The Next Transportation Era: Brookline’s electric scooters are shaping state-wide policy and infrastructure
An unpublished class assignment
It was around noon on a dreary day in April 2019 and Edward Boches, 65, was on his way to a doctor’s appointment in Kenmore Square. He had walked less than a mile from his home in Brookline when he spotted an electric scooter abandoned near the road. Boches recognized it’s black, L-shaped frame, white logo and red accents. The scooter was a Bird, one of three “micro-mobility” companies to arrive in Brookline during an eight month pilot program the town will use to assess the scooter’s viability.
Though he had never ridden one, Boches was tired and running late. “Oh shoot, I’ll just jump on,” he said to himself. After downloading an app to unlock the scooter, Boches was zooming down the street. But within seconds, he came to a rolling stop. Boches had crossed an invisible border between Brookline and Boston, activating one of Bird’s lesser advertised traits: geo-fencing. The technology allows Bird to control where its riders go, which in this case, meant inside Brookline. Not only could Boches not ride the scooter the rest of the way to his doctors’ office, he now had to wheel it back to a specific drop-off location in Brookline, or pay a fine.
“I should have done my homework,” Boches, a communication professor at Boston University, said.
Since its debut launch in Santa Monica, CA less than three years ago, Bird has expanded to more than 100 cities worldwide, according to its website. Bird’s primary competitor, Lime, reports an even higher number. But electric scooters are still not prevalent in the Northeast.
Brookline became the first town in Massachusetts to openly embrace electric scooters with the launch of its pilot program on April 1. Salem and Winchester shortly followed with smaller programs of their own. But the areas that directly border Brookline remained no ride zones, limiting the distance that scooter riders, like Boches, could travel.
Last January, Massachusetts’ Gov. Charlie Baker proposed a bill that, if passed, would legalize electric scooters state-wide, raising questions for transportation officials about how to adjust for them.
“If we are going to have electric scooters be part of a larger transportation network, it's pretty critical for these communities to be working in coordination with one another,” said Kasia Hart, a policy analyst at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a public agency that serves Boston and its surrounding regions.
For the past year, the MAPC has facilitated meetings with transportation officials in Boston, Cambridge, Sommerville, Watertown and Brookline to establish a set of unified guidelines for electric scooters in the likely event that they are approved at a regional level. As Brookline’s pilot program indicates, a few obstacles remain.
In community forums, many scooter riders said they found it difficult to navigate the town’s narrow roads without an expansive network of bike lanes. Others said the scooters added unsightly clutter to public spaces, like parks, in addition to blocking the path of pedestrians, specifically seniors and people with disabilities.
In response to this feedback, which Brookline will analyze in a report this month, the town rolled out a few stop-gap solutions over the course of its pilot program, which ended on Nov. 15. For example, in crowded areas, such as Coolidge Corner, Brookline officials converted car parking spots into virtual scooter corrals. But more expansive solutions may be required in Boston, which was named the nation’s most congested city in 2018 by the Washington-based transportation analytics firm, INRIX.
“You can’t just look at it as, ‘what do we do about the scooters?’” said Daniel Roos, an engineering professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You got to look at it in a broader context...it’s part of an overall change in our mobility system.”
Electric scooters are just the latest transportation option to appear in cities, which for years have been shifting away from single-occupancy vehicles and toward more sustainable alternatives, like shareable bikes.
“You have a whole series of new options, which were not available just several years ago,” Roos said. “The issue that Boston and Brookline and cities are facing is that you have a street system that was basically designed for cars and pedestrians. The question now is, ‘how do you adapt?”
Until Boston has an answer, Boches said he will stick to walking to work.
“I don’t dislike them but I don’t necessarily like what they are at the moment,” Boches said. “I like what they represent and I like the potential they pose.”
***
Before scooters, there were bicycles.
At the turn of the 20th century, bicycles became a popular mode of transportation for millions of Americans, due, in part, to influential early champions, like Mark Twain. Bicycles led to the invention of revolutionary technology, such as ball bearings and air-filled rubber tires, as well as America’s highway system and paved roads.
In the last two decades, bicycles’ popularity has taken off again, amid what some experts are calling the “micro-mobility” trend, a turn toward individualized, sustainable and shareable transportation options best suited for short-term trips. Elliot Sclar, an urban planning professor emeritus at Columbia University, identified three factors shaping the trend: environmental awareness, urban growth and portable technology.
“Concerns with climate change are leading to widespread attempts to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Because about one-third of all greenhouse gasses are mobility sourced, i.e. produced by cars and trucks, there is a large movement afoot to encourage pedestrian, bicycle and public transit alternatives,” Sclar said in an email interview. “A second large piece is that cities have become preferred spatial locations in comparison with suburbs. The mixed land uses of cities and the short distances for most journeys make micro-mobility a tempting alternative. Lastly, technology. The internet and cell service make it possible to develop a marketable product in bike-share and scooter-share services."
In 2008, Washington D.C. launched the nation’s first bike-share program. Two years later, the MAPC brought bike-sharing to Boston. Hubway, which today is called Bluebikes, uses a station system, by which users can pay to unlock a bike at one station and ride it to another. In addition to being attractive to commuters, Hubway reduced the need for cars, helping Boston work toward its sustainability goals.
In its first 10 weeks, Hubway reported more than 100,000 rides, 600 bikes and 61 stations, according to the MAPC website. Within two years, it had surpassed 1,000,000 rides, 1,000 bikes and 100 stations across Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline.
Bike-share programs were having similar success across the country. The number of people who commute to work by bike each day increased 60 percent from 2008 to 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2016, Pew Research Center reported bike-share programs in more than 80 U.S. cities. Around the same time, ride-share services like Uber and Lyft were taking off as well.
“Bikes were the first step as people began to think about mechanical means of getting around cities,” said Sclar. “It was a relatively easy step for bike-share providers, given the technology of the internet, to go one more step and see another new market.”
Lime and Spin, both of which took part in Brookline’s electric scooter pilot program, began as bike-share companies.
“We made the transition to electric scooters when we really started to see a change in the way people wanted to move around,” said Ashley Brown, Spin’s east coast government partnership manager. “People have found great freedom in the dockless nature of e-scooters.”
Because scooters are smaller than bikes, they can be dockless without getting in the way of pedestrians, Brown explained. A mobile app helps users locate available scooters, which require an unlocking fee in addition to a fee per minute used. Over night, company employees collect, recharge and return the scooters to high demand areas.
Though less carbon efficient than bicycles, electric scooters are more carbon efficient than cars and most public transportation options, like buses and trains. Unlike bicycles, electric scooters don’t require the physical effort of pedaling, which can be attractive to people in poor physical shape, like much older riders, or those wishing to avoid sweat, such as commuters on their way to work, Brown said.
In September 2017, Bird launched the first shareable electric scooters in Santa Monica. With no legal precedent in place, the scooters caused problems, namely blocking sidewalks and failing to comply with traffic laws, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press, a local newspaper. At first, the city charged Bird with a nine-count criminal complaint, which was eventually settled. But Santa Monica also saw the scooters’ potential to “move people in a new way,” according to a city report published in November.
Santa Monica designed a year-long pilot program to evaluate the scooters, beginning in September 2018. Four micro-mobility companies were invited to participate, including Bird and Lime, in addition to Lyft and Jump, which is owned by Uber. The city gave each company a permit and vehicle cap set to fluctuate based on the scooters’ popularity. Santa Monica collected data from the scooter companies and city residents over the course of the program, which was analyzed in the November report.
More than 2.5 million electric scooter rides were taken during Santa Monica’s pilot program, indicating significant public demand, according to the report. The rides averaged 1.3 miles in length, suggesting that electric scooters could fill some gaps in public transportation, which is typically suited for longer journeys. Nearly half the scooter rides replaced car trips, potentially reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and traffic.
As shareable electric scooters spread throughout the country, other cities looked to Santa Monica as a model. In Austin, Texas, city officials issued cease and desist notices to electric scooter companies, following their arrival in February 2018. The city then implemented a nine-month pilot program for electric scooters the following January, yielding results similar to those found in Santa Monica.
“There were a lot of folks that were not used to seeing scooters in the landscape,” Jacob Culberson, an Austin transportation official, said. “New innovations are going to cause disruptions and cities need to address those disruptions and turn those disruptions into benefits for the city.”
***
Compared to cities like Santa Monica and Austin, where electric scooters have taken hold, Brookline is relatively small. The town spans just 6.7 square miles and has less than 60,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
When it comes to sustainable modes of transportation, though, Brookline is a pioneer. In 2014, town officials opted to supplement the MBTA with Bridj, a privately-owned bus company that connected with riders via a mobile app. Bridj shut down a few years later, but the idea behind its implementation in Brookline persists.
“We are known to embrace new technologies faster than some of our neighbors,” said Todd Kirrane, Brookline’s transportation administrator.
Bird’s unauthorized launch in Cambridge during the summer of 2018 offered Brookline an opportunity to pave the way for shareable electric scooters in Massachusetts. Until Baker’s proposed legislation is passed, the scooters remain illegal under a state law intended for larger vehicles, like vespas. Cambridge issued a cease and desist notice against Bird, leading the city to collect and store the scooters in a government holding facility, where they remain today.
“That got ourselves, as well as other communities, thinking, ‘this technology is coming here,’” Kirrane said. “We better understand it and get an understanding of what it means and how to implement it and regulate it safely.”
As the MAPC began facilitating meetings to regulate electric scooters throughout the region, officials in Brookline met internally and with representatives from Bird and Lime to design a pilot program.
Following the common model, Brookline’s program required each micro-mobility company to have a town-issued permit and vehicle limit, beginning with 100 scooters, which would increase in relation to demand. Bird and Lime kicked off in April and Spin joined later in August. Each company was responsible for enforcing a geographic limit on their scooters. Bird used geo-fencing, while Lime and Spin employed a different method, by which scooter trips could end, but not begin, outside Brookline.
By the end of the program, data collected by Brookline and Lime reported more than 170,000 scooter rides, Kirrane said. A third of these rides replaced car trips, a proportion consistent with most national findings, according to the data. Yet the program was met with mixed reviews.
Feedback collected from Brookline residents in community forums and online surveys revealed some problems with the town’s infrastructure and electric scooters in general:
“This town is not set up at this point, being a pedestrian friendly town, for this program.” “We need protected bike lanes and we need the police to enforce automobile laws.” “I’ve seen a lot of discarded scooters near where I live and in the park and it really concerns me.” “This is a big problem for senior citizens.” “I’m just concerned about the safety issues.”
Officials in Brookline worked with the scooter companies to improve the program where possible. To lessen scooters’ blockage of sidewalks, Brookline officials converted parking spots for cars into communal parking corrals for scooters, by painting the surrounding ground and hanging signs. A corresponding screen on the scooters’ apps directed riders to the corrals and fined them for parking in over-crowded areas. The officials also worked with Brookline schools to deter children less than 16 years old from riding the scooters. And the Brookline police department hired a full-time bicycle and electric scooter enforcement officer to better uphold traffic and safety laws.
In addition to the town’s efforts, Lime held free ride-safety workshops every other Saturday throughout the summer in the Coolidge Corner School parking lot. Participants received a helmet, 30 minutes of scooter instruction and the chance to ride around Brookline under the supervision of a Lime employee.
By the end of the pilot program, most of the feedback in Brookline was positive:
“It is clearly a mobility solution for a large group of people.” “Scooters offer me a great alternative. They’re quick. They’re easy to use. They’re very efficient.” “Overall, the pros of the pilot, and scooters in general, greatly outweigh the cons.”
David Fisher, 65, got rid of his car thanks to electric scooters, the Brookline resident said. Fisher, who owns an accounting firm, now shares a car with his wife. He rides a scooter to work, the post office and the gym.
“It’s part of my routine,” he said. “I just hope that Brookline comes back to them. I thought the program worked well.”
Whether or not the town does reinstate electric scooters, which were removed from Brookline by Bird, Lime and Spin at the conclusion of the pilot program in November, is a matter not yet decided, Kirrane said. In January, the town will release an analytical report, using feedback from community surveys and forums, as well as data collected from the scooter companies. Transportation officials have indicated that this report will help shape the future of electric scooters, not just in Brookline, but throughout the region, pending state legislative approval.
“We’re definitely supportive in a general sense,” said Joseph Barr, director of traffic, parking and transportation in Cambridge. “We’re assuming that at some point, the legal issues would be resolved and we’re hoping to roll out a program fairly quickly at that point.”
***
Bill Schecter, who has lived in Brookline for more than 40 years, likes to walk along the Muddy River with his adult son, Scott. During Brookline’s pilot program, the pair encountered a horde of electric scooters abandoned in the grass below Longwood Avenue bridge. Schecter, a lover of parks and retired high school history teacher, said to Scott, “this is unacceptable.”
“Having 10 scooters down in our parks by the grass, I don’t think that’s a good look,” he said.
Schecter was among a number of Brookline residents in community forums who criticized the appearance of dormant electric scooters. Yet no one expressed the same concern for parked cars, which often occupy half of road space on streets with parking lanes.
Jacob Culberson noticed a similar phenomenon in feedback collected during Austin’s electric scooter pilot program. “They were complaining about the scooters,” he said, “But, of course, they were completely blind to the cars.”
For the better part of a century, automobiles have been common fixtures in cities, making it easy for some people to discount them as part of the scenery. At the same time, cities are looking to reduce people’s dependence on cars in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and road congestion. In the Go Boston 2030 plan, which identifies the city’s long term environmental goals, single-passenger car trips are set to decrease by 50 percent in the next decade.
“We’re thinking about ways to encourage modeshift, get people out of cars, to more efficiently use our curb space,” Matt Warfield, Boston’s new mobility planner, said.
But as Daniel Roos, the MIT engineering professor, pointed out, “there’s a lot of learning that really has to go on, as evidenced by the experience in Brookline.”
Schecter and others like him must come to view micro-mobility as a transportation solution, rather than an eye-sore, for scooters to affect meaningful change. Equally, if not more importantly, cities must adopt new infrastructure and policies to support a widespread shift toward miro-mobility, similar to the changes made for bicycles in the past. In addition to scooter corrals, which take the place of car parking spots, much of Brookline’s feedback emphasized the town’s need for additional bike lanes, which further limit the space available for cars.
“The potential here, to fundamentally reimagine the rights of way, that’s what this is all about,” Scott Mullen, Lime’s director of Northeast expansion, said.
A study released in August by North Carolina State University stands in opposition to scooter companies’ claims that they are environmentally friendly. Though electric scooters produce about half the carbon emissions of a standard automobile, only a third of scooter rides replace car trips, according to the study. The majority were taken in place of walking or bike trips, which have far less carbon emissions. So about two-thirds of the time, scooters are not as carbon-efficient as their riders may think. In addition, electric scooters run on a relatively insignificant amount of electricity, but their recharging process requires the use of automobiles to retrieve them. And roughly half of electric scooters’ carbon emissions are released during their manufacturing, the study found.
To improve their environmental impact, electric scooter companies are working to increase the average lifespan of their scooters, which was initially only a few months. The latest Bird models last about 18 months, compared to a year for Lime and nine months for Spin, company representatives said.
“It just takes time for an innovation to be adapted,” Roos said. “More and more people are going to be using them and the technology is going to improve and the cost is going to get better.”
As the shareable electric scooter industry develops and urban infrastructure adapts to meet its demands, cities are growing ripe for additional micro-mobility options to emerge.
“I don’t think the scooters are the end of the road in terms of how the micro-mobility industry is evolving, by any means,” said Kasia Hart, of MAPC. “We need to be really thoughtful as we’re thinking about how we make decisions around electric scooters. How can we be thinking about things in a broader way that will also apply to micro-mobility options that don’t yet exist?”
Roos holds a similar view. “We’re just at the beginning right now,” he said.
An unpublished class assignment
It was around noon on a dreary day in April 2019 and Edward Boches, 65, was on his way to a doctor’s appointment in Kenmore Square. He had walked less than a mile from his home in Brookline when he spotted an electric scooter abandoned near the road. Boches recognized it’s black, L-shaped frame, white logo and red accents. The scooter was a Bird, one of three “micro-mobility” companies to arrive in Brookline during an eight month pilot program the town will use to assess the scooter’s viability.
Though he had never ridden one, Boches was tired and running late. “Oh shoot, I’ll just jump on,” he said to himself. After downloading an app to unlock the scooter, Boches was zooming down the street. But within seconds, he came to a rolling stop. Boches had crossed an invisible border between Brookline and Boston, activating one of Bird’s lesser advertised traits: geo-fencing. The technology allows Bird to control where its riders go, which in this case, meant inside Brookline. Not only could Boches not ride the scooter the rest of the way to his doctors’ office, he now had to wheel it back to a specific drop-off location in Brookline, or pay a fine.
“I should have done my homework,” Boches, a communication professor at Boston University, said.
Since its debut launch in Santa Monica, CA less than three years ago, Bird has expanded to more than 100 cities worldwide, according to its website. Bird’s primary competitor, Lime, reports an even higher number. But electric scooters are still not prevalent in the Northeast.
Brookline became the first town in Massachusetts to openly embrace electric scooters with the launch of its pilot program on April 1. Salem and Winchester shortly followed with smaller programs of their own. But the areas that directly border Brookline remained no ride zones, limiting the distance that scooter riders, like Boches, could travel.
Last January, Massachusetts’ Gov. Charlie Baker proposed a bill that, if passed, would legalize electric scooters state-wide, raising questions for transportation officials about how to adjust for them.
“If we are going to have electric scooters be part of a larger transportation network, it's pretty critical for these communities to be working in coordination with one another,” said Kasia Hart, a policy analyst at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a public agency that serves Boston and its surrounding regions.
For the past year, the MAPC has facilitated meetings with transportation officials in Boston, Cambridge, Sommerville, Watertown and Brookline to establish a set of unified guidelines for electric scooters in the likely event that they are approved at a regional level. As Brookline’s pilot program indicates, a few obstacles remain.
In community forums, many scooter riders said they found it difficult to navigate the town’s narrow roads without an expansive network of bike lanes. Others said the scooters added unsightly clutter to public spaces, like parks, in addition to blocking the path of pedestrians, specifically seniors and people with disabilities.
In response to this feedback, which Brookline will analyze in a report this month, the town rolled out a few stop-gap solutions over the course of its pilot program, which ended on Nov. 15. For example, in crowded areas, such as Coolidge Corner, Brookline officials converted car parking spots into virtual scooter corrals. But more expansive solutions may be required in Boston, which was named the nation’s most congested city in 2018 by the Washington-based transportation analytics firm, INRIX.
“You can’t just look at it as, ‘what do we do about the scooters?’” said Daniel Roos, an engineering professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You got to look at it in a broader context...it’s part of an overall change in our mobility system.”
Electric scooters are just the latest transportation option to appear in cities, which for years have been shifting away from single-occupancy vehicles and toward more sustainable alternatives, like shareable bikes.
“You have a whole series of new options, which were not available just several years ago,” Roos said. “The issue that Boston and Brookline and cities are facing is that you have a street system that was basically designed for cars and pedestrians. The question now is, ‘how do you adapt?”
Until Boston has an answer, Boches said he will stick to walking to work.
“I don’t dislike them but I don’t necessarily like what they are at the moment,” Boches said. “I like what they represent and I like the potential they pose.”
***
Before scooters, there were bicycles.
At the turn of the 20th century, bicycles became a popular mode of transportation for millions of Americans, due, in part, to influential early champions, like Mark Twain. Bicycles led to the invention of revolutionary technology, such as ball bearings and air-filled rubber tires, as well as America’s highway system and paved roads.
In the last two decades, bicycles’ popularity has taken off again, amid what some experts are calling the “micro-mobility” trend, a turn toward individualized, sustainable and shareable transportation options best suited for short-term trips. Elliot Sclar, an urban planning professor emeritus at Columbia University, identified three factors shaping the trend: environmental awareness, urban growth and portable technology.
“Concerns with climate change are leading to widespread attempts to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Because about one-third of all greenhouse gasses are mobility sourced, i.e. produced by cars and trucks, there is a large movement afoot to encourage pedestrian, bicycle and public transit alternatives,” Sclar said in an email interview. “A second large piece is that cities have become preferred spatial locations in comparison with suburbs. The mixed land uses of cities and the short distances for most journeys make micro-mobility a tempting alternative. Lastly, technology. The internet and cell service make it possible to develop a marketable product in bike-share and scooter-share services."
In 2008, Washington D.C. launched the nation’s first bike-share program. Two years later, the MAPC brought bike-sharing to Boston. Hubway, which today is called Bluebikes, uses a station system, by which users can pay to unlock a bike at one station and ride it to another. In addition to being attractive to commuters, Hubway reduced the need for cars, helping Boston work toward its sustainability goals.
In its first 10 weeks, Hubway reported more than 100,000 rides, 600 bikes and 61 stations, according to the MAPC website. Within two years, it had surpassed 1,000,000 rides, 1,000 bikes and 100 stations across Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline.
Bike-share programs were having similar success across the country. The number of people who commute to work by bike each day increased 60 percent from 2008 to 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2016, Pew Research Center reported bike-share programs in more than 80 U.S. cities. Around the same time, ride-share services like Uber and Lyft were taking off as well.
“Bikes were the first step as people began to think about mechanical means of getting around cities,” said Sclar. “It was a relatively easy step for bike-share providers, given the technology of the internet, to go one more step and see another new market.”
Lime and Spin, both of which took part in Brookline’s electric scooter pilot program, began as bike-share companies.
“We made the transition to electric scooters when we really started to see a change in the way people wanted to move around,” said Ashley Brown, Spin’s east coast government partnership manager. “People have found great freedom in the dockless nature of e-scooters.”
Because scooters are smaller than bikes, they can be dockless without getting in the way of pedestrians, Brown explained. A mobile app helps users locate available scooters, which require an unlocking fee in addition to a fee per minute used. Over night, company employees collect, recharge and return the scooters to high demand areas.
Though less carbon efficient than bicycles, electric scooters are more carbon efficient than cars and most public transportation options, like buses and trains. Unlike bicycles, electric scooters don’t require the physical effort of pedaling, which can be attractive to people in poor physical shape, like much older riders, or those wishing to avoid sweat, such as commuters on their way to work, Brown said.
In September 2017, Bird launched the first shareable electric scooters in Santa Monica. With no legal precedent in place, the scooters caused problems, namely blocking sidewalks and failing to comply with traffic laws, according to the Santa Monica Daily Press, a local newspaper. At first, the city charged Bird with a nine-count criminal complaint, which was eventually settled. But Santa Monica also saw the scooters’ potential to “move people in a new way,” according to a city report published in November.
Santa Monica designed a year-long pilot program to evaluate the scooters, beginning in September 2018. Four micro-mobility companies were invited to participate, including Bird and Lime, in addition to Lyft and Jump, which is owned by Uber. The city gave each company a permit and vehicle cap set to fluctuate based on the scooters’ popularity. Santa Monica collected data from the scooter companies and city residents over the course of the program, which was analyzed in the November report.
More than 2.5 million electric scooter rides were taken during Santa Monica’s pilot program, indicating significant public demand, according to the report. The rides averaged 1.3 miles in length, suggesting that electric scooters could fill some gaps in public transportation, which is typically suited for longer journeys. Nearly half the scooter rides replaced car trips, potentially reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and traffic.
As shareable electric scooters spread throughout the country, other cities looked to Santa Monica as a model. In Austin, Texas, city officials issued cease and desist notices to electric scooter companies, following their arrival in February 2018. The city then implemented a nine-month pilot program for electric scooters the following January, yielding results similar to those found in Santa Monica.
“There were a lot of folks that were not used to seeing scooters in the landscape,” Jacob Culberson, an Austin transportation official, said. “New innovations are going to cause disruptions and cities need to address those disruptions and turn those disruptions into benefits for the city.”
***
Compared to cities like Santa Monica and Austin, where electric scooters have taken hold, Brookline is relatively small. The town spans just 6.7 square miles and has less than 60,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
When it comes to sustainable modes of transportation, though, Brookline is a pioneer. In 2014, town officials opted to supplement the MBTA with Bridj, a privately-owned bus company that connected with riders via a mobile app. Bridj shut down a few years later, but the idea behind its implementation in Brookline persists.
“We are known to embrace new technologies faster than some of our neighbors,” said Todd Kirrane, Brookline’s transportation administrator.
Bird’s unauthorized launch in Cambridge during the summer of 2018 offered Brookline an opportunity to pave the way for shareable electric scooters in Massachusetts. Until Baker’s proposed legislation is passed, the scooters remain illegal under a state law intended for larger vehicles, like vespas. Cambridge issued a cease and desist notice against Bird, leading the city to collect and store the scooters in a government holding facility, where they remain today.
“That got ourselves, as well as other communities, thinking, ‘this technology is coming here,’” Kirrane said. “We better understand it and get an understanding of what it means and how to implement it and regulate it safely.”
As the MAPC began facilitating meetings to regulate electric scooters throughout the region, officials in Brookline met internally and with representatives from Bird and Lime to design a pilot program.
Following the common model, Brookline’s program required each micro-mobility company to have a town-issued permit and vehicle limit, beginning with 100 scooters, which would increase in relation to demand. Bird and Lime kicked off in April and Spin joined later in August. Each company was responsible for enforcing a geographic limit on their scooters. Bird used geo-fencing, while Lime and Spin employed a different method, by which scooter trips could end, but not begin, outside Brookline.
By the end of the program, data collected by Brookline and Lime reported more than 170,000 scooter rides, Kirrane said. A third of these rides replaced car trips, a proportion consistent with most national findings, according to the data. Yet the program was met with mixed reviews.
Feedback collected from Brookline residents in community forums and online surveys revealed some problems with the town’s infrastructure and electric scooters in general:
“This town is not set up at this point, being a pedestrian friendly town, for this program.” “We need protected bike lanes and we need the police to enforce automobile laws.” “I’ve seen a lot of discarded scooters near where I live and in the park and it really concerns me.” “This is a big problem for senior citizens.” “I’m just concerned about the safety issues.”
Officials in Brookline worked with the scooter companies to improve the program where possible. To lessen scooters’ blockage of sidewalks, Brookline officials converted parking spots for cars into communal parking corrals for scooters, by painting the surrounding ground and hanging signs. A corresponding screen on the scooters’ apps directed riders to the corrals and fined them for parking in over-crowded areas. The officials also worked with Brookline schools to deter children less than 16 years old from riding the scooters. And the Brookline police department hired a full-time bicycle and electric scooter enforcement officer to better uphold traffic and safety laws.
In addition to the town’s efforts, Lime held free ride-safety workshops every other Saturday throughout the summer in the Coolidge Corner School parking lot. Participants received a helmet, 30 minutes of scooter instruction and the chance to ride around Brookline under the supervision of a Lime employee.
By the end of the pilot program, most of the feedback in Brookline was positive:
“It is clearly a mobility solution for a large group of people.” “Scooters offer me a great alternative. They’re quick. They’re easy to use. They’re very efficient.” “Overall, the pros of the pilot, and scooters in general, greatly outweigh the cons.”
David Fisher, 65, got rid of his car thanks to electric scooters, the Brookline resident said. Fisher, who owns an accounting firm, now shares a car with his wife. He rides a scooter to work, the post office and the gym.
“It’s part of my routine,” he said. “I just hope that Brookline comes back to them. I thought the program worked well.”
Whether or not the town does reinstate electric scooters, which were removed from Brookline by Bird, Lime and Spin at the conclusion of the pilot program in November, is a matter not yet decided, Kirrane said. In January, the town will release an analytical report, using feedback from community surveys and forums, as well as data collected from the scooter companies. Transportation officials have indicated that this report will help shape the future of electric scooters, not just in Brookline, but throughout the region, pending state legislative approval.
“We’re definitely supportive in a general sense,” said Joseph Barr, director of traffic, parking and transportation in Cambridge. “We’re assuming that at some point, the legal issues would be resolved and we’re hoping to roll out a program fairly quickly at that point.”
***
Bill Schecter, who has lived in Brookline for more than 40 years, likes to walk along the Muddy River with his adult son, Scott. During Brookline’s pilot program, the pair encountered a horde of electric scooters abandoned in the grass below Longwood Avenue bridge. Schecter, a lover of parks and retired high school history teacher, said to Scott, “this is unacceptable.”
“Having 10 scooters down in our parks by the grass, I don’t think that’s a good look,” he said.
Schecter was among a number of Brookline residents in community forums who criticized the appearance of dormant electric scooters. Yet no one expressed the same concern for parked cars, which often occupy half of road space on streets with parking lanes.
Jacob Culberson noticed a similar phenomenon in feedback collected during Austin’s electric scooter pilot program. “They were complaining about the scooters,” he said, “But, of course, they were completely blind to the cars.”
For the better part of a century, automobiles have been common fixtures in cities, making it easy for some people to discount them as part of the scenery. At the same time, cities are looking to reduce people’s dependence on cars in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and road congestion. In the Go Boston 2030 plan, which identifies the city’s long term environmental goals, single-passenger car trips are set to decrease by 50 percent in the next decade.
“We’re thinking about ways to encourage modeshift, get people out of cars, to more efficiently use our curb space,” Matt Warfield, Boston’s new mobility planner, said.
But as Daniel Roos, the MIT engineering professor, pointed out, “there’s a lot of learning that really has to go on, as evidenced by the experience in Brookline.”
Schecter and others like him must come to view micro-mobility as a transportation solution, rather than an eye-sore, for scooters to affect meaningful change. Equally, if not more importantly, cities must adopt new infrastructure and policies to support a widespread shift toward miro-mobility, similar to the changes made for bicycles in the past. In addition to scooter corrals, which take the place of car parking spots, much of Brookline’s feedback emphasized the town’s need for additional bike lanes, which further limit the space available for cars.
“The potential here, to fundamentally reimagine the rights of way, that’s what this is all about,” Scott Mullen, Lime’s director of Northeast expansion, said.
A study released in August by North Carolina State University stands in opposition to scooter companies’ claims that they are environmentally friendly. Though electric scooters produce about half the carbon emissions of a standard automobile, only a third of scooter rides replace car trips, according to the study. The majority were taken in place of walking or bike trips, which have far less carbon emissions. So about two-thirds of the time, scooters are not as carbon-efficient as their riders may think. In addition, electric scooters run on a relatively insignificant amount of electricity, but their recharging process requires the use of automobiles to retrieve them. And roughly half of electric scooters’ carbon emissions are released during their manufacturing, the study found.
To improve their environmental impact, electric scooter companies are working to increase the average lifespan of their scooters, which was initially only a few months. The latest Bird models last about 18 months, compared to a year for Lime and nine months for Spin, company representatives said.
“It just takes time for an innovation to be adapted,” Roos said. “More and more people are going to be using them and the technology is going to improve and the cost is going to get better.”
As the shareable electric scooter industry develops and urban infrastructure adapts to meet its demands, cities are growing ripe for additional micro-mobility options to emerge.
“I don’t think the scooters are the end of the road in terms of how the micro-mobility industry is evolving, by any means,” said Kasia Hart, of MAPC. “We need to be really thoughtful as we’re thinking about how we make decisions around electric scooters. How can we be thinking about things in a broader way that will also apply to micro-mobility options that don’t yet exist?”
Roos holds a similar view. “We’re just at the beginning right now,” he said.
The Friend Who Wasn't
An unpublished class assignment
She was there to get better.
Regardless of the steps it takes to reach the detox facility’s front door, upon arrival, recovery becomes the ultimate goal. S.S, who is referred to by her initials in court documents, was trying to overcome a heroin addiction. The Cape Cod based facility offered counseling, art therapy and educational sessions. It was supposed to be a haven designed for women to recuperate and get back on track after drugs took a hold on her life.
The detox facility is also where Savannah Wobecky convinced S.S to leave the detox facility and work as a sexual servant for Hendricks Mario Berdet, who was convicted this past July on multiple charges including rape and trafficking of persons for sexual servitude. It will be glamorous, Wobecky said, according to court documents filed at the Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, Massachusetts. He’ll give you whatever drugs you want, plus, you’ll get paid.
It was an enticing offer, especially for someone already vulnerable from the symptoms of Heroin withdrawal. But what Wobecky did not mention, and what S.S. would eventually find out for herself, was that Berdet would take all the money she earned, even when it exceeded his nightly quota of $1,500. He’d also take her ID, rape her, and make her call him “Daddy,” according to court documents.
S.S’s story is not unusual. Since January 2015, the National Human Trafficking Hotline has learned of 105 human trafficking victims who were recruited at health care facilities, according to research conducted by a leading anti-trafficking organization called Polaris. Traffickers oftentimes plant recruiters as patients in health care facilities with the intent of identifying potential victims who may be struggling to complete their treatment, the research found.
Wobecky’s coercion technique is “a classic, perfect example, of what [sex trafficking] looks like,” said Rachel Devine, the donor relations and community development coordinator for Generate Hope, a recovery house that offers support for survivors of sexual trafficking in San Diego, California.
“We often see that victims are lured to the promise of a better life, more money,” Devine said. “The most vulnerable victims come from maybe a struggling home and lack loving, supporting adult relationships, so they seek that elsewhere. It can be really easy for a trafficker to fill that need for affection.”
The U.S. Department of State defines sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act,” according to the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. Wobecky is what Devine described as “the bottom,” a young woman who has herself been trafficked and with time earned the trust of a pimp. Now, she recruits other women and girls in exchange for fewer beatings or more drugs.
Due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal policy that protects the privacy of healthcare patients, it is difficult to confirm the facility at which Wobecky and S.S. met one another. However, a Facebook post made at that time by Wobecky's mother, Wanda Wobecky, suggests that the women were temporary residents together at Emerson House, a group home-style recovery program in Falmouth, Massachusetts for women struggling with substance abuse.
Wanda Wobecky did not respond to messaging over Facebook and two Emerson House employees declined to comment when contacted by phone (the contact information for Wobecky and S.S. could not be determined). But Kevin Rosario, regional outreach representative for Gosnold, the Cape Cod based non-profit organization that oversees Emerson House and several other recovery residency programs, said, “I don’t know how it would happen...I mean, they’re under constant supervision.” He neither confirmed nor denied the claim.
“There’s a lot of crazy things that happen in the world of addiction,” Rosario explained. “Drugs drive people to do crazy things.” He said he’s seen people quit their jobs, parents abandon children, young women sell expensive jewelry or their own bodies, all in pursuit of drugs.
Even at recovery centers like Emerson House, where residents are closely monitored, fatal overdoses are not unheard of. As a point of reference, Rosario cited two deaths that occurred at Boston Center for Addiction Treatment in Danvers during the eight months following its opening last January. The facility was temporarily shut down following the second death in August of that year.
“Most come with the intention of getting better, to see their kids, go back to work,” he said. “The motive is usually good but when they get there...without drugs and alcohol these people don’t function like normal people, they don't have normal coping skills.”
This reasoning goes a long way in explaining how Wobecky was able to convince S.S. to leave the detox facility despite her attempts to get clean. To researchers and advocates in this space, S.S’s story is familiar. Consider that Polaris reports since January 2015, the National Hotline has learned of 1,133 victims who engaged in substance use prior to being trafficked and which may have played a role in their entry into trafficking.
“Traffickers may escalate a potential victims’ existing substance use by constantly supplying them with an ever-increasing supply of drugs, thereby increasing their dependence on their trafficker,” the report reads. “Hotline callers have also revealed that potential traffickers may instigate a new addiction, either by forcefully inducing illicit substances to incapacitate a potential victim into compliance, or more commonly, subtly manipulating a potential victim into an addiction.”
Drug addiction is common among victims of sex trafficking, Devine confirmed. Substances are often used to help the victim perform better sexually or to stay awake. They’re also used as a means of coercion as well as a numbing tool.
For Berdet’s victims, it was heroin, Percocet, fentanyl and cocaine. S.S described to her lawyers, who declined to comment after being reached by phone, as having done a combination of these drugs every day under Berdet’s control. But each case is different. For the victims of Marvell Antonio Culp, who in 2012 pled guilty to sex trafficking charges in Memphis, Tennessee, it was ecstasy. According to a case cited in “The University of Memphis Law Review,” Culp introduced the drug to K.F. when she was barely 18, just after telling her he loved her and just before beating her with a belt -- aggressively enough to injure his own back -- so that she would agree to prostitute herself.
Like Wobecky, at first Culp posed as someone with his victim’s best interests at heart. K.F. came from a dysfunctional home, according to the details of the case, and Culp offered an escape.
“If it is an older guy he’ll often say, ‘we can run away from here and leave your parents, we can move to a new city and I’ll provide for you,’” Devine said. “She thinks they’re in love...it's exploitive.”
After a few months with Culp, during which he drove K.F. around Memphis to meet up to six or seven clients a day, K.F. helped him groom another girl three years her junior, according to the case. She gave the 15-year-old lingerie, and explained to her Culp’s rules, one of which required that he be called “Daddy,” just like Berdet. According to the case, if Daddy had to tell the girls something more than twice, they’d be thrown in a scalding hot shower and burned with one of his cigarettes.
“Once they're in, it's incredibly hard to get out,” said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, executive director of My Life My Choice, an organization that serves sex trafficking survivors in Massachusetts. “The exploiter is going to say to them that there's no way out, if you did get out no one's going to want you back, all these things that that young person is gonna believe.”
Even when they do get out of “the life,” as those familiar with these crimes often refer to them, it can be difficult for survivors of sex trafficking to recover for a multitude of reasons.
For starters, there is a significant lack of resources for survivors of sex trafficking. Though some experts said that determining exact numbers is almost impossible, by Devine’s estimates, there are only 500 beds available in recovery programs nationwide. Six of those beds are located in San Diego at Generate Hope, the non-profit where Devine works. She says that this small number is intentional, due to Generate Hope’s desire to foster a sense of family and community among the women it serves.
Another six beds are located in Washington D.C., at Vida Home, a 90 day transitional housing program maintained by FAIR Girls, a non-profit that serves girls and women who are victims of sex or labor trafficking (the acronym “FAIR” stands for “Free, Aware, Inspired, Restored”). Shannon Sigamoni, the director of programs at FAIR Girls, said that while it’s difficult for a lot of people, “add the level of trauma that someone has after they’ve been trafficked and finding subsidized housing is a huge problem.”
Funding is another “constant problem,” said Grace. Aside from a small amount of state funding, most nonprofits dedicated to counteracting sex trafficking rely on federal grant writing and individual donations. For example, 97 percent of Generate Hope’s funding comes from private donors, which makes their operations largely dependent on the public’s awareness of these issues.
The reality is, a large proportion of the population remains ignorant to the prevalence of sex trafficking in the United States and the fact that its victims flock from all geographic areas and demographics. “They are coming from every community...urban, suburban, rural,” said Grace. “They come from every race and ethnicity, though low income youth of color are disproportionately vulnerable.”
Many people also don’t understand the coercion techniques involved in sex trafficking and think that women are making this choice. “I think a lot of people imagine it like the movie “Taken,” where someone is just kidnapped and thrown into a van, and a lot of people don't understand that there are boyfriends involved and the grooming technique,” said Devine. “A lot of people view victims as women who just messed up and made poor choices and fail to understand the coercion that’s involved.”
This lack of awareness can negatively affect various aspects of victims’ lives. Sometimes, it takes the form of victim blaming, in which survivors of sex trafficking, usually women, are denied health care or other rights because they are looked down upon as prostitutes, according to the Polaris report. “People hold onto this idea that, well it's her choice and she wanted it,” said Grace. “It continues to be a real struggle.”
If they are able to overcome the odds against them and arrive at organizations like My Life My Choice, Generate Hope or FAIR Girls, survivors of sex trafficking have the opportunity to rebuild their lives through a variety of programs, including therapy and case management. The later, Sigamoni explained, addresses what individuals need to move forward. Sometimes, this means being taught how to write a resume or perform well in an interview. Other times, sex trafficking survivors require additional health care or a lawyer.
Often, due to their involvement and proximity to crimes, sex trafficking victims arrive at rehabilitation programs with legal charges against them. Grace said women like Wobecky, who was probably a recruiter in addition to a victim, are unlikely to be incriminated for their actions so long as they can prove they were being sex trafficked at the time they committed that crime. However, drug and weapon charges do not fall under this category, Grace said.
Though Wobecky was listed as a co-defendant in the case against Berdet, who now resides in the Cedar Junction Massachusetts Correctional Facility in Walpole, his lawyer did not return a voicemail left at her office, so it is unclear whether or not the recruiter was prosecuted as well.
In Massachusetts alone, the National Human Trafficking Hotline reports 490 confirmed cases since 2007, involving a total of 950 victims. Nationwide, the statistics are more staggering; in the same time span, the Hotline reports 45,308 cases and 107,653 victims. However, the true numbers are likely much higher, said Rafael Flores, communications director for Polaris, which oversees the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
“What we report is just the phone calls we get here at the hotline,” Flores said. “But that doesn’t mean that those are representative of all the cases that we get in the country.”
Grace, from My Life My Choice, agrees that numbers like those recorded by the Hotline do not accurately represent the magnitude of sex trafficking in the United States. “We don’t have good baseline statistics,” she said.
Nevertheless, each year the numbers are getting higher as more and more cases get reported. “We have increased the number of calls every year because people are more aware of it or more conscious of this problem,” said Flores.
Devine speculates that the increase in awareness surrounding sex trafficking is largely due to documentaries, including “Tricked” and “I am Jane Doe,” that have appeared on Netflix recently. In San Diego, where Generate Hope is located, District Attorney Summer Stephan has brought sex trafficking to the forefront of issues to be confronted, which helps foster awareness and state funding, Devine said.
“It’s helpful to have someone with a public platform, such as the D.A., to speak on it and give light to it in context of civil rights in the legal justice system,” said Devine.
Nonprofits are also doing their part to further awareness. Executive Director of FAIR girls, Erin Andrews, frequents Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. to lobby in favor of sex trafficking advocacy, said Sigamoni.
For awareness to continue to spread, and subsequently, victims to be identified and survivors to recover, more people will have to take up sex trafficking as an issue.
“There's been an incredible shift in terms of the awareness. The awareness is much better than it ever was,” said Grace. “Of course we still have a ways to go.”
An unpublished class assignment
She was there to get better.
Regardless of the steps it takes to reach the detox facility’s front door, upon arrival, recovery becomes the ultimate goal. S.S, who is referred to by her initials in court documents, was trying to overcome a heroin addiction. The Cape Cod based facility offered counseling, art therapy and educational sessions. It was supposed to be a haven designed for women to recuperate and get back on track after drugs took a hold on her life.
The detox facility is also where Savannah Wobecky convinced S.S to leave the detox facility and work as a sexual servant for Hendricks Mario Berdet, who was convicted this past July on multiple charges including rape and trafficking of persons for sexual servitude. It will be glamorous, Wobecky said, according to court documents filed at the Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, Massachusetts. He’ll give you whatever drugs you want, plus, you’ll get paid.
It was an enticing offer, especially for someone already vulnerable from the symptoms of Heroin withdrawal. But what Wobecky did not mention, and what S.S. would eventually find out for herself, was that Berdet would take all the money she earned, even when it exceeded his nightly quota of $1,500. He’d also take her ID, rape her, and make her call him “Daddy,” according to court documents.
S.S’s story is not unusual. Since January 2015, the National Human Trafficking Hotline has learned of 105 human trafficking victims who were recruited at health care facilities, according to research conducted by a leading anti-trafficking organization called Polaris. Traffickers oftentimes plant recruiters as patients in health care facilities with the intent of identifying potential victims who may be struggling to complete their treatment, the research found.
Wobecky’s coercion technique is “a classic, perfect example, of what [sex trafficking] looks like,” said Rachel Devine, the donor relations and community development coordinator for Generate Hope, a recovery house that offers support for survivors of sexual trafficking in San Diego, California.
“We often see that victims are lured to the promise of a better life, more money,” Devine said. “The most vulnerable victims come from maybe a struggling home and lack loving, supporting adult relationships, so they seek that elsewhere. It can be really easy for a trafficker to fill that need for affection.”
The U.S. Department of State defines sex trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act,” according to the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. Wobecky is what Devine described as “the bottom,” a young woman who has herself been trafficked and with time earned the trust of a pimp. Now, she recruits other women and girls in exchange for fewer beatings or more drugs.
Due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a federal policy that protects the privacy of healthcare patients, it is difficult to confirm the facility at which Wobecky and S.S. met one another. However, a Facebook post made at that time by Wobecky's mother, Wanda Wobecky, suggests that the women were temporary residents together at Emerson House, a group home-style recovery program in Falmouth, Massachusetts for women struggling with substance abuse.
Wanda Wobecky did not respond to messaging over Facebook and two Emerson House employees declined to comment when contacted by phone (the contact information for Wobecky and S.S. could not be determined). But Kevin Rosario, regional outreach representative for Gosnold, the Cape Cod based non-profit organization that oversees Emerson House and several other recovery residency programs, said, “I don’t know how it would happen...I mean, they’re under constant supervision.” He neither confirmed nor denied the claim.
“There’s a lot of crazy things that happen in the world of addiction,” Rosario explained. “Drugs drive people to do crazy things.” He said he’s seen people quit their jobs, parents abandon children, young women sell expensive jewelry or their own bodies, all in pursuit of drugs.
Even at recovery centers like Emerson House, where residents are closely monitored, fatal overdoses are not unheard of. As a point of reference, Rosario cited two deaths that occurred at Boston Center for Addiction Treatment in Danvers during the eight months following its opening last January. The facility was temporarily shut down following the second death in August of that year.
“Most come with the intention of getting better, to see their kids, go back to work,” he said. “The motive is usually good but when they get there...without drugs and alcohol these people don’t function like normal people, they don't have normal coping skills.”
This reasoning goes a long way in explaining how Wobecky was able to convince S.S. to leave the detox facility despite her attempts to get clean. To researchers and advocates in this space, S.S’s story is familiar. Consider that Polaris reports since January 2015, the National Hotline has learned of 1,133 victims who engaged in substance use prior to being trafficked and which may have played a role in their entry into trafficking.
“Traffickers may escalate a potential victims’ existing substance use by constantly supplying them with an ever-increasing supply of drugs, thereby increasing their dependence on their trafficker,” the report reads. “Hotline callers have also revealed that potential traffickers may instigate a new addiction, either by forcefully inducing illicit substances to incapacitate a potential victim into compliance, or more commonly, subtly manipulating a potential victim into an addiction.”
Drug addiction is common among victims of sex trafficking, Devine confirmed. Substances are often used to help the victim perform better sexually or to stay awake. They’re also used as a means of coercion as well as a numbing tool.
For Berdet’s victims, it was heroin, Percocet, fentanyl and cocaine. S.S described to her lawyers, who declined to comment after being reached by phone, as having done a combination of these drugs every day under Berdet’s control. But each case is different. For the victims of Marvell Antonio Culp, who in 2012 pled guilty to sex trafficking charges in Memphis, Tennessee, it was ecstasy. According to a case cited in “The University of Memphis Law Review,” Culp introduced the drug to K.F. when she was barely 18, just after telling her he loved her and just before beating her with a belt -- aggressively enough to injure his own back -- so that she would agree to prostitute herself.
Like Wobecky, at first Culp posed as someone with his victim’s best interests at heart. K.F. came from a dysfunctional home, according to the details of the case, and Culp offered an escape.
“If it is an older guy he’ll often say, ‘we can run away from here and leave your parents, we can move to a new city and I’ll provide for you,’” Devine said. “She thinks they’re in love...it's exploitive.”
After a few months with Culp, during which he drove K.F. around Memphis to meet up to six or seven clients a day, K.F. helped him groom another girl three years her junior, according to the case. She gave the 15-year-old lingerie, and explained to her Culp’s rules, one of which required that he be called “Daddy,” just like Berdet. According to the case, if Daddy had to tell the girls something more than twice, they’d be thrown in a scalding hot shower and burned with one of his cigarettes.
“Once they're in, it's incredibly hard to get out,” said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, executive director of My Life My Choice, an organization that serves sex trafficking survivors in Massachusetts. “The exploiter is going to say to them that there's no way out, if you did get out no one's going to want you back, all these things that that young person is gonna believe.”
Even when they do get out of “the life,” as those familiar with these crimes often refer to them, it can be difficult for survivors of sex trafficking to recover for a multitude of reasons.
For starters, there is a significant lack of resources for survivors of sex trafficking. Though some experts said that determining exact numbers is almost impossible, by Devine’s estimates, there are only 500 beds available in recovery programs nationwide. Six of those beds are located in San Diego at Generate Hope, the non-profit where Devine works. She says that this small number is intentional, due to Generate Hope’s desire to foster a sense of family and community among the women it serves.
Another six beds are located in Washington D.C., at Vida Home, a 90 day transitional housing program maintained by FAIR Girls, a non-profit that serves girls and women who are victims of sex or labor trafficking (the acronym “FAIR” stands for “Free, Aware, Inspired, Restored”). Shannon Sigamoni, the director of programs at FAIR Girls, said that while it’s difficult for a lot of people, “add the level of trauma that someone has after they’ve been trafficked and finding subsidized housing is a huge problem.”
Funding is another “constant problem,” said Grace. Aside from a small amount of state funding, most nonprofits dedicated to counteracting sex trafficking rely on federal grant writing and individual donations. For example, 97 percent of Generate Hope’s funding comes from private donors, which makes their operations largely dependent on the public’s awareness of these issues.
The reality is, a large proportion of the population remains ignorant to the prevalence of sex trafficking in the United States and the fact that its victims flock from all geographic areas and demographics. “They are coming from every community...urban, suburban, rural,” said Grace. “They come from every race and ethnicity, though low income youth of color are disproportionately vulnerable.”
Many people also don’t understand the coercion techniques involved in sex trafficking and think that women are making this choice. “I think a lot of people imagine it like the movie “Taken,” where someone is just kidnapped and thrown into a van, and a lot of people don't understand that there are boyfriends involved and the grooming technique,” said Devine. “A lot of people view victims as women who just messed up and made poor choices and fail to understand the coercion that’s involved.”
This lack of awareness can negatively affect various aspects of victims’ lives. Sometimes, it takes the form of victim blaming, in which survivors of sex trafficking, usually women, are denied health care or other rights because they are looked down upon as prostitutes, according to the Polaris report. “People hold onto this idea that, well it's her choice and she wanted it,” said Grace. “It continues to be a real struggle.”
If they are able to overcome the odds against them and arrive at organizations like My Life My Choice, Generate Hope or FAIR Girls, survivors of sex trafficking have the opportunity to rebuild their lives through a variety of programs, including therapy and case management. The later, Sigamoni explained, addresses what individuals need to move forward. Sometimes, this means being taught how to write a resume or perform well in an interview. Other times, sex trafficking survivors require additional health care or a lawyer.
Often, due to their involvement and proximity to crimes, sex trafficking victims arrive at rehabilitation programs with legal charges against them. Grace said women like Wobecky, who was probably a recruiter in addition to a victim, are unlikely to be incriminated for their actions so long as they can prove they were being sex trafficked at the time they committed that crime. However, drug and weapon charges do not fall under this category, Grace said.
Though Wobecky was listed as a co-defendant in the case against Berdet, who now resides in the Cedar Junction Massachusetts Correctional Facility in Walpole, his lawyer did not return a voicemail left at her office, so it is unclear whether or not the recruiter was prosecuted as well.
In Massachusetts alone, the National Human Trafficking Hotline reports 490 confirmed cases since 2007, involving a total of 950 victims. Nationwide, the statistics are more staggering; in the same time span, the Hotline reports 45,308 cases and 107,653 victims. However, the true numbers are likely much higher, said Rafael Flores, communications director for Polaris, which oversees the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
“What we report is just the phone calls we get here at the hotline,” Flores said. “But that doesn’t mean that those are representative of all the cases that we get in the country.”
Grace, from My Life My Choice, agrees that numbers like those recorded by the Hotline do not accurately represent the magnitude of sex trafficking in the United States. “We don’t have good baseline statistics,” she said.
Nevertheless, each year the numbers are getting higher as more and more cases get reported. “We have increased the number of calls every year because people are more aware of it or more conscious of this problem,” said Flores.
Devine speculates that the increase in awareness surrounding sex trafficking is largely due to documentaries, including “Tricked” and “I am Jane Doe,” that have appeared on Netflix recently. In San Diego, where Generate Hope is located, District Attorney Summer Stephan has brought sex trafficking to the forefront of issues to be confronted, which helps foster awareness and state funding, Devine said.
“It’s helpful to have someone with a public platform, such as the D.A., to speak on it and give light to it in context of civil rights in the legal justice system,” said Devine.
Nonprofits are also doing their part to further awareness. Executive Director of FAIR girls, Erin Andrews, frequents Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. to lobby in favor of sex trafficking advocacy, said Sigamoni.
For awareness to continue to spread, and subsequently, victims to be identified and survivors to recover, more people will have to take up sex trafficking as an issue.
“There's been an incredible shift in terms of the awareness. The awareness is much better than it ever was,” said Grace. “Of course we still have a ways to go.”