Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, spoke to PBS News Hour about electric scooters in the Los Angeles region. While Santa Monica has been more lenient toward electric scooters, cities such as Milwaukee have prohibited them completely, Matute said. Bird bypassed licensing in Santa Monica, he said, explaining, “They wouldn’t have been able to get a license because there wasn’t a category for what they were doing. They wanted to demonstrate something, show that it worked and then attract additional rounds of financing.” When Lime, another electric scooter company, entered the market, Matute said it saturated the market to make it more convenient for people to try them. Electric scooters are intended to solve mobility issues in the city, Matute said. “It kind of remains to be seen what types of trips the scooters are displacing,” he concluded.