Scoot, Skip, Jump, Lime and Spin

Time to revisit transportation planning in cities and countries to choose the most environment-friendly, comfortable and safe options

Four companies — Scoot, Jump, Lime and Spin — received permits to offer shared electric-scooters in San Francisco earlier this month, in a fairly neat evaluation process with clearly assigned weightings for sustainability, among other things. The process can serve as a useful benchmark for other cities looking at rolling out new mobility services. 

There are four aspects of the San Francisco exercise which stood out:

Scoring smartly: The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency issued permits to four operators from the 11 applications it received, based on their total score on eight criteria. 

The highest score was for responses “that