Editor’s Note: You can report e-scooters and e-bikes parked blocking the sidewalk by calling 311, emailing 311@portlandoregon.gov, using PBOT’s online reporting form or filing an ADA Title II complaint.
Rod Barker was excited when he heard rentable e-scooters were coming to Portland in 2018.
“I thought, ‘Oh, here’s an alternative mode of transportation that doesn’t take gas,’” he said. “Because it feels like we’re all the time breathing gas fumes downtown.”
Barker had taught at Portland State University’s business school since 2003, and enjoyed walking around downtown with his guide dog and white cane, especially to Chinatown.
“Eat some Chinese food and things like this,” he said. “It’s quite a walk, nice exercise for me.”
He assumed the motorized scooters and bikes would be stored in parking garages and people would only ride them on the streets. But Barker, president of the Portland chapter of the National Federation of the Blind, realized he was dangerously wrong.
“It only took me the first year or so to realize this is a train wreck, this is a disaster,” he said. “There goes more of our space.”
Riders silently rocketed past the since-retired professor on sidewalks and left the scooters littered across the middle of the sidewalks.
Blind Portlanders told Street Roots the problem only worsened as the number of rentable motorized scooters and bikes on Portland’s streets exploded after approvals from the Portland Bureau of Transportation.
Lyft’s Nike-sponsored BIKETOWN and Lime are the two companies the city currently allows to operate in Portland. Both companies provided statements saying they are addressing the longstanding issues.
However, Street Roots tested the two companies’ safeguards and found some did not actually work. In some cases, even allowing Street Roots to park motorized scooters and bikes completely blocking sidewalks without warning or consequence.
Street Roots shared photos and a recording of the tests with Disability Rights Oregon. Emily Cooper, legal director for the organization, said the city admitted the issues in 2018 — years before its Bureau of Transportation approved and expanded the program.
“Eight years and thousands of rides later, this investigation shows safe parking claims continue as marketing, not reality,” she said. “Cities and companies must start enforcing rules that actually keep sidewalks safe for everyone, including people with disabilities.”
The Portland Bureau of Transportation said in a statement the two companies “are working on improving their end-of-ride tech.”
Origins of the obstacle
Nickole Cheron, Portland’s ADA Title II compliance officer for much of the last decade, ensures it doesn’t violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In 2017, e-scooter rental apps infamously dropped hundreds of their devices in cities around the world, often without warning or approval. Portland took a different approach, welcoming them here for a 2018 pilot project. Cheron said that approach had its own drawbacks.
“When e-scooters and BIKETOWN first emerged, there were a lot of discussions around how it was impacting people with disabilities,” she said. “And, of course, those discussions didn’t happen prior to these things happening. They were kind of launched on the city, and then the community complained, and then I was kind of pulled into everything.”
After the city’s 120 day pilot program in 2018, PBOT published a report in 2019. It noted people were riding and discarding scooters on sidewalks, impacting blind people and other people with disabilities. It also highlighted the benefits to Portland’s transportation goals.
Many pedestrian and transportation advocates also celebrate the scooters for reducing car-dependence and adding a way to get people from public transit to where they need to get. The companies also have programs to reduce the cost of riding for working class people.
The report recommended a second pilot program test. With 2020 support from City Council, PBOT maintained that second pilot through 2024 when it approved the current program.
In the last five years, the number of e-scooters increased about 160% to 3,222, said PBOT spokesperson, Dylan Rivera. The companies’ current contracts allow them to expand to a total of 4,300, according to the city’s website. And BIKETOWN’s e-bike numbers also grew in that time.
The total number of rides increased dramatically. There were 1,274,800 combined trips in 2021, city data shows. By last year, the total grew to 2,069,000.
‘The only rights that pedestrians are guaranteed are the last rites’
As the motorized devices grew in ubiquity, their impacts on blind Portlanders and other people with disabilities faded from the spotlight, becoming a fact of life.
About 101,000 Oregonians have visual disabilities meaning they’re blind or have serious difficulty seeing even with glasses. Federal estimates show roughly 8,900 Oregonians are blind.
Stephanie McGary, president of the National Federation of the Blind’s statewide affiliate, said blind Oregonians are mostly concentrated in the Portland area due to greater resources and accessibility.
One of those resources is the Oregon Commission for the Blind, a state agency that teaches people who experience sight loss how to navigate the world.
Jim Portillo leads those efforts for the agency. Portillo, who is blind, runs into rentable e-scooters enough that it’s a “routine occurrence.” The same is true for the people he works with.
“You think, ‘Wow, are people not being careful, or what?’” he said of riders. “So, those are the kinds of stories I’ve been hearing a lot of.”
Mary Lee Turner worked for the commission from 1979 until 2010 as a trainer. She’s blind and currently sits on Portland’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee.
She said she’s run into e-scooters about 50 times.
Studies from the United Kingdom and Norway show those experiences are often nearly ubiquitous for the blind in places that have scooters.
In 2024, Portland mandated rented e-scooters are locked to a “public bike rack or to a city signpost if no bike racks are available.” But in one week of simply making note, this reporter documented 21 motorized Lime and BIKETOWN scooters and bikes either partly or completely blocking the sidewalk.
Turner said some incidents are more infuriating or scary than others.
“I was really tempted to pick one scooter up that was laying right across the sidewalk,” she said. “I wanted to heave that sucker into the street. I wanted to stop traffic and make them deal with it. I was just really, really upset.”
Turner was hit by a car about 15 years ago. She said the rentable motorized scooters and bikes compound the danger of cars by adding just another thing to keep track of while blind people are trying to get to work, get groceries, go to the doctor and generally live their lives.
“I also tell my clients, my former clients, that the only rights that pedestrians are guaranteed are the last rites, and I’m not laughing,” she said. “I am not laughing.”
People from around the world have been killed by being hit by e-scooter riders. A 2026 study by New York University’s Langone Health found the share of New York City emergency room visits related to the motorized devices skyrocketed from less than 10% in 2018 to more than 50% by 2023.
It found one third of those patients suffered traumatic brain injury. Pedestrians struck by the electric devices suffered brain injuries at nearly double the rate of the riders.
The city allows motorized scooters and bikes to travel up to 15 miles-per-hour.
Street Roots asked PBOT if any blind Portlanders or other people with disabilities have been involved in any incidents with e-scooters or e-bikes rented through Lime or BIKETOWN. PBOT’s Rivera said they “are not aware of any crashes” like that which “resulted in an injury.”
Blind Portlanders told Street Roots Portland’s motorized scooters and bikes have a more common but subtle impact: isolating blind people.
The devices add another threat on top of the many blind Portlanders already face, leaving blind people less safe in public and more hesitant to leave their homes. This can lead people to skip time with friends and family, doctors visits and trips to the grocery store for fresh food. Each of those has significant downstream impacts on health.
“I know several people who are blind who used to be out there in the community much more than they are now,” Turner said. “But of course years have passed as well, so we’re getting older — but it’s not getting easier.”
Failing safety measures and missing enforcement data
Part of Barker’s duties as president of the Portland National Federation of the Blind chapter is organizing monthly meetups downtown at the Capital One Café across from Pioneer Courthouse Square.
“All the buses and everything go down there,” he said. “So it’s easiest from wherever our members are at.”
When Street Roots went to photograph the cafe for this story, this reporter found a BIKETOWN motorized bike strewn across the sidewalk out front, right next to a BIKETOWN parking area. No one picked it up during the roughly 30 minutes this reporter watched.
(During that time another BIKETOWN bike whizzed behind this reporter, heading down Morrison on the sidewalk. No one acted surprised as the rider shot by them.)
Lyft did not comment on the situation.
Cheron, the ADA manager for the city, said her office has not received official complaints about e-scooters. She said people might be reporting incidents to PBOT. But she had another hunch too.
“As a person who lives with a severe disability, I can tell you that we can often get into a habit of (accepting issues), like, ‘Well, this is just what it means to live with a disability, right?’” she said.
Portlanders have made 2,738 improper parking complaints submitted through 311 since the new program launched two years ago, Rivera said.
He said the companies fine riders between $5 and $25 for violations after a warning, and “can remove a customer from using the devices.”
But he said PBOT does not have the numbers of enforcement actions actually taken.
Rivera said the bureau conducts quarterly testing to make sure operators are complying with contractual obligations including not parking on pedestrian walkways. He also said PBOT has “denied fleet increases to Lime due to a lack of contractual regulatory compliance.”
Street Roots sent Lyft’s BIKETOWN and Lime questions about enforcement and a summary of major findings of this reporting.
Lyft sent a brief statement saying, “Safe, accessible sidewalks are core to how we operate in Portland” and highlighting the company’s use of the parking areas BIKETOWN uses. CJ Macklin, Lyft’s communications director, also said the company is working on “sidewalk-detection technology.”
(In a since-removed blog post, Lime explains that technology is cameras embedded in the scooters running “the industry’s first AI-enabled computer vision platform.”)
Lime’s senior lead of government relations for the Pacific Northwest, Parker Dawson, provided a detailed statement pointing out, “Cars remain the most dangerous vehicle on Portland streets” and highlighting the company’s safety safeguard features and work to promote non-car infrastructure locally.
“At the end of every ride, riders are prompted to take a photo of their parked device, and are provided real-time feedback via an AI-enabled tool to help riders park devices appropriately,” they said. “When noncompliant parking is detected or reported through our reporting channels, Lime delivers warnings, fines, suspensions, or bans in line with our disciplinary policy and city contract.”
Dawson said the company has sent out more than 10,000 warnings and fines in Portland in 2026.
But Lime spokesperson Julia Stevens said Lime can’t say how many of those incidents were actually fines, pointing to complexities of Lime’s data. Stevens said Lime “banned/suspended dozens of accounts this year in Portland.”
“These experiences are important, and we take them seriously,” Dawson said about blind pedestrians’ experiences. “At the same time, we want to distinguish individual reports from citywide trend data.”
Lime repeatedly declined to provide Street Roots data establishing citywide trends in enforcement over the years.
Lime’s website says “studies have found that only about 2% of dockless scooters are misparked.” Because there were 1,651,743 e-scooter rides in Portland last year, that would mean 33,035 misparked scooters that year alone.
Street Roots rented Lime and BIKETOWN e-scooters and e-bikes and found the current safeguards — like the ones Dawson highlighted — didn’t do anything.
Both apps let Street Roots leave e-scooters and e-bikes unlocked and entirely blocking sidewalks without warning or penalty. Lime’s app did not give Street Roots any feedback and approved the parking job despite the scooter being on its side, totally blocking the sidewalk.
After documenting the parking process, Street Roots properly re-parked and locked the devices.
A symptom and a solution
The blind Portlanders Street Roots spoke to said riders parking the heavy, motorized devices without blocking the sidewalk was a matter of basic respect, humanity and simple common sense.
“Back when I could see, we were always pushed to ride our bikes in the (bike) lane,” Barker said. “Now, we’re seeing more and more of these things (e-scooters and e-bikes) not only parked on the sidewalk, but actually being ridden on the sidewalks.”
Barker said he isn’t against the companies’ motorized scooters and bikes — if they can just stay off the sidewalks.
For him, the minimum would be if they were stored in parking garages. But ideally, riders would need a permit or license they would receive after taking a class.
“There needs to be some kind of formal training, even if it’s only two hours,” he said. “And has anybody ever in the history of these been ticketed?”
Lyft, in its statement, said more cities are moving away from the fully dockless models toward station-based or docked models like BIKETOWN partly uses.
Lime, which uses the fully dockless model, did not echo that.
But PBOT’s Rivera said the city has its eyes on ways to improve the situation similar to that.
“A parking system that allows for designated areas for e-scooters would greatly improve parking compliance,” he said. “E-scooter corrals in the public right of way would keep scooters in designated areas on the street rather than on the sidewalk. This would also make it easier for users to locate an e-scooter.”
He added another solution: “By contract all scooters have ‘report improperly parked scooter by calling 311’ in brail on the neck.”
Blind Portlanders did not mention that as something to address the problem.
“Didn’t their mothers teach them to pick up their underpants?” Turner asked of careless riders.
She said she thinks people leave them littered around because they’re busy and absent minded, but added the e-scooter problem is actually a symptom of a greater danger.
Turner and Portillo both described years of work to get people — car drivers, e-scooter riders, e-scooter companies and the officials who write the policy that shapes everyone’s lives — to remember blind people exist.
“The e-scooters and the e-bikes are the problem, yes, but I think the greater problem is just awareness in general,” Portillo said. “People are not aware of a lot of blind people.”
October 15 is National White Cane Awareness Day. In Oregon it is a crime for a driver to fail to stop for a blind person crossing the street.
Editor’s Note: You can report e-scooters and e-bikes parked blocking the sidewalk by calling 311, emailing 311@portlandoregon.gov, using PBOT’s online reporting form or filing an ADA Title II complaint.
This article appears in September 16, 2026.
