Multiple Purposes in Policy Pilots: Interrogating English Experiences with E-Scooters

This thesis investigates the English rental e-scooter pilot. E-scooters promise efficient, equitable, low-carbon, mobility, but the rapid spread of rental services has brought concerns over safety, sustainability, and use of public space. Occupying multiple regulatory ‘grey areas’ (Fearnley, 2020, p. 171), governments often had limited powers to intervene. Unusually, rental e-scooters could not enter the English market without government permission (Hirst, 2019, 2020), which was granted on a trial basis following the Covid-19 pandemic.

I investigate the purposes served by the English e-scooter trials for participating local and national governments, using a case-study approach. Existing literature was used to develop a novel framework of pilot purposes (testing, nurturing and politics), resolved by determining how a specific instance navigates three linked tensions between controllability and adventure (Ettelt and Mays, 2019). Echoing previous work (Ettelt, Mays and Allen, 2015), I find purposes vary across actors, over time and between stated vs revealed intent. The trials served predominantly political purposes for national government: facilitating rapid action during a window of policy opportunity while avoiding firm commitment towards a controversial technology. Local governments were more certain about the expected benefits of e-scooters and used pilots to nurture a nascent transport option.

Considering their wider use, I find that the ‘state of exception’ previously thought to facilitate individual pilot success (Van Buuren et al., 2018; Bailey, Hodgson and Checkland, 2019) is actually dual-edged. The temporary and tentative nature of experimental policy change can ease implementation and attract additional resources but, particularly within transport, also limits investment in difficult and durable infrastructure change. The result is experimental implementations that are physically and politically precarious: easy to do but easy to undo.

More widely, I conclude that experiments are political spaces, tools, and manifestations. Despite much hope around the transformative power of experiments, my case shows their form, function and outputs are strongly mediated by prevailing political environments. More research into experimentation beyond well-resourced global cities is needed, particularly around potential public-private power imbalances and ensuring adequate public input.