查看文章

A prominent question in transportation planning is how cities should regulate emerging modes, such as shared bikes and e-scooters. This pertains to a range of attributes, including pricing, use of the public right of way, number of vehicles in a fleet, and vehicle speeds. However, less attention has been paid to the way private operators spatially constrain access to their fleets, such as via the use of virtual geographic boundaries (hereafter “geofences”), or how municipalities have regulated these features. San Francisco, given it is home to a number of these schemes, presents a compelling case for studying geofences, and how regulators have sought to influence them to further public policy goals, including spatial equity. This study analyzes each bike and e-scooter geofence in San Francisco longitudinally from 2017 to 2019 via manual digitization of all geofences. This reveals high levels of overlap in the city’s …