Dockless bikesharing and scootersharing (collectively, micromobility) services have expanded mobility for their users, but improper parking of bikes and scooters is a leading complaint from residents.

A team led by Don MacKenzie at the University of Washington has developed Misplaced Wheels (misplacedwheels.com), a mobile web application to help local governments, residents, and micromobility operators reduce the impacts of improperly parked bikes and scooters. Misplaced Wheels could be implemented for reporting by the general public, or adapted for systematic audit studies, with companies and violation types tailored based on the local market and regulations.

In this presentation, Professor MacKenzie shared insights from interviews with city staff responsible for regulating micromobility services, the architecture and functionality of the Misplaced Wheels app, and examples of analyses that could be conducted with the data collected from Misplaced Wheels, which is available in a public repository on the web (misparkrepo.com). Finally, he provided an overview of the steps needed to set up Misplaced Wheels for reporting violations in a specific city.