind of keep moving forward. And so even though there will be that lack of familiarity for some people that are involved, I think we're still worth trying to get as much as we can done since then. And so between January and August, one I took over as chair because Dave Dicker got reassigned in his position at Bureau Veritas. And so that's why I hosted this. And we have another one coming up next month. One nice thing though about our group and as others have talked about today, there's always gonna be a balance in the voting membership between you wanna have enough manufacturers and consumer advocates and consultants, academics and all these kinds of things. And it's really great to see that we already have a good breadth and array of people involved from the get go, you know? And so even though eventually we'll get to the point where it's put it for vote and you'll have the quote unquote proper balance, it is really great to see that in our initial discussions we have a lot of wide involvement. Everyone from consultants like ESI and Exponent to manufacturers like Puffy, Burd, Lyft, Razor. We have some lures, you have the CPSC involved. The city of Austin is also very active. So it's just really great to see such a wide range of people. And I think it's ultimately result in a lot of rich discussion. And so I hope that by having so many people involved in the early stage that we'll have a better standard when we actually submit it for balloting. As I mentioned before, our current approach basically is that we're using F2641 as a template. As I said before, this is the consumer safety standard for recreational powered scooters on pocket bikes. And so even though, you know, I'm not gonna make any guarantees or assurances here, I would expect the content in our adult scooters standard will be finished to be roughly similar to the scope of the F2641. I expect to be some additions, some deletions. For those of you that aren't familiar with F2641, here's kind of an idea of like the different topic areas that are in that standard. See of everything from, you know, brakes, electrical systems, curb impact tests, fasteners, the discussions of plastics, shields, guards, dynamic strength, static strength, wheel retention, grip retention, sort of the handle stem. There's discussions of the paint, the material quality, toxicology, exposed bolts, labels, accessible points and edges. So to kind of just give you a feel like where this is separated from, you know, like the SAE one that we talked about earlier that, you know, Ryan was talking about that, was specifically looking at, you know, scooter performance and, you know, how fast they can break or how quickly they accelerate. Whereas this, at least if we follow F2641, we expect the scope to be more based on, I would say, mechanical testing in terms of strength, whether it's static or dynamic, in terms of grip retention, you know, curb impact tests. So very, I mean, different scope, but these are all gonna be in the end, complementary to one another in terms of the testing. You know, that was the areas and here's the actual tests that are called on F2641, you know, as I said before, curb impact, dynamic brakes, dynamic strength, static strength, guard tests, some fatigue and compression tests as well. And again, just to reiterate, you know, one would expect but cannot guarantee that these topics would be including adult scooter standard. You know, one mention here is, you know, this one in F2641 has a method of measuring maximum speed because the SAE is already taking this on. It seems like we would probably just refer to the SAE standard when it gets published. But yeah. And then for those of you that were not participating in our meeting in August, just wanted to kind of share with you what we did discuss. Basically, we had a sharing of some of the CPSC compilation of scooter accent data. So I think that was part of the information that was shared in that first session today. And then the remainder of the meeting actually, it was a two hour long meeting, I believe. We spent a lot of the time actually discussing the scope and I think it's really important business to really iron up the scope early on so that everyone's clear as to, you know, what work we've set up for ourselves. And so some members were really interested in having the standard to be inclusive of rental and retail scooters. And the idea here was just to try and get a standard that would have a greater impact and cover a wider range of vehicles. But other members wanted to have the standard more narrowed because they saw a distinction between rental markets and retail markets. And the standard that we should apply to to both of those would have different test requirements. In the end, the task group has decided we're gonna start by adopting a rental only approach and focus on making a standard for rental scooters first and then we plan to apply to develop a standard for retail scooters later. Also during the new business discussion, there was a request for concerned safety scooters as it pertains to connectivity, which may result in a collaboration with another F-1575 group that is drafting a similar standard for coming internet of things standard. So the next steps for us though is, you know, once we're gonna continue having meetings, we're playing monthly meetings about an hour long. So I'll have my contact information at the end. So if you are interested in participating, like I said, it's open to all. Just, you know, let us know who you are and your email address so we can make sure to get you the meeting invite. But we're gonna have these meetings monthly to try and just really mold and shape and try and get this standard into a form which we can set up for balloting. Once the task group has kind of done a cursory approval of it, it then gets sent to subcommittee and then here's where it starts to get official, so to speak. So the subcommittee at 1558, that's the one that's on recreational bike or scooters or board of powered scooters. They have to vote and when they do their voting, it requires two thirds approval to pass. So that's, you know, a pretty high margin to ensure that the standard is adequate and appropriate for adoption. But then it goes a step further and after the subcommittee approves it, it then goes to the main committee at 15 and what is known as the society to review for voting. And in this process, the main committee at 15 has to have a 90% approval. So again, I think that really kind of speaks to the level of quality that is expected of our standards in order to get these to actually be accepted and available for people to use. And during each voting process, any negative votes must be addressed. So if it's an individual votes against the standard, they have to provide a reason and that reason has to be responded to. So it doesn't mean enacted, it doesn't mean that they have, you know, veto power, but it does mean that at least the committee has to respond to that concern. And that's part of the society is there for the society to make sure that there's the voting process and accurately in that, you know, if someone comes in and has, you know, four points that they feel need to be addressed that those four points at least get addressed. So that's kind of where we're at here with the ASTM task group. As I said, we're planning monthly one hour long meetings to get us down into vote ready shape. Our next meeting is actually later this week on Thursday. It's between two and three PM Eastern time. And if you are interested in participating, we would love to have you join the conversation and see where we're at and also help, you know, contribute to the development of the standard. Please let me know. My email address is here is just robert.willcatbird.co. If you can type this down fast enough so you can get the, it's my name's the agenda. You can find me on LinkedIn, however you want, but we'd be happy to have more people join us. So that's all I have. And now I'll pass it back to Lawrence. Thanks, Robert. Okay, thank you. Our last presentation in standards development sessions will be the development of micromobility safety standards by James Bird. As an R&D manager, James helped oversee SIN development and evaluation of e-scooters and as an early employee helped build SIN hardware teams. In his role, James also works with SAE, UL and ASDM on the development of new micromobility standards. James has over 13 years of experience working in product development, creating products in the consumer, solar, wearables and mobility industry. James has a BS in civil engineering from Cornell University. Thanks. Sorry about that. So yes, thank you very much. So this is, I'm gonna talk a little bit about standards development from the perspective of a scooter sharing company. You gave me that great presentation intro, so I'll skip all of this. That's me and my kid. Before I get into the details of this, this was mentioned briefly, but there are a number of different things people talk about when they talk about scooters. There are, of course, moped Vespa style scooters. There's a number of different scooter products for kids, both powered and unpowered. And then what I'm just gonna be talking about right now is powered scooters for adults, sometimes called kick scooters, sometimes called standing scooters. But the reason I wanted to distinguish between kids and adults and powered and unpowered is, later on we'll talk about some rules and standards that apply or don't apply based on those differences. So why does Spin want an industry-wide safety standard? The stereotype is that companies tend not to like standards, but actually I think that micro-obilities an excellent example of how standards can help industries. And actually common standards is something that Spin has been pushing for since before I got there. And of course, the primary reason is safety. And safety is a very important part of Spin's culture. It's written into our company values. One of them is do the right thing, even if it means more work and care. And so that comes out in a number of areas. We've had to develop our own internal standard for testing scooters to make sure that anything we put on the street is safe. And we do work in a number of other areas. My colleague, Kay Chang is gonna be talking a little bit later on today in the next hour about some of the work she's done partnering with cities to improve street infrastructure to make it safer. And then industry reputation is also tremendously important. For any new industry, even a small number of bad actors can create an industry-wide reputation that hurts everybody. And at Spin, we think that micro mobility and scooter sharing is one of the greatest changes of the decade and we really wanna see it succeed and show its full potential for how it can improve society. And so we wanna make sure that everybody's operating to the same high standards and that the industry as a whole has a reputation for safety and reliability. We also think that common standards can help us can help reduce regional variations and that that's a benefit, of course, for scooter operators since it means fewer customizations to hardware. But we think it also actually helps cities a lot as well. If you think of somebody working for a city trying to write a scooter permit process and they wanna make sure that the scooters on their streets are safe, they're not necessarily an expert in what makes a scooter safe. And so they either need to put out some incomplete rules on safety or they need to spend a lot of time and effort developing some custom rules and much simpler for them to just be able to go and reach for common safety standards. And then we also think that it will make evaluation of new scooter products faster and help the industry innovate more quickly. So right now, whenever somebody comes to us with a new product, we have to start taking that product through our internal safety standards, which is not fast and not cheap. Whereas if somebody developing products for scooter sharing or micro mobility can just go look at the common safety standards, then they can just develop their product to that standard from the beginning. And so by the time they're bringing it to spin or other companies are to market, it's basically ready to go. So, but despite all these good reasons for one, currently there are no safety standards for adult powered scooters. There are a number of rules for adult powered scooters. There are national rules, state rules, city permits of course have a number of rules in them. And then there are some voluntary standards that cover portions or subsections of scooters. So this is an example of some of the current applicable standards, many of them, some of them, the UL1s were spoken about previously. But as you can see, these are talking about very specific portions of scooters. And these are very important aspects of safety, but none of them are talking about scooter behavior or rider safety. And then there are standards that are covered very similar products such as scooters for kids or unpowered scooters or bicycles of course have some similarities. And these are useful standards for looking at how it's been done and taking some inspiration, but none of these standards actually cover adult powered scooters. And then of course there are laws that do cover adult powered scooters. Germany probably has the most prescriptive one to date. It has fairly detailed guidance on braking performance and headlight design. A number of US states have rules on scooters. They'll usually have a brief definition of a scooter to define it as a vehicle class and then a section on visibility requirements. A few of them will have additional requirements on maximum vehicle weight, but for the most part the state DOT rules are pretty brief and we've found that there's a lot of room for interpretation that often there is room for interpretation in them. And I'll get to an example of that on the next slide. And then of course there are city permits which can be quite detailed, but they're primarily concerned with how scooters are deployed and how companies operate within the city. They do have some rules on the safety and behavior of the scooters, but for the most part they refer to state rules for those aspects. So in terms of state rules and ambiguity, I'm gonna pick on my home state of California here. So this is an excerpt from the California vehicle code on rules for scooter headlights. And I'll just read the highlighted section. It says illuminates the highway in front of the operator and is visible from a distance of 300 feet in front and from the sides. So this is a fine rule. It's a perfectly reasonable requirement, but there is some room for interpretation of exactly what this means. So for example, how much should it illuminate the highway? And how do you test for visibility? Do you just send somebody 300 feet away and ask them if they can see the headlight? I assume you're doing that at night, but it doesn't say. And then it says that it has to be visible from the sides, but it doesn't say how far to the sides. Just a little bit, 45 degrees, 90 degrees. So if you talk to somebody that designs or tests bicycle headlights, they have kind of common understandings of what this means and how to interpret it, but if I'm designing a new product or if I'm evaluating new products, often from companies that aren't familiar with California vehicle code, it's nice. I would like to have a solid understanding of how they've tested their products and made sure that it meets this requirement and not be relying on how they have interpreted this possibly to the best advantage of their products. So this is one of the areas where we're hoping that common standards can provide a little bit more detail. So out of all these, the current set of voluntary standards that apply the adjacent voluntary standards and the laws, the what is left out is a common definition of what a scooter is. And SAE has just recently come out with taxonomy, which is fantastic. There's still all these standards are new development. So this is all of the standards organizations that presented previously are working as quickly as we can since I'm on all of those committees to cover these areas. I'm just highlighting the importance of why we're doing it. We need guidelines on how to measure performance. If there's gonna be rules on maximum speed, if there's gonna be rules on breaking performance, we need to make sure that everybody's measuring those in the same way. And really those first two things are just a foundation so that we can get to the meteor topics of durability and rider safety. So scooter sharing in particular has some interesting needs around durability. If you think of a vehicle that somebody owns privately, they understand that they're responsible for the maintenance of that vehicle, even if only to the extent that they take it to a mechanic every so often, but for shared scooters, shared vehicles of any kind, really not only is there the additional wear and tear that they have to absorb, but when a rider gets on a shared scooter, they have to trust that the operator has properly maintained that. And so for everybody to have some common understanding of what proper maintenance means is an area that isn't covered yet. And then of course there's rider safety and you get into questions of what is a safe speed, when something breaks and no matter how well we design things, things will break, how do we make sure it breaks safely? For example, if a throttle breaks in the middle of a ride, does can the scooter detect that and slowly and safely come to a stop? Or is it just gonna hold on to that last speed signal it had and keep going forever? I'm not gonna cover these again, they've talked already, but these are the organizations that Spin has been working with. We've been involved essentially from the beginning of all three. And in fact, we worked with ASTM in March of 2019 to formally request a new standard to cover powered adult scooters. I've been the primary contact that's been for all of these, all three of these committees, but as we get into more areas of technical, more technical areas, we've been bringing in subject matter experts as needed. So that is it, thank you very much for your time. Thanks, James. I wanna thank again all the speakers for our standards development section. Gonna have some time here to get some questions answered. One for me, one second. Okay, so we had one question here for SAE. The question reads, does the SAE J3194 recognize that there are three types of e-bikes, classes one, two, and three. Classes one and three do not have self-propulsion even though there is a motor. Yeah, Chris Cherry here. The SAE standard does, I'm trying to remember what the language exactly says, but it does reference that people for bikes, class system is sort of the law of the land essentially for most states or many states at least. And I think you'll hear a little bit more about that later on in the conversation today, near the end. But yeah, we explicitly included the sort of definition of an e-bike that has operable pedals and some of the same language that's in the three-class system. We don't break down the speeds and so on and you can actually, with our system, say that it's a low speed electric bike, lightweight electric bike, however you wanna do it, we do include that in there. Also, one of the things we were talking about that John mentioned was with weight, for example, we're not as prescriptive on some of the weights and other things, but we do allow heavier e-bikes like big cargo bikes that are family hauling bikes that people tend to have are becoming popular. And so those would be a heavier weight version of an e-bike, so. Let me just jump in real quick to add a couple of things to what Chris said. The e-bike classification is in alignment with the three classifications for electric bikes in the standard here. It's underpowered bicycles, so there is opportunity to expand that. One thing that is different from what we have done versus what you see in the CPSC definition or some other definitions, we are agnostic on the power of the motor. We felt that the speed was more important than determining the power of the motor as it relates to classification of the device. Yeah, and we're also agnostic on the source of the power of the motor. So you could have a gasoline powered, you've seen these bicycle, that still is a powered bicycle in ours. But again, we would have that tag that says it's a combustion engine, not an electric motor, right? So those are, so it's a little bit broader than, it allows for a broader sort of definition than the three class system. Okay, great, thanks. Let's see. Another question we have here, it looks like this one can go out to all the speakers. Have any standards address potential need for turn signals as it can be difficult to remove hands from handlebars? Hi, this is James. I have not seen any standards that cover that, cover turn signals yet, but certainly I think that's, the standards committees aren't quite at that phase of development yet. Taxonomies being covered, standard ways of measuring performance are being covered. They haven't gotten to specifications like turn signals yet. Yeah, but this is Robert. Go ahead. Pause it. This is Robert. And just kind of like following what James said, the same thing. And the one thing I find interesting is that Germany, which I think has a pretty rigorous standard. They do have a lot of requirements for the lighting and the reflectors and stuff does not include turn signals as a requirement. It's optional. So I think it's interesting finding, but yeah, nothing in the US that I'm aware of. Thanks, Robert. Okay, another general question we have. Are there any plans for other SDOs to follow ASTM scope to decipher between rental and retail products? This is Robert again. I'm not going to speak for the others, I'm not as heavily involved in those, but I think one thing that might separate though is that with ASTM, like because it is somewhat currently focused on more mechanical testing, I think that people in the meeting recognized a need for more rigorous mechanical standards for rental scooters, just because to give a really easy example, people treat things in the quote unquote public space very differently than they treat their own personal belongings. So to give you an example, if I wanted to put a park bench in my backyard, I'd go to Home Depot and get a one made out of probably thin slots of wood and maybe a little bit of metal on it from my backyard and would use it gently and it would last for several years. If I was to put a park bench in a city park, I would instead get a few cubic yards of concrete and pour a concrete bench. So I think that's kind of a good example just to illustrate how people treat rental scooters differently than their own personal property. And so I think that's probably, that was some of the justification given for why people wanted a separate standard for rental versus retail scooters for ASTM, specifically that people recognize a need for higher requirements for mechanical testing. And I don't know if those requirements would carry over to like, for instance, UL has some batteries, I said the battery standards is pretty high and SE is looking at taxonomy, how we define it, they're also looking at high speed, low speed. I don't think there's a need for separation there. I could be wrong, of course, having other people applying, but just to some color, that was kind of the reason why ASTM while we so far have decided to separate the retail and rental. Yeah, this is Ryan Yee here. I guess as far as J3230 is concerned, I'm not sure that the discussion around the sell around geofence boundaries would have come out outside of the shared context, though it's not explicit in the standard itself. Okay, great. Looks like we have time for maybe just one more question. We got a couple of questions about susceptibility of softwares to cyber attacks. How do the current standards address these concerns? This is something that I kind of hinted at very briefly in my presentation, and this was a question that was brought up during our last meeting. So there is an ASTM standard, I think it's, I'll have to get the exact citation, but there is another subcommittee that's drafting a standard about like the connectivity of devices. And my understanding is that they are addressing or at least considering cybersecurity as a aspect of that. And so I think that with the ASTM standard that we're developing for power and adult scooters, we could just refer to that when it does get completed. But to be honest, I'm not entirely sure the content of that and to what level they go into ensuring the safety and security of devices. But that's what we can look into. Yeah, Chris, the SAE is not really looking at that within the micro mobility group, at least not currently. There is a different kind of parent, not a parent group, a sister or brother group related to shared mobility rather. And that includes a little bit broader scope as it relates to data and apps and onboard firmware that includes controlling vehicles and so on. And this is Diana from UL. Just so you know, UL does have some cybersecurity standards. We can look at adding those to 2272 and or 2849. We also have a new standard UL-5500 for remote software updates. So we can also look at adding that if there's interest with the industry. So I'll make note of that. We could consider that for the future. Awesome, thanks. That was a great presentation guys and I guess some really good questions come in. Let's thank our panelists again. And it's time to move to the next session. It will be best practices for enhancing safety. And Einstein Miller and CBSC will be the moderator. Good morning all. My name is Einstein Miller. I'm an electrical engineer and I've been with the agency for roughly nine and a half years. My support of ensuring micro-mobility safety primarily revolves around an evaluation of the power source of these devices such as lithium-ion battery packs and battery chargers. First up, Dr. Chris Cherry will be joining us again to talk about safety, data limitation and opportunity for micro-mobility. Go ahead Chris. Chris, you may be muted. We're having... Let me start over. I was just, I was getting rolling there, sorry. Okay, thank you. Okay, try again. So professor in civil engineering at University of Tennessee and I'm gonna acknowledge my students who of course every professor realized so heavily on and appreciate so much. So Natesh Shah and Yuen were kind of pivotal for the work that I'm gonna present here. And I'm gonna go quickly through this set of slides but really with the main focus of understanding how infrastructure plays a role. There were questions on the earlier panel about intersections and behavior, writer behavior and so on and we're gonna get into that here, okay? So we've heard from epidemiologists but we don't really learn a lot from epidemiological studies on scooter safety as it relates to the transportation safety. So the studies that have come out have been very interesting and very useful but they don't really bridge that gap between transportation safety and injuries. So what this side looks at and I'll confess that the work that I do doesn't bridge the gap the other way but at least looks at the other side of the chasm so to speak. And we are trying to really understand where the system has failed and what are the ways that we can improve micro-mobility safety through system improvements, okay? So I'm gonna highlight here quickly that I worked with Bird last year essentially with hosting round tables on trying to figure out ways to improve safety as you all know this was sort of the year everything was happening, 2019-20 there was a lot of safety related studies coming out and there was a lot of safety related incidents that were occurring, crashes and collisions and fatalities that were occurring throughout the year. So we looked at operators, what they could do and then of course what the public sector can do. I'll focus here and I'm not gonna talk too much about this but we already heard about this especially from Dr. Harmon earlier this morning about the injury epidemiological studies that have dominated the research. I chair a subcommittee at Transportation Research Board and we had 35 micro-mobility papers last year and very few addressed safety directly. So what we found from the epidemiology studies is that most single vehicle crashes are what we're seeing in hospitals, in emergency departments. There's been a lot of media scrutiny of head injuries. We see that non-user injuries are quite low that is pedestrians, the rate is pretty small. And then the hospital admission rate so this is maybe an indicator of severity is about 10% in these and give or take some, okay? So that's the order of magnitude. So an injured person comes to an emergency department and 90% of them are discharged. So what we're trying to understand is what's the role of car crashes? Almost all of the fatal crashes that we see, these 20-something fatal crashes that we've seen in the US and Europe for that matter, 80% of those are, of the fatal crashes involve a car, okay? A car hits the scooter rider, okay? I should say a car driver hits the scooter rider. About 10% of the emergency department and these are the more minor injuries involve a car. So you can start to see this map. When you're looking at trauma centers, about half of the trauma center injuries or reports include a car. So we're really focused on, we as Vision Zero Transportation Safety folks are trying to focus on reducing severe and fatal injuries. And trying to understand that involves trying to look at where these car conflicts occur. One of the challenges, of course, is that epi studies don't explicitly link injuries with car crashes for the most part. And that's been a real problem or a real challenge. A couple of unique insights from some of the studies at Austin and San Diego's studies is that inexperienced riders may have higher injury rates. We know that they have higher injuries, but we don't know if they're proportionally higher to the number of inexperienced riders that are out there, right? There's a lot of inexperienced riders out there. And of course, inexperienced riders are becoming injured. And then there was this interesting finding about intoxication and nighttime riding that seems to be a risk factor. And I'll show you a little bit about that later on, okay? So some of the four key recommendations, and I got this after this footnote here. This is Bird, and I'm not endorsing or encouraging this, but I agree with these because I've worked with, and I think these are common sense that any operator can improve on or can endorse, is we need to improve our infrastructure and that's what this talk is about. We need to improve education of both riders and car drivers, and I'll show you a little hint of how that might play out in a little bit. We need to improve vehicle design, of course, and then protect the pedestrian right of way, okay? And so we'll look at these two essentially, we can talk about all of them, but look at these two in the rest of this talk, okay? So what we were lucky to do to get is Nashville has a very rich shared scooter data set, and I use shared in both senses of the word here. It's from all the scooter operators, and it's shared with researchers in the state, at least and maybe beyond, but we were able to have a data use agreement with the Nashville folks that looked at some of the raw scooter data and try to understand where and why scooter riders ride. There's a question in transportation and we can unpack this and spend a lot of time talking on it, but should we treat and mitigate transportation risk in similar ways as we do to recreation risk? And if we say yes to that question, then should we look at scooter riders trip purpose in different ways? So that's kind of a philosophical question you can think about as you're looking at scooters in the future, okay? And then we're trying to bridge this gap of looking at injury data and coupling it with trip data. So I'm gonna highlight the data that we have. Again, the epidemiology studies are very kind of aggregate, which is fine, but we aren't able to kind of untangle the specific factors that matter for scooter safety. So for example, exposure matters. Here's, let me see, February is on the bottom and July is on the top in this case. And as we're looking at that, we can see of course that there's a higher volume or at least a proportionally higher volume of nighttime riding in February than there is potentially in the summer. That is dark hour riding. So what about first time riders? You can ask the same sort of questions and I don't have the answers to these questions, but the data allows you to dig into this, okay? We were able to do all this fancy clustering and classification and machine learning on the data itself and we can understand different patterns of travel. So for example, we have daytime errands here on the top. If you recognize Nashville, you know that obviously the red blob is the downtown area and then the bottom left is kind of the Vanderbilt University area. So you have a lot of activity on the bottom left and then you have the downtown, what you think of as Nashville's main street and Broadway and the honky-tonks and the bar scene and all of that, okay? You also have a stadium right across the river where there's a little hotspot there too. On recreation on the bottom right, obviously nighttime entertainment, we were able to cluster all of these trips together and you get this pattern and then on the bottom right, you have recreation trips and you can probably just by looking at that identify where the parks are, where the greenways are and so on, okay? So this is, so we're able to split this out and I'm gonna just sort of whiz past this, but the idea is you can follow these different patterns for different times of the day, different days of the week and of course different months of the year. I'll highlight the blue line on the bottom right that suddenly drops off the first week of May, 2019. And of course that is when Vanderbilt University took off or basically let out so all the students disappeared or many of them did so they're not going back and forth to classes on their daytime errands, okay? And so you can see how you can pull some of these examples out. So let's get in safety data. So we have, there it is, Vanderbilt University downtown and this is a heat map essentially, it's not very hot, but it's a weighted map of trips that are occurring between downtown and other parts of the city. And what we, you can see the different crash locations. We have bicycle crashes and scooter crashes highlighted here and you can see these hotspots. Basically, you can see this high injury network and you can normalize that to the volume of vehicles on that route. I wanna highlight the scooter crash hot spot in downtown that row of bicycle and scooter crashes on the kind of in the middle of the figure on the right, top right, that's Broadway, that's lower Broadway. That's where all the bars are. And just a couple of days ago, they announced that they're gonna be shutting down lower Broadway to cars at nighttime on weekends, okay? And so this is gonna reduce one of these big conflict zones and that's a strategy to allocate space to vulnerable road users and COVID and spacing and everything else, okay? So we broke this out as a crash typology framework. We have a paper that we've written that I'll present some preliminary results on and it's relying on Tennessee's police crash reporting and all of these crashes of course are car to scooter crashes. They do have a good classification of scooters and as a non motorist personal conveyance we have complete kind of transparency. We can see the narrative. We can read all of these narratives and we can pretty clearly identify what is a scooter crash or not. There's also a person type that's been added called a pedestrian on an electric scooter. This is relatively new. There's no records in this of this person type in the crash database. So it's not being used yet, but it is another type, okay? So I'm gonna go quickly here. We looked at 51 crashes of scooters, 79 bicycle crashes over the same period of time. This is about a two year period of time. You can see them there. We chose crashes for bicyclists that were in the same geographic bounds as the scooters that were within a mile of the nearest scooter crash. And so we didn't get the suburban bicycle crashes. We didn't get the long recreational trips outside the city or any of that, just the downtown bicycle crashes. We have the full crash narratives and we were able to develop these typologies. So a couple of differences. If it's not listed here, it probably means it's about the same. So a few differences is that scooters have a little bit more, quite a bit more crashes in dark and lighted conditions. So street lighted conditions, but dark after dark. But that's contrasted to bicyclists who have more crashes in dark or low lighted conditions. So bicyclists are crashing in dark and unlighted conditions whereas scooter riders are crashing on lighted streets, okay? The gender balance is a little bit different. More women crash with cars on scooters than men relative to bicyclists. And then for age and severity, there's a little bit more severity in this younger cohort for scooters. 20 year old cohort is what we're looking at as kind of the big peak, whereas the bicyclists tend to be a little bit older, okay? A few other things that are interesting, we were able to map where people's lived and where they're crashed. And so what we found is that a lot of scooter riders and bicycle riders were close to home actually. So people live downtown and they ride a scooter around and they get hit downtown. With one little exception, of course, is about a third of our e-scooter riders are from more than 50 miles away. So these are travelers coming in riding scooters. So this yields information about education and so on, okay? The drivers on the other hand, almost all of them are suburbanites or travelers. So they're all in this 10 to 50 mile range away from home. They're driving into downtown Nashville from outside of the city essentially, and they're striking bicyclists and scooter riders from outside. So again, talking about education, you have somebody who's not used to driving maybe in a dense urban environment, certainly not used to driving around scooters if they're from the outside in their kind of home turf and they are hitting cyclists and scooter riders about equally actually, okay? Couple of points. Intersections are really important. I'm out of time, so I'm gonna really kind of just highlight this. Intersections are 80% of all crashes for bicyclists and scooters are at intersections. The highest, the thing I want you to remember here if anything is that about 25% of those crashes, scooter intersection crashes, a fourth of them are these right turn, right approach crashes, okay? So bear with me on this. You have a scooter coming from the right of a car and the car is turning right. So they're looking to the left. This is a right turn on red scenario. If you can visualize that, you don't have to. This is where our, this is an example of that. This is where we had a fatality in Nashville and it was crossing at this point from a direction maybe that was not where the motorist was looking, okay? Here's another crash diagram. You can see what happens here, okay? So I'm gonna get to the end and you can read these on your own, but we need system risk factors, not just injury factors. We need to look at police crash data to provide context of injuries. Hospitalization is the extent of injuries. Overlay probe count data like I showed earlier to provide the rate of injuries and patterns of use. And then finally, infrastructure data is really the tools for this. I'm gonna point to this. Everybody says what's your recommendation on scooter safety? And I always say just read the ITF report. That's a pretty good, they've got 10 really not good strategies that are somewhat included here in some ways, but really focusing on severe injuries and fatalities is an important aspect for transportation safety and focusing on intersections, protected intersections, driveways, networks. The reason people ride on these really hellacious streets in Nashville, the reason they ride on sidewalks is because the street is so hostile to scooter riders or bicyclists for that matter in most cases. So build a protected low stress network that deals with one way connectivity and so on and maintain this non-motorized infrastructure. So those are the key aspects here. And then of course, data is important. So I'm gonna stop there. I'm a couple of minutes over. You can reach out to me here. This work, a lot of it was funded under this Collaborative Science Center for Road Safety, a grant from them, okay? So I look forward to questions at the end. Thank you, Chris. Next we have Kay Chen. She'll be speaking on roommate, remaking urban infrastructure for micro-mobility. Kay leads initiatives for spin safe and livable streets program where she's helping cities provide safer experiences for consumers. Prior to spin, she had a long tenure with the San Francisco Planning Department and led many of the departments in innovative projects like Groundplay, Business Zoning Check, Market Street Prototyping Festival and the Better Roots Program. She has an act of pushing the city to try new things. Kay's a board member for San Francisco Transit Riders combining previous experience working at New York City Planning. Landscape architecture, architecture and transportation planning firms. Kay has experience on a wide scope of private and public projects. Kay has an MS in urban planning from Columbia University and a BA in urban studies and minor in digital design from University of California Riverside. Thank you for being here today, Kay. Hi, Eric. Kay, I just wanna make sure everyone can hear me and see my screen. It looks like everything's green, so I'll go. You're good to go. Okay, great. So yeah, thanks for that great introduction and I've had a good time listening to all the other presentations as well. So kind of focusing on remaking urban infrastructure for micro-mobility. As the introduction stated, my previous background was working for cities, working around safer streets, working with vision zero goals and thinking about the street as committing to all users, not just vehicles. So zooming out like Dr. Chris Cherry did, looking at the environment for the scooter operates is where we're focusing for safety efforts today. So I spend, we believe that streets belong to everyone and our mission is to impact positive change to be advocates for accessibility and safety in our communities. Our St. St. Street's program that I lead at Sven focuses on a couple of buckets and some of these are overlapping, but generally we're trying to help people navigate intersection safely, reclaiming space from cars, whether that be travel lanes, repurposing for bike lanes or parking spaces to park lots which are temporary or long-term spaces that are converted for parking for people to use to bike, to park their bikes or scooters and then just making the physical case for bike lanes. So I'll run through some of our examples. Here's a quick intro from our videos. I'll play a quick clip and... Safety is everyone's responsibility. And while knowing the rules of the road how to operate our vehicles and wearing a helmet are important, we know safety is much bigger than the individual behavior. It's about how we design our streets and for whom. That's why Sven Street's team commits funding and staff resources to help bring together better bike lanes, safer intersections and infrastructure improvements to make our streets more accessible to all that use them. Whether you're eight or 80, you get around on a bike or scooter by foot or with a wheelchair. Regardless of your gender, your race or your background or the neighborhood you're from, everyone deserves to get home safely. So that's just a quick snippet sort of outlining our streets program and the whole things on our website if you wanna check that out. But basically, we fund projects working with cities and advocacy groups throughout the country and the world now to work on these infrastructure improvement. So I'll walk through some examples. As Chris mentioned, intersections are really important and this was one of our projects we did last year and the top left, you can see the before. So it's a pretty big intersection that there was an existing bike lane but it wasn't painted. So what we did is work with local advocacy group and the city and community to paint the crosswalks, paint in the buffered bike lane and then add some physical separation so that pedestrians and seniors and other folks in the neighborhood felt sleep safer to navigate that intersection. And these are sort of examples that can be inspirational for the city to that is trying to test out new ideas and try to get people to see the street in a different way. Another aspect that's common for us to have to think about is not just the movement of scooters but also where they're parked. So we hosted a parklet competition which allowed for creative thought around what a form factor of a parklet could be. And we asked the designs to also incorporate scooter parking because one of the challenges that we have is if there's scooters strewn across the sidewalks and people are trying to cross, there's conflict there. So all of the ideas that we selected in the competition that were built out had different ways to park bikes and scooters off of the sidewalk to maintain that clear path to travel. And then- Nashville is a great place but- There we go. So there's sort of piggybacking on Nashville. We have some examples of working with advocacy groups that have grappled with how to make safe for infrastructure in their city and push electeds to make these decisions to invest in infrastructure for quite a long time. So we've partnered with these groups to just give them sort of mini grants to help bring their ideas to light, to have people participate and ride on a protected bikeway in an area of town that usually doesn't have it and that kind of garners support. And so those are the types of projects that our program has funded throughout the country. And we have a bunch of examples. So I'll just kind of go through these. Milwaukee is another example. Even in the colder months, people still want a more protected place to travel. So even a super wide street like this where you have bike and cars and everything, people, you know, there's always with creative thought some place to carve out space for people to ride safely. And another aspect of our program that we've been finding, especially during COVID is there's been a lot of streets that are citywide programs that are closing down streets to traffic or slow streets, reducing the streets, the traffic flow. So we've partnered with cities to give them communities and signage and the resources to sort of help let people know that, you know, there's scooter riders, there's people, there's kids around and that's sort of just helping to reiterate the narrative that the streets can are for not just vehicles but for other modes as well. Additional examples of demonstrating bike lanes. So this was a two-way cycle track pop-up in St. George, Utah. We partnered with the city and bike Utah to do this temporary installation to show the communities and advocates and politicians that, you know, this was possible and it's making its way through council now and has garnered some support. So hopefully we'll see that soon installed in the future. Another aspect of our program is, you know, funding, not just the physical infrastructure but spending time with communities that have been traditionally disinvested in the safe infrastructure and have high fatality rates or crash rates. So we worked in DC with Ward 7 and 8 working with community members and the local bike advocacy organization to talk through some of their like top intersections of concern. And then the hopes is that after we develop some of these their ideas, community-seated ideas we'll work with DDOT to install one or two of those. And then I'll just end on two last programs of ours. In terms of data and our streets program we created a program last year that advocated, so I provided tools for six advocates. So those are listed here. But basically we thought, you know, there's all sorts of data that these advocates could be collecting and may not have the resources for. So we provided them with, you know, populist streetlight data, all sorts of different types of data that they could ingest on their own and provided trainings for them. And then also provided them with data counters and sensors, so traffic counters that could do different modes and then also vehicle speeds. So they're kind of in the midway through their program right now and we'll have a report out of all the different projects that they've tackled around street safety given the tools that we were able to provide for them. And then our last project that I'll talk about is really focusing on barriers. We know, you know, we've all seen these different types of barriers in the street. There, you know, it can be expensive to maintain for what you get out of them. And we thought that there would be an opportunity to invite the design community and everyday folks to sort of envision what that could be. So we held a competition again, had a webinar and we announced our winners and we're working with them to create a prototype. And we solicited a lot of advice from different folks in the industry from transportation planners to people for bikes and all sorts of people who have a lot of experience in this realm. And our winning design is shown here and we're working on creating a prototype using reclaimed rubber tires. And so hopefully we'll see those, we'll be able to pilot that with our, with the community soon this year. And then there's all the different winners or runners up as well, all listed on our website if you're interested. So it's up there, ready for questions. Thank you. Thank you, Kay. Before we get started on questions, I wanna take a moment to thank our panelists. All right, we have time for a few questions before we break for lunch. I see one of our first questions here is directed towards Dr. Cherry. I appreciate that your research considered relevant variables for micro-mobility accidents such as various trip patterns. And I think it's very helpful that you mapped out scooter and bicycle crash locations. Have you compared your findings to other locations or do you have plans to do so? We only have really good data on both crashes and scooter trips in Nashville. And we haven't dug into that. And one of the objectives of looking, there's been a lot of talk about bicycle, whether scooters have different characteristics as bicyclists. And that was really our main idea here was to control kind of at least for geography and populations and road infrastructure for that matter in one area. It'd be nice to have that data everywhere. A couple of challenges though is, for example, we don't have great exposure data for bicyclists. So we don't actually 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. I won't spend a bunch of time on this. 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 the rider got up to his maximum speed and then we had a moderator yell at them as loud as they could stop like you'd see for somebody, you know, trying to warn somebody of an accident. 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. So he had a tandem position but he had his back foot up. 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 of the Boston University School of Law thank you Rachel for being here and for speaking today thank you so much can you hear me? yes we can hear you excellent really thank you so much for all the work that went into today's forum by CPSC staff and others and also to all the presenters all the presentations were substantive and thoughtful and really interesting so thank you one of the risks of going later in the day is that everyone has said what to say but that is not entirely the case so please stay tuned so something that everyone has talked about though is that the growth of micro-mobility products in the United States has been profound and along with the increased popularity has been increased reports of injuries and as well as deaths I will discuss micro-mobility products known incidents discuss data from medical literature and provide recommendations to the CPSC so first I will focus on electric scooters according to the January 2020 Journal of the American Medical Association an article they presented that more than 39,000 electric scooter injuries were treated in emergency rooms across the United States between 2018 which is an increase of 222% over the period and they analyzed the types of injuries that patients experience and that's what I'm going to discuss a third of patients suffered head trauma a bit less than a third 27% suffered saw-shers contusions and abrasions and lacerations on electric scooters well this is true before today it's no longer true but we're glad the CPSC has issued a report and communicated today about data about electric scooters and we urge the agency and all government entities to take action to monitor, investigate track and ultimately reduce incidents as these products continue to be grown in popularity the CPSC and the Austin Public Health Department conducted an epidemiological investigation that many of you are likely familiar with and the analysis of these incidents was published in April of 2019 and it found that un-190 injured riders identified 48% had injuries 70% sustained injuries to the upper limbs 55% to lower limbs and 18% to the chest, abdomen and multiple injuries across body regions as possible many individuals sustained injuries to their arms, knees, face and hands and almost half of the injured riders had a severe injury the study determined that there were 20 individuals injured per 100,000 e-square trips taken during the study period and significantly especially in terms of policies looking forward the study determined that these injuries may have been preventable and very few only one of the 190 injured scooter riders was wearing helmet onto electric bicycles these products as we discuss today are similarly really experiencing increased news and been associated with increased incidents of injury and death and the growth is profound cities such as Chicago or starting programs making these products available indicating that other cities are likely exploring similar programs that will increase the numbers of these vehicles across the country the Journal of Injury Prevention analyzed CPSC nice data of e-bikes, power scooters and pedal bicycles from 2000 to 2017 and found that while people injured using e-bikes were more likely to suffer internal injuries and require hospital admission power-slippered injuries were nearly few times more likely to result in a diagnosis of a concussion e-bike related injuries were more than few times more likely to involve a collision with the pedestrian and either pedal bicycles or power scooters but there was no evidence that power scooters were more likely than bicycles to be involved in a collision with the pedestrian 17% of e-bike accident victims suffered internal injuries compared to about 7.5% for both power scooters and pedal bikes and while population based rates of pedal bicycle related injuries have been decreasing which is a good thing particularly in young children reported e-bike injuries have been increasing dramatically particularly among older people so the conclusion that these authors drew was that e-bike in powers with reduced and injured patterns differ from more traditional pedal operating bicycles efforts to address injury prevention and control are warranted and cyber studies examining demographics in hospital resorts realizations are necessary I also wanted to point out that the CPSC has conducted at least 8 recalls of ruptured clinicals due to a variety of hazards fall, crash and other injury hazards Hovered words. So as was discussed and for those of us in the space we are very aware that these products render these consistently for causing fires and damaging property in 2016 and 2017 the CPSC is aware of at least 250 fire incidents involving hoverboards and the CPSC estimated that there have been 13 burn injuries 3 smoke inhalation injuries and more than 4 million property damage related to hoverboards but in the first 2 years that these products were on market more people were actually injured by falls than by fires according to an April 2018 article in the Journal of Pediatrics that analyzed nice data for children under 18 years of age involving hoverboards and skateboards for 2015-2016 the authors found that there were 26,854 injuries serious enough to require emergency room treatment to drill down and what else they found the mean and median ages for hoverboard and skateboard injuries were 11 13 years respectively in both groups boys were more commonly injured the majority of hoverboard injuries occurred at home the risks were the most common injured body part and fractures were the most common diagnosis in both groups the majority of patients in both groups were discharged from the hospital and approximately 3% of the patients with skateboard injuries and hoverboard injuries were admitted to the hospital the CPSC has conducted numerous recalls to at least 20 and issued safety alerts for hoverboards due to fire hazards and we discuss the UL standard as well the CPSC conducted an educational campaign focused on the fire hazards caused by hoverboards however newer products have caused fires indicating that perhaps the current voluntary standard may not be sufficiently addressing fire risks so we urge the CPSC to focus on the fall hazards caused by these products as well another issue that was brought up recently today but not extensively discussed is the fact that many of these products especially when they are shared products are connected products the connectivity of an E-square or any micro mobility product could serve to pose additional hazards to consumers we know what works that an electronic scooter's Bluetooth module was hacked and that the hacker was able to control the braking and acceleration of the scooter so we urge the CPSC as well as manufacturers and retailers and providers of these products to address these issues for the CPSC to take enforcement action to protect consumers and it's interesting because on the one hand the connectivity could pose risks in terms of hacking such as what occurred with the braking and acceleration on the other hand it's possible that these issues could be fixed in a much easier way than a traditional recall through updates to the software protective equipment that's something else that I think is very important has not been discussed extensively today micro mobility equipment necessitates the use of protective equipment such as helmets helmets may not be available that are specifically designed to protect consumers from each of these products and it's from micro mobility products that are rented on the streets for example often or at least in Washington DC no protective equipment is provided which increases risks of serious injury to consumers in inclusion the CPSC should engage in the documentation of incidents the study of deaths and injuries lead efforts to enforce reporting obligations recall unsafe products track and release incident data support policies that reduce the severity and incidence of injury and death and educate consumers and all stakeholders about safe operation of these vehicles thank you very much happy to take questions at the end of this panel thank you Rachel for that presentation so we'll move on to the next presentation so our next speakers my colleague Lawrence Mella has already introduced once again here's Morgan Lamell and Alex Lagemann from People for Bikes this time presenting from the point of view of policy and consumer safety so I want to hand it over to Morgan and Alex thank you thank you again this is Morgan you all heard from me and my colleague Alex just a couple hours ago as we covered some safety and studies around e-bikes and I would be remiss to not qualify our expertise again as strictly within the purview of bicycles and electric bicycles you all heard a lot about e-scooters and hoverboards today from much more qualified presenters than us and one of our overall goals of presenting today and one of the reasons we're very grateful to have been extended this opportunity is to really look to distinguish electric bicycles and bicycles from the variety of other innovative micro mobility devices out there and so what you'll learn in this presentation is a little bit of a shift from the prior presentations even within this segment but framing electric bikes as from a state and federal regulatory and legislative perspective as more in alignment with bicycles than electric scooters and hoverboards and again the myriad of other products that we're seeing come to our streets and fast and furious so Alex and I will cover move forward here cover state e-bike laws federal e-bike laws and then close with a description of many of the federal laws that align e-bikes very closely with bicycles and in some respects differentiate them from other micro mobility devices today so that's a quick intro this is me and Alex as well I did already go through the mission and background of people for bikes but just for those who just joined within the last few minutes here people for bikes is the bicycle industry trade association and we speak on behalf of most if not all of the major bike suppliers and manufacturers bicycles and e-bikes and parks and accessories across the United States so thankful again to be here I'll get into state e-bike laws and again it's someone of a deviation from some of the consumer facing information we heard just in the last couple minutes but I want to paint the picture of how electric bicycles are very clearly regulated at the state level as you all know the federal government through the CPSC regulates the manufacturing and for sale of e-bikes and the analogy and kind of metaphor we give is that it's legal to sell an e-bike in all 50 states but states clearly regulate where that e-bike can be used so an individual consumer can go into a bike shop legally by an e-bike but then the rules as to where you can ride that bike and how vary from state to state so about five to six years ago people for bikes and its partners within the bike industry came together to clarify how e-bikes are treated within state vehicle codes with the intent of giving e-bike riders the same rights and duties to the road as a traditional bike rider so again this effort just as e-bike manufacturing standards are defined in federal law consistent with bicycle manufacturing standards we're looking for e-bike rules and rights to the road to be very closely aligned with that bicycle rules and rights to the road so what the bike industry did was proactively came together to define three classes of e-bikes that fall within the 15 USC 2085 which Alex covered a little bit earlier today so all three classes of e-bikes fall within that federal definition of what an e-bike is to a bike and we're looking for harmonized standards for state e-bikes for regulation across all 50 states so at the end of the day all 50 states would recognize an e-bike as a bike as long as it falls within one of the three classes and I'll get into these details in just a second there's still work to do like I mentioned we've been doing this for five or six years now six legislative sessions to be specific and slowly but surely moving to a total number of 50 states in DC that define three classes of e-bikes and there's still a couple states that do not define e-bikes as bikes and I'll get into what those states are in just a second here so like I mentioned the industry recognized that state e-bike laws were all over the place and decided to proactively define its products within three classes a class one e-bike is a pedal assist e-bike you have to be pedaling to engage the motor but that motor will shut off at 20 miles an hour and as I mentioned on my earlier presentation that 20 mile an hour is not the average speed that's just the speed at which the motor will shut off and the e-bike rider is left to human power alone to propel the e-bike forward a class two e-bike is a throttle actuated e-bike you can twist a throttle and you don't have to be pedaling to engage the motor the bicycle does have to have operable pedals and that motor will shut off at 20 miles an hour just like a class one e-bike so after 20 miles an hour throttle a pedal assist actuated you're on your own with a class one or two e-bike a class three e-bike is a pedal assist e-bike again you have to pedal to engage the motor and propel the bike forward with the motor but that e-bike will shut off once the rider reaches a speed of 28 miles an hour so again once the rider reaches 28 miles an hour you're up to human power alone so those are the three classes of e-bikes those fall squarely within the federal definition for manufacturing and for sale of an e-bike and I cannot overstate this that the 20 and 28 mile motor cut-offs are not an average user speed that is the speed at which the motor will shut off I mentioned our legislative work here and that we started six legislative sessions ago working to harmonize e-bike regulations within state vehicle codes across the country so about six years ago this map was all yellow or red and what the red states mean is that those state vehicle codes define an e-bike a moped a motorized vehicle a motorized conveyance but not assigning the rider of that motorized conveyance the same rights to the road as a bicycle the states in yellow define an e-bike as a bicycle but not within the three classes yet those are states that we are working the red states and the yellow states are states where we're working on codifying the three classes of e-bikes so that a bicycle or an e-bike as a bike as long as it falls within the three classes and you'll see states in green here and those are the states that define an e-bike as a bike so long as it falls within one of those three classes so in other words as I mentioned the those states define the three classes of e-bikes and a rider of a class one through three e-bike in the green states has the same rights to the road and same duties as a bicycle rider in those states there's also been codified a provision that requires the supplier of the e-bike to display a label on the e-bike with its class has to display the class class one through three the top motor assisted speed of 20 or 28 miles an hour and sometimes that's below those classes but as long as the max under each class is 20 or 28 and the maximum wattage and because e-bike suppliers can't parse out what state they sell a bike into you know whether it's Rhode Island or Massachusetts or California for the most part suppliers are just displaying the sticker under the clear coat so it's not easily tampered with for sale in all 50 states so the trickle down effect from the 28 states that codify this provision requiring a class sticker is that you know by default all 50 states bike shops in all 50 states have displayed this class sticker so key takeaways if you recall two slides ago that map that I showed you the states in green are geographically diverse are politically diverse in terms of population and types of riding big cities small cities and so our work to classify the three classes of e-bikes as a bike in those states is very bipartisan we've had support from across the island the reason I mentioned is that when we work to develop legislative champions for these issues within state departments of transportation as well and on the legislative side we are able to find support from all strikes of regulators and legislators simply because we paint this issue as kind of a common sense cleanup to state vehicle codes to align e-bikes with bicycles knowing that e-bikes also have a history you know responsible safety and we also show that e-bikes are for the most part e-bikes are operated safely and really offer a bike-like experience to the e-bike rider and so it makes sense to update states statues consistent with those three those three classes we get a lot of questions from public safety officials transportation planners and land managers about what does this three-class system mean and what it truly does is it provides that extra layer of regulation so that they can decide what classes of e-bikes go where and really provides a framework at the state level to regulate e-bikes more appropriately at the local level all of those states do have provisions that allow cities and municipalities and counties to regulate e-bikes more restrictively or less restrictively than that state framework but we're generally finding that cities aligned with the state laws so that's one of the key exceptions across the country and last but not least for my end here states have chosen to regulate electric scooters and other shared microability devices separately from e-bikes you heard from Ed who earlier from Byrd and Ed and his colleagues both within Byrd and across the kind of sphere were very successful in updating many state statutes specific to how electric scooters are regulated but that really is a separate issue from how e-bikes are regulated and we've worked together to differentiate those issues so when we're talking about these regulations and statutes that we've helped put in place for e-bikes it really pertains to private ownership of e-bikes and they've been implemented at all 28 states and counties with really no issues and no increases in hazards or risks to public safety so that's something we're happy to record on with that I'll turn it over to Alex my colleague and our people for bikes policy council to get into some of the key points around the federal safety laws for e-bikes thanks again Morgan and we've covered a little bit of this in the prior presentation but I will give sort of a brief recap of what the two big product safety laws do look like again e-bikes are defined by federal statute and you can see the citation there 2085 and this federal law also states that e-bikes must comply with the same product safety requirements as bicycles which deal with a broad range of structural and use and component standards to really regulate the bike part of the bike but don't go into the electrical standards which are fall under that UL standard that we've heard about earlier today I want to take a moment to talk a bit more about 15 USC 2085 then we did in that earlier presentation and some of the details of that statutory provision it does not distinguish between pedal and throttle assist style bicycles so at least in terms of the underlying federal statute both those types of e-bikes have sort of an equal regulatory status there is a 750 watt maximum on those bikes a 30 mile per hour speed limit under the motor power alone the federal statute doesn't specify what the top assisted speed of any bike is under a pedal assist mode or combined human and motor power so that's one of the areas that the class system was intended to very firmly address is getting into that higher speed pedal device and very clearly stating what the top end speed for that should be 28 mile per hour speed limit aligns with international standards in most countries outside the U.S. where the maximum speed of a pedal style device can be 45 kilometers per hour so the class system harmonizes nicely with other international standards for e-bikes for those higher speed devices I think one of the issues that our industry is really thinking about lately with media reports going on of different types of issues is confusion for consumers when somebody calls something an e-bike you know I think the recent Simon Cowell incident was one that's easy for everyone to understand because it was so widely reported but there were a lot of media reports about Mr. Cowell being involved in an e-bike crash and being injured as a result of that and then over the next 48 hours after those initial reports it turns out he was on something that's quite a different device than something that meets the requirements of the 15 U.S.C. 2085 year and it appeared to be something that was like 5000 watts of power and a speed of 50 or 60 miles an hour so I think that is an issue for all of us in the micro mobility space is that in terms of you know maybe marketing materials or media reports sometimes these terms are used very loosely whereas for us they have a lot of legal significance and so you know we're trying to do the best we can I think to emphasize what exactly an e-bike is from our perspective in terms of the work that we do and in terms of the products that the bike industry is putting out there. Next slide Morgan and then again for the voluntary standards the 16 CFR part 1512 is obviously a required federal regulation that you must meet when you sell a new bicycle in the United States but there are some additional standards that go beyond just that federal regulation that specify the condition of the bike on the showroom floor and the class system I really would view that as a sort of voluntary and proactive effort of the bike industry to try and put some additional specificity on that federal statute particularly for the class 3 e-bikes to ensure that we have a reasonable upper bound speed for those types of devices. Those state laws also have a few additional requirements for e-bikes throttle assistile bikes need to be equipped with brake inhibitors class 3 e-bikes need to be equipped with a speedometer so state law does provide a few additional requirements in addition to federal law although they tend not to be focused so much on the condition of the bicycle itself but more so on its use also state law addresses things like the use of lights at night time or at sunrise and sunset so e-bikes and bicycles are subject to the same requirements there as well so those sort of have a product nexus but not necessarily something that goes into that product testing in terms of 16 CFR part 1512 and then again the UL standard electrical system that's sort of been the piece that was very much needed to determine what the standards would be for batteries and motors and things like that so with UL 2849 that issue has been addressed in terms of creating a national standard for e-bikes to follow next slide morning and you know again bikes just have an interesting posture in terms of the regulatory history and what they've been I think also their use history we have a long history of people riding bikes in the United States and I was really heartened today to hear so much of the conversation about infrastructure earlier on because from people for bikes perspective that's certainly probably the biggest thing we can do to improve the safety of the bike riding experience and that was really the foundational focus of people for bikes when it was an organization was to accelerate the development of safe and protected bike networks that would hopefully eliminate these different conflicts between motor vehicles and bikes but also giving bikes a dedicated space that's different from the sidewalk because you don't always want them there either so providing those dedicated networks and those dedicated systems for bikes is the best way to eliminate or reduce the incidents of the kinds of collisions that have been reported by some of these other presenters today or sometimes in the media and that's a huge focus as well. Next slide Morgan. Moving forward I think the bike industry feels really good about where it sits in terms of product standards we have also people for bikes always been very heavily focused on the research side particularly as we've started this e-bike work there's a lot of deficiencies in terms of the research of bike usage bike injuries things like that overall but then also with the e-bike side so it's an area I foresee us continuing to spend additional resources in the general research front and the safety research front to make sure that any of the work we're doing in the e-bike space makes sense from a safety perspective and then again also continuing the work we do on the infrastructure front to make sure that e-bike riders and bike riders have a safe place to go since so many of the issues that are presented by daily bike use are really identical for those user groups and that's it for me. All right thank you Morgan and Alex and I also want to say thank you to our other panel five participants Sherry, Edward, Lawrence Jennifer and Rachel really appreciate all of your insights so before we move to the questions just have a quick statement to make before the discussion section so just want to take a moment to talk about connected consumer products so these products pose challenges for our agency because of software evaluation which is a change from the typical engineering analysis that staff has performed in the past and so to that end CPSC has been working with contractors and NIST to develop capabilities and the agency has recently hired Mr. Nevin Taylor who will serve as the CPSC chief technologist so in this role he will help the agency establish standard protocols for evaluating these connected products among other responsibilities so just wanted to let the group know about that recent hire that we made so with that I'm going to move on to questions here for the group so I'm going to go to the first question it's a little bit open in here but anyone in the panel 5 that wants to speak to this point feel free to go ahead and jump in by unmuting so the first question is can anyone speak to local requirements and with regard specifically directed more towards like the helmet requirements for micro mobility hey this is Ed from Bird and I can speak to that my sense is that and I might have missed one or two cities here but my sense is that as a general rule all of the cities follow the state's guidance on this and when it comes to state guidance my understanding is that the only two states that require it of adult riders would be Oregon and Washington Washington state that is I'm not aware of another jurisdiction I think that has a helmet that has a helmet requirement that imposes it and this largely also tracks I believe for bicycles as well I think probably someone people for bikes is probably better suited to speak to this than I am but my understanding I think it's also that King County is one of the few few places that requires adults on adult cyclists and so I think the two track each other pretty closely thank you for that and anyone else want to share their insight regarding that question yeah thanks this is Alex from people for bikes I think Edward is pretty on point there with his answer as it pertains to bikes generally this is an issue addressed in state law probably two dozen states or so maybe a little more have state helmet laws that primarily address the use of helmets on children those could be for people either under age 12 or under age 18 in some cases and so that's usually what ends up being put in place many states also have a helmet requirement for class three e-bikes for users of any age well thank you thank you for your insights there so next question I have here it was actually asked right after Ed after you had spoken so given that GPS is inadequate for very precise geofencing well are you aware of any technologies that exist beyond GPS that could potentially deliver safe user experience while still maintaining adequate level of regulatory compliance I think the answer to that is not right now I think that there's a lot of very smart folks and I think probably some of my colleagues at BIRD as well they're working on sort of other technologies that can address this issue to my knowledge there's a lot of research that's focused on what happens basically if you can install a bunch of infrastructure around in a city that the scooter or the e-bike can respond to but as far as like something from a satellite perspective I think GPS is unfortunately the best we have so far with few caveats that there's some things that you can do to make it a little bit more accurate but at the end of the day a GPS based solution in an urban environment isn't going to be very accurate and you're going to need a lot of physical infrastructure I think before you'll see an appreciable resolution difference. Thank you for that so next question I have here is regarding training for micro mobility usage I guess what are what are some insights that the panel 5 has regarding new riders and renters to potentially reduce injuries so this is you know going more toward to the effect of perhaps an interface or any kind of training or education that could be provided either at the time or even beforehand in order to mitigate some of the injuries that are happening this is Morgan and people for bikes the training helmet requirements any kind of restrictions or obligations placed on the individual are important and we should not ever use as red herring to preclude the fact that infrastructure safe places for people regardless of their device to go regardless of whether it's a car, hoverboard electric skateboard electric bike electric scooter is the number one most critical aspect ensuring safety of all consumers on our streets enough room for every single consumer regardless how they choose to get around is the number one deciding factor whether someone will stay safe safe in our public spaces or not so people for bikes participate and lead some trainings we remain active in state legislative work to ensure consumer safety but our primary focus and one thing we'd really like to leave folks with is the consideration that safe places and building enough in a built environment to ensure consumer safety is a critical component of this work and ensuring consumer safety for years to come excellent so next next question I had is it was it was asked with regard to the city of Seattle but I guess more generally is one aware of any specific numeric speed limitation for these devices when they're in use so not really to the maximum but rather something much lower given the the I guess the overall ecosystem of of all the different vehicles that might be on the road or sidewalk you know the entire system I guess so this is Jennifer Huddleston generally what we've seen on a policy front here is not a speed limit in the traditional sense that most of us would encounter it of when you're driving a car or whatever and it says 20 mile an hour zone or school zone or anything like that what we've seen more is speed caps particularly in regards to pilot programs or to other agreements for shared operation in the city and the regulation of the kind of shared deployment element of this this is Sherry Shafflon with Federal Highways I think as we try to measure comfort in the walking and biking network we've introduced a new variable in the variable speeds of multi-use path so an elderly person a young a young child who might dart out somebody with a baby buggy you know they're all going to have different perceptions of comfort now that we are that they may have not expected in a multi-use trail for example so I you know starting to see some research underway for people to try to think about that comfort measure that get feedback and you know we've got to give that information back to the trail managers in the communities to help figure out how to accommodate all users and one other thing that I want to point out relating to the work that was done on J3194 the SAE standard I think there was there was a little bit of a conscious decision there when it's in setting in segregating the speed categories for various micro mobility vehicles to try to split them into a sidewalk slash bike lane slash middle of the road speed and I think they I think they were said somewhere around 8 and 20 and 30 if I remember correctly and the point isn't that every sidewalk is appropriate for 8 or every bike lane is appropriate for 20 or something like that but I think just more of the general concept that when we think of our streets there are those three general categories of places to ride and with different speed expectations for each and that a more fulsome organization system or taxonomy eventually might address think of those three as think of those three and classify them by way and speed of the vehicles that are permitted within them. Excellent well hey I really appreciate everyone's insights I know that there was kind of quick fire questions there just want to share as much information as we can so we've run out of time on panel five but I just want to remind all the participants if you have a question that was not answered please use the question box to at least write the question down we'll have a record of it and so it will become a part of this the forum and so it's something that we could potentially address in the future so just keep that in mind so it is 4 30 and so I want to turn it back over to my colleague Lauren for some final comments Thanks Jay and thank you again to all of our panelists for joining us today and sharing their knowledge for this very important discussion I think today we framed a lot of the opportunities and challenges related to micro mobility and consumer safety we know micro mobility products are not necessarily brand new but advancements in technology and introduction of things like ride sharing and fleet use have kind of changed the way that people are using these things in our commuting norms giving consumers some additional choices on how they move around especially in high density areas in urban environments by using this safety solutions by purchasing safety solutions by using a systems approach I think that gives everyone kind of the best chance in addressing safety concerns more comprehensively and so before we close I just want to remind everyone that this meeting was being recorded and we once we get through some technical things with the recording we will try to get this out to everyone and try to get it posted on our website additionally we will be publishing a meeting log on our website that will include a brief synopsis of the day and we will attach the presentations from the speakers today and we will try to get that out to all the registrants through emails with a link and thanks again for everyone to the speakers and thanks to all that attended I know that we had some attendees from the west coast that joined us in the morning at six o'clock in the morning over there and I think we even had some international attendees so I just wanted to say thank you and I appreciate all of you working through the different times and the last thing I want to say is while we don't have anything specific planned right after this forum feel free to reach out to us I'm going to drop my email here in a second if you guys want to share any other information that you think would be very helpful to the CPSC in moving forward in our goal with safety for consumers so thanks again everyone and have a great afternoon