How Cary, NC Used AI for Data-Backed E-Scooter Policy Recommendations

Introduction

In the fall of 2018, electric scooters (e-scooters) began operating, unannounced, in the Town of Cary, North Carolina. The Town had watched e-scooters arrive in neighboring cities and sought a way to navigate their policy around these new micro-modes of transportation. It was important for the Town to balance the benefits e-scooters could provide to its citizens with the operational and safety challenges they posed for the Town and broader community. An essential element of the Town’s strategic approach is being data-driven, and therefore it wanted to use data to make and back up its recommendations to the Town Council regarding how Cary should approach and manage e-scooters in their city.

The Challenge

Understanding Resident Feedback About E-Scooters

While neighboring cities had been heavily regulating e-scooters, the Town wanted to take a data-driven and strategic approach to figure out what was best for its community within the context of its recently adopted comprehensive community plan. It was important for Cary to look not just at what other cities were doing and at anecdotal experiences with the new dockless vehicles, but also at their citizens’ wide-scale feedback. Cary wanted to gauge broader public perceptions about the e-scooters and measure their impact on the community.

The Solution

The Zencity Platform

From the first day the scooters landed, Cary began using Zencity to track resident sentiment and discourse around them. Zencity automatically aggregated city-wide resident-generated data points from sources like social media, local news sources, and more. With the use of advanced AI, the data was categorized and sorted to automatically identify and filter comments about the e-scooters. The next layer of analysis tagged each of these comments with a negative, positive, or neutral score. As a whole, Zencity’s platform was able to quantify resident sentiment towards e-scooters and track discourse trends. The platform’s visualization of the data enabled the Town to better understand residents’ perceptions of e-scooters.

To shape the Town’s strategic approach, Cary relied on three months of aggregated Zencity data in order to understand the longer-term impact of e-scooters, and not just how the public initially responded to them.

The Data

Resident Sentiment in Cary

Zencity’s data showed that there wasn’t an outpouring of positive or negative sentiment around e-scooters, and that the public was still forming its own opinions. The data showed two main spikes of discourse activity around the e-scooters:

1. When they were initially spotted in Cary
2. When the councils in the neighboring communities of Durham and Raleigh took action

Otherwise, the data showed that contrary to some vocal cries in the community, the jury was still out and residents were still getting used to the new scooters.

Prior to using Zencity, the Town would have been able to only identify general chatter around e-scooters and would have only heard the more outspoken opponents or proponents of e-scooters. With Zencity’s data, Cary was able to understand the extent of the chatter, how it changed over time, and the sentiment behind it in a quantitative way.

Rather than just hearing those complaining, the Town was able to see that the majority of discourse on e-scooters was not negative, but rather that there was a lot of neutral chatter. This was essential in helping Town officials decide how to navigate e-scooters.

Putting the Data to Work

Providing Data-Backed Recommendations to Town Council to Adopt a “Wait & See” Approach

Cary’s staff used this data to compile a staff report for Town Council and presented the report at a Council meeting. The report looked both at external data around e-scooter ride usage and the volume of scooters in Cary, alongside Zencity’s citizen sentiment data over the three months since the e-scooters arrived in Town. Based on this data, the Town of Cary decided the most beneficial approach to the community would be “wait & see.”

	Cary’s leadership took into account its desire to ensure that public rights-of-ways, including sidewalks and greenways, remained free from obstructions while allowing e-scooters to operate safely.
	The Town understood that being responsible about e-scooters meant following “what the people want,” and Zencity’s data helped Cary understand the majority of residents were still weighing the pros and cons of e-scooters themselves.
	Cary’s staff recognized that ordinance changes were needed to achieve the balance of a safe “wait & see” approach and proposed that the Town Council adopt some amended ordinance language to reflect this.
	Town staff also recommended that they continue the monthly tracking of feedback, easily done through Zencity, as well as monitor legislation and action by other municipalities so that, rather than jumping to conclusions or hard lines based on a more vocal minority, Cary could continue to monitor the impact of e-scooters on residents and understand the majority’s preferences, enabling the Town to act more wisely in the future.

Conclusion

With the help of its data-driven staff report, the Town of Cary succeeded in having the Council adopt the ordinance changes and all of its recommendations. The data the report was based on helped Cary’s staff and Council make better decisions. The Town’s “wait & see” approach, and the data behind it, allowed each Council member to feel confident in their support for the ordinance, make their own comments about e-scooters, but ultimately make a statement as a municipality that Cary was allowing e-scooters to operate, while making their operation as safe and effective as possible. The icing on the cake was that Cary’s approach was well received by the community and local press alike, and they could track that as well on Zencity’s platform.

Zencity was a powerful tool for helping us make data-driven recommendations to Town Council, and also imperative in helping Council Members feel confident about their decision.

Dan Ault

Assistant Town Manager, Town of Cary, NC