Who wrote this stunning rebuke at 10am the day before the glorious weekend when tens of thousands celebrated the Grand Opening of the glistening new Seattle Waterfront Park? And how could it come to be written to a Hadley Harvey, West Coast honcho of Lime rented e-scooters and e-bikes in response to an email he never should have sent the previous afternoon?
The rebuke, suggesting a civil war over scooters at City Hall:
“Hi, Hadley. We are happy to meet after the big event tomorrow. That said, I want to be 100% clear. I wholeheartedly disagree with your statement that city policies are in conflict. As a city, and particularly SDOT as a transportation department, we are charged with providing safe and accessible transportation infrastructure to all modes of travel. That means not just bikes and scooters, it includes pedestrians, trucks, ferries, streetcars — pick your transportation option.
“We are not in a position to prioritize scooters/bikes over any other mode, nor should we be asked to. We did not design our new waterfront to be a scooter/bike highway. Our pedestrians and other users deserve much better, and we are looking forward to working through our areas of concern with your team.”
This stern email’s author was Angela Brady, today three months into her new job as Mayor Katie Wilson’s interim director at the Seattle Department of transportation (SDOT). When writing the email she was an effective director of Seattle Waterfront Project Office. The email found me as a grizzled miner of the scruffy gold field workings called the Public
Disclosure Request (PDR).
I went PDR-questing after an interesting rumor I had heard. The rumored story was that the summer months of 2025 had seen Lime and SDOT micromobility managers and SDOT Waterfront staff wrestling fractiously with one another, in hopes of getting e-scooters and e-bikes in order on the Waterfront.
The PDR process much resembles old-fashioned gold panning. Except instead of swirling shovels of stream-bottom sand and gravel in a pan looking for the occasional glint of a gold fleck, you skim hundreds of city emails and internal reports scrolling as fast as you can across a computer screen, hoping to spot the stray sentences that might gleam in your story. Only on a very rare day do two big shiny nuggets jump off the screen together, as happened this lucky day. Angela Brady and Hadley Harvey — double e-mail Eureka!
With my two nuggets, the story I was chasing turned out to be bigger than the rumors suggested. Let’s go back to the beginning of the micromobility saga, which actually all started in 2019.
Three mayors ago, a skeptical but heavily-lobbied Mayor Jenny Durkan yielded a grudging retreat to break Seattle’s delay into the early spreading of the e-scooter craze. She said on Geekwire, “Let’s try scooters, but let’s do it right.” Off to the races roared SDOT. E-scooters and e-bikes for rent have since covered Seattle like bumps of spreading measles. In 2025 with 16,000 mostly Lime rental e-scooters and e-bikes in Seattle, the per-capita saturation had risen to twice, three times, four times the levels in peer American cities.
Meanwhile, Mayor Durkan and the city managed to do micromobility completely wrong: The result is riding on sidewalks, no helmets, idle scooters as pedestrian obstacles and tripping hazards everywhere, injuries by the hundreds, even the horrible brain injuries that had given Mayor Durkan such pause.
But it is not too late. All over the country and the world, even from industry-dominant Lime, experience has shown that shared micromobility can be done much better than in Seattle. By uncanny coincidence, when World Cup fans swarm to Seattle in June from Belgium and Australia and should they find here Seattle’s accustomed e-scooter and e-bike mess, they’ll wonder why we hadn’t learned from their lessons back home. So will any visitors from a forward-looking city such as Chicago, which has managed by wrestling from Lime itself the reforms and innovations so badly needed and long overdue here.
The World Cup spotlight on Seattle should galvanize SDOT into action. Angela Brady and Mayor Wilson have just time to do so, but they must hurry. There is a very tight window.
Brady brings crucial direct experience and the story of how she fought and largely won 2025’s e-scooter fracas on the Waterfront Park as leader the $800 million signature Seattle Waterfront Park project, bedeviled by scooters and rental bikes.
In March 2025, one year ago, Mayor Bruce Harrell had just been handed the ribbon-cutting of the long-awaited waterfront cycle track for Seattle bicyclists. It was completely expected that e-scooter and e-bike riders would flock to the Waterfront Park paralleling the splendid pedestrian Promenade at water’s edge. The PDR documents and emails show lots of forethought paid to coming challenges.
In August 2024, with a plenary gathering of Brady, Waterfront staff, and James Corner’s celebrated New York design team (in the person of its landscape architect leader, Andrew tenBrink). The challenges: How to assure no riding on the Waterfront Park, as the already adopted park rules explicitly stipulated? Where to park scooters and bikes coming to the Waterfront? How to guarantee compliance with the city’s legal obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act that sidewalks, curb ramps, and bridges not be blocked?
Architect tenBrink was well-prepared for the meeting, arriving with data and photos of e-scooter chaos on Seattle sidewalks. One of the city’s own designers played Captain Obvious: “This is a bigger issue than the Waterfront — it’s citywide.” Brady herself at the meeting noted SDOT’s micromobility managers’ suspicious advocacy for the vendors and users.
A month later, at another high-level meeting, this time with the e-scooter program managers attending and yet more problem photos at hand, the basic policy contours were agreed upon. E-scooters and e-bikes would only be ridden on the forthcoming cycle track, not the pedestrian-focused Promenade. No Promenade riding would be enforced, once the cycle track was opened, by a geofenced No Ride Zone everywhere in the bounds of the Waterfront Park. Parking bikes and scooters would need to be located in installed parking locations, called corrals.
The big cycle track opening celebration in March was met with a decidedly mixed reviews from Seattle’s urbanist observers. As expected, the track was immediately popular with cyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders, hoverboarders, unicyclists, strollers, joggers, and e-scooter riders — men, women, and (totally illegally), children — and lots of two-to-a-scooter tourists.
In no time idled e-scooters were piling up in front of the new Aquarium, at the tourist-popular Pier 62, and all along the length of the Promenade. Soon the City’s Find It Fix It app harvested comments such as: “They zoom around and are startling to those walking enjoying our new waterfront. I thought Seattle prohibited scooters from sidewalks.” No sooner had the cycle track opened than staff in Brady’s Waterfront Office began scrambling in earnest to catch up with the e-scooter/e-bike parking problem.
Just two weeks later the Waterfront Office was informed, to its surprise, of a big SDOT back-log of bike rack and corral installation, owing to a years-long empty staff position. A temporary employee had just been hired, but there was also a paperwork backlog and crew backlog. These backlogs probably explained why an SDOT micromobility manager had suggested that the Waterfront Office might design and install corrals for SDOT’s devices. This possible fix stood at odds with SDOT’s years-earlier submittal to the City Council in 2020 stating that costs for e-scooter parking infrastructure would be funded from the permit fees to be paid by the scooter vendors.
Did the SDOT micromobility managers ever share with the Waterfront Office a startling document Lime submitted in April? According to Lime, for 15,000 micromobility devices — roughly SDOT’s 2025 approved deployment level — almost a thousand parking corrals (each sized for ten e-scooters or e-bikes and spread across several areas of the city) would be needed to support well-ordered parking, assuming that riders could be bothered to use them.
By May, the Waterfront Office was hearing from the Washington State Ferries. The Colman Dock Operations Manager complained his staff shouldn’t be having to move scooters and bikes from blocking the terminal, and he was also unhappy with proposed corral locations. Brady’s Waterfront deputy replied, “We are now tackling the parking issue.”
Heightening e-scooter scrutiny, on May 9, Post Alley broke my story of the alarming volume of e-scooter injury visits to UW Medical Emergency and Trauma Facilities tallied by the Harborview Injury Prevention and Center. Together with reports that the account SDOT micromobility managers had first promoted and promised to fund, and then tried to kill, the Harborview injury data research.
As summer wore on and the Waterfront Promenade’s popularity soared, the city’s e-scooter and e-bike mitigation efforts moved by fits and starts, first struggling to establish effective geofenced No Ride Zones everywhere other than on the cycle track. Endless consultations and negotiations back-and-forth played out between the SDOT e-scooter managers, the Waterfront Office, and the e-scooter companies claiming that their geofence boundaries would automatically stymie any errant rider.
On July 31, a Waterfront staffer to a SDOT micromobility manager: “Where are we in establishing the new geofence we discussed in our meeting on Tuesday? During my site walks last week I got buzzed from behind at top speed by two devices in areas I thought would not allow operations. In addition, we observed significant device parking by the vendors below the Overlook Walk. Use of the waterfront bike racks continues to lessen the ability for private users to lock their equipment.”
Locating and painting at least a token number of corral locations became an object lesson that nothing governmental is simple, especially in a hurry. Another point not yet clear from the PDR email record: Did the SDOT micromobility managers ever share with the Waterfront Office, or pretty much anyone else, that the end was near for Bird, the little guy of Seattle’s shared e-scooters and e-bikes? Ending Bird’s permit would have made Lime into Seattle’s monopoly e-scooter and e-bike vendor.
The cancellation letter was sent to Bird on August 29, Friday afternoon of Labor Day Weekend, while Bird, too, was being furiously tasked by the Waterfront Office to be ready one week later for the big Waterfront Opening Day. Bird seemingly survived its September 30 cancellation date, since its lonely e-scooters are still to be seen. Bird’s survival remains veiled in SDOT micromobility non-transparency.
Finally, as the Grand Opening approached in the first weekend of September, Waterfront e-scooter e-bike frantic summer rush to ready the Promenade was wrapping up with overworked people and some frayed relationships, even among city staff. Even on Wednesday before the Grand Opening, Waterfront staff sent an email to SDOT micromobility staff, saying one area is “completely inaccessible to pedestrians, much less to using a mobility device. Note: I observed conditions in the morning, notified Lime, and it had not been resolved by the time I left in the afternoon.”
Lime submitted its opening-day operating plan, including the promise to muster its
own dedicated foot patrols to move and tidy its e-scooters and e-bikes expected to be errantly abandoned amidst the crowds.
Then at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 4, on the very eve of the big weekend, Lime’s Haley Harvey, Director of Government Relations, U.S. West, unfortunately delivered his triggering email to Angela Brady and ten other SDOT employees Harvey failed to copy James Cormer’s Andrew tenBrink in New York, a 15-year veteran in helping Seattle vision and implement its new waterfront. That history included leadership in the meetings to shore up the Waterfront e-scooter e-bike plan to fit with the Waterfront’s grand vision.
Harvey certainly picked his moment: “It is increasingly clear that competing policies are in conflict as the waterfront attempts to operate differently from the rest of the City. A paradigm that will be chaotic and untenable for users accustomed to how micromobility works elsewhere in Seattle and around the world.” What would be the prospect next year for the FIFA World Cup, he asked? “The Waterfront’s parking infrastructure deficiencies will ensure overcrowding challenges until remedied.”
Angela Brady at 10:04 am the next morning, Friday, September 5, sent back her the blunt reply, quoted at the top of this post. She copied everybody, but it did not even stop there. A SDOT micromobility manager deplored that Lime’s “foot patrollers were likely out tidying devices in places where they had been left by riders, vs Lime specifically deploying there.” “I remain concerned that not allowing for parking on the [Waterfront] west side near destinations is not a realistic expectation, and does not align with the policy goals of increasing micromobility utilization particularly leading up to FIFA. I’d be interested in further discussion on when, and by that metrics, we plan to revisit this.”
There the PDR email trail ended, 14 weeks before Mayor-elect Wilson on December 16th designated Angela Brady as her interim SDOT director. Meanwhile, Seattle, SDOT, and Brady are just weeks away from the first Lumen Field FIFA World Cup match, Belgium vs. Egypt on June 19, and United States vs. Australia five days later. That means Seattle’s Wild West paradigm for Seattle micromobility will be seen around the rest of the world.
Another bit of awkward timing: Lime’s current permit to rent e-scooters and e-bikes in Seattle expires on March 31.
Thousands of fans will come from Belgium, where Brussels in 2025 dramatically reformed its micromobility program to avoid the guillotine by plebiscite with which Paris voters threw out rented e-scooters altogether in rebellion against e-scooter mayhem. In December, Brussels banned e-scooters entirely from its city center pedestrian zone.
Australian visitors will be our next visitor avalanche. A new report published just days ago found that country-wide Australian e-scooter ridership shrank in 2025. In Melbourne, the municipal authorities for its central business district ended e-scooter rentals in late 2024, including Lime’s. The Lord Mayor said he had originally supported public e-scooters, but he was “fed up with bad behavior and safety issues. They’re scattered around the city like confetti, like rubbish, creating tripping hazards.” A report from Royal Melbourne Hospital said that 250 injured e-scooter riders had shown up emergency department in 2022, with big risks from speed, intoxication, and helmetless riding.
Lime still hangs on in the Melbourne outskirts, on strict best behavior. (A helmet comes attached to every scooter. Lime’s Melbourne FAQ says the law requires you to wear a helmet. If you find a Lime scooter without the helmet attached and you don’t have your own, “we recommend using the app to find another vehicle nearby.”) This is the same Lime whose riders are seen helmet-less all over Seattle, ignoring the exact same helmet legal requirement that Lime has found a way to support and implement in Melbourne.
In Sydney, last October New South Wales following a parliamentary inquiry on safety and clutter has announced a legislative initiative for statewide regulatory frame work for rental e-scooters and e-bikes. The parliamentary secretary for transport said: “We want to see these schemes forward and succeed, but in a way that works for everyone whether you’re a rider, a pedestrian, or a local business. The new laws put safety, accountability and public amenity front and centre.”
In Brisbane, a city population of 1.2 million, 2025 saw around 3,000 shared e-scooters and perhaps 400 shared e-bikes. A parliamentary inquiry in 2025 after taking testimony from 140 witnesses made 28 recommendations covering every facet of micromobility with special attention to improving safety and reducing injuries. Lime for now seems only allowed to operate in only a portion of Brisbane. Its riders must be over 18, and helmets are provided for every e-scooter by Lime, just as in Melbourne.
The most important and timely domestic lessons for Seattle probably come from Chicago, whose micromobility regulation was completely revamped in 2025. Its program is now divided between Lime dockless e-scooters (far fewer than Seattle’s summer peak) and a popular docked e-scooter and e-bike program called Divvy with clutter-defeating docking stations all across the city. Chicago posted 12.9 million shared micromobility trips in 2025, nearly half using the docked systems. The new Chicago rules required that by December 31, 2025, every shared device in Chicago be equipped with sidewalk-riding detection technology giving an audible warning to the rider to not ride on the sidewalk.
An in-app impairment assessment test much be passed by anyone hoping to mount a device between midnight and 5 am. Vendors must report to Chicago Department of Transportation the occurrence and circumstance of any collision incident or injury of which they learn. Seattle has never seen anything like Chicago’s current program.
We can do as well as Chicago, or Brussels, or Melbourne, or all other the other good shared micromobility leaders. The moment is here. Angela Brady is the right leader well-equipped by experience to make with Mayor Katie Wilson some very hard choices for SDOT shared micromobility.
There are only two paths: Fix it. Or shut it down, now.
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