Electric Scooters Roll onto New Brunswick Campus

Rutgers added the e-scooters to help achieve a more balanced transportation network with more travel choices, according to John Karakoglou, assistant director of transportation services in Rutgers University Institutional Planning and Operations.

“Students seem to enjoy the scooters as a fun way to get around the campus,” said Karakoglou. “I’m looking forward to seeing how much students use them as they return to campus as the university resumed in-person classes.”  

Veo started by offering scooters on the Purdue University campus in 2017 and has since expanded to large cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Still, the steady ridership rates of college campuses and their surrounding neighborhoods are a fit with the scooter program, said Alex Keating, director of policy and partnerships for Veo. He points to similar scooter programs at other large universities as well, including the University of Alabama, University of Maryland, Indiana, and Texas A&M.

“All universities benefit from these first mile/last mile transportation programs,” said Keating. “All these universities have quite similar travel profiles, with students making similar types of trips. So the scooters can really complement the university bus systems and fill gaps where those buses don’t run.”

Over the life of the program, students have taken 300,000 rides, Keating said, with an average distance covered of just less than 2 miles. “We see that distance as the sweet spot,” he said, noting that distance may be too long to walk but too short to consider driving or even using a car service like Uber. “These scooters fill a transportation need.”

Keating said that students on the Rutgers Newark campus could access Veo scooters through an agreement the company has to provide scooters to the whole city. 

The scooters’ arrival has not come without some criticism. For example, a Daily Targum editorial published in September 2021 criticized the scooters as creating a safety hazard to pedestrians and drivers and blocking sidewalks and paths due to riders ending rides and then parking them incorrectly.

Veo’s Keating counters that Veo encourages safe ridership with measures including all users taking training through the app and snapping a picture of where they park the scooter when their ride is over to show they left the scooter in a safe location. In addition, Veo penalizes and even bans riders for irresponsibly ending rides.