In a metropolitan region widely regarded as hostile to pedestrians, Santa Monica, California, is delightfully walkable. The city’s oceanfront, both down along the beach and atop the palm-lined coastal bluff of Palisades Park, is an obvious attraction, one made all the more appealing by its idyllic Mediterranean climate. For the street photographer, the world-famous amusement pier and nearby Third Street Promenade commercial district provide a multitude of potential subjects. For the casual walker, Santa Monica’s several residential neighborhoods offer a variety of quieter landscapes removed from the tourist crowds and also punctuated by distinctive hubs of activity, such as tony Montana Avenue on the city’s north side and its more eclectic and eccentric Main Street through historic Ocean Park.

During the past quarter century, I have come to know Santa Monica’s streets and neighborhoods well—from behind the steering wheel of my car, perched on the saddle of my bicycle, and walking on the city’s sidewalks, stairways, and foot paths. At various times during the last quarter century living on the west side of Los Angeles, my daily routine has placed me in Santa Monica with an hour or two of spare time in the afternoon. I have used such periods as opportunity both for some light exercise and for some photographic practice. I long have struggled to combine exercise and photography, as my mind tends to concentrate on one activity over the other. Walking along familiar streets, I need to assign myself a photographic theme for my eye to seek. In the summer of 2018, that subject was something that many were noticing and discussing: the arrival of the rentable-via-smart-phone electric scooter, led by a local startup company, Bird, that had been founded the previous autumn.

All cities are shaped and reshaped by various modes of transportation. Santa Monica is no exception and has experienced multiple transportation revolutions during its century and a half of existence. Like so many California cities, Santa Monica began as a real-estate development doubling as a railway. In 1875, anticipating the eventual arrival of a direct transcontinental link between Los Angeles and the eastern United States—a Southern Pacific railroad to complement the original Central Pacific railroad to San Francisco Bay—a company led by John P. Jones and Robert S. Baker built the L.A. & Independence Railroad to connect Los Angeles to a new ocean port on Santa Monica Bay, sixteen miles away. This short-line railroad terminated on a short pier extending into the ocean. On the bluffs above, Jones and Baker subdivided and sold a quintessential American rectangular grid of streets and town lots. The railroad helped sell the real estate, and the new community generated traffic for the railroad to carry.

Jones and Baker’s original maritime dream never fully realized. The Port of Los Angeles instead would be built on San Pedro Bay, adjacent to Long Beach. The city of Santa Monica nevertheless thrived as a town built by rail. The original Shoofly wharf was replaced by the city’s famous amusement pier, to which visitors from across Southern California traveled on the Balloon Route of the sprawling Pacific Electric street railway. During the 1920s, these historic Red Cars were rapidly joined by an altogether different kind of car—the personal automobile—which motorists were now able to drive along the base of Santa Monica’s palisades toward Malibu along the new Roosevelt coastal highway. This soon attracted the accumulating wealth of Hollywood stars and moguls, transforming Santa Monica’s waterfront into a Gold Coast of private homes and beach clubs. Meanwhile, up on the bluffs, Donald Douglas was leading Santa Monica into the aviation age. By 1940, Santa Monica’s growing and diverse cast of characters had transformed it into a “Bay City” full of stories for authors such as Raymond Chandler to tell.

After World War Two, both the planes and the trains faded from Santa Monica’s landscapes as the automobile became ever more dominant. Santa Monica was the official end point of 20th-century America’s “Mother Road”—Route 66—and in the 1960s, Interstate 10 (the Santa Monica Freeway) was extended to the Pacific Coast Highway, roughly following the old route of the LA & Independence. The automobile, however, never would have Santa Monica’s streets to itself. As the 10 freeway was being built, 3rd Street was transformed into a car-free pedestrian mall. A short distance to the south, in the “Dogtown” of old Ocean Park, beachside counter culture spawned a new mode of urban transportation, as well as recreation: the skateboard.

With the construction of a concrete public path atop the sands of Santa Monica Bay, roller skates had their day in the sun, while bicycles of many different shapes and styles have endured across the generations. Meanwhile, the city’s famously progressive political culture supported one of Southern California’s most robust local transit systems—the Big Blue Bus. Santa Monica’s mass transit received a further boost in 2016 when the Exposition (E) Line of the region’s Metro reconnected downtown Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles by rail.

This was the context a couple of years later for the introduction of the Bird scooters. Politicians, planners, and activists interested in promoting use of the new Expo Line were wrestling with mass transit’s “last mile” problem. Many would-be transit riders are discouraged, at least in part, by the walking required at either end of their train journey. As transit agencies experimented with bike-share programs, Bird and other private startups saw the electric scooter as a potentially scalable and profitable option. Santa Monica in the summer of 2018 seemed a perfect time and place to test the concept. Year-round pleasant weather. A generation of young adults who had grown up, if not skateboarding, then at least riding unpowered Razor scooters as kids. The recent opening of the Expo Line brought a number of people to Santa Monica without a car, or even if they did arrive by car—including international tourists arriving from the airport in their rentals—the expense and hassle of finding parking made local driving much less appealing. The paved paths along the beach, as well as the various streets within the city itself, made for fun and easy scooting.

Since my first interest in photography was sports, and also since a large share of my recent photography had focused on my kids’ participation in soccer and running, I first approached this photo project like a sporting event. While on my afternoon walks through Santa Monica, I kept my eyes open for scooter riders, and then tried to capture them in action like I was at a cross-country or track meet. I was able to make a handful of images I liked, but my Fuji X100S walking companion is not made for such action photography, and people scooting through a city are not nearly as predictable in their movements as athletes following a race course at designated start times.

As the summer wore on, I increasingly cast my attention toward the controversy the scooters were generating. The Birds had been introduced into an unregulated Wild West of anything goes, so it is not surprising that their quick proliferation was met with considerable pushback.

Consistent with the tech startup culture of “hurry up and break things,” everyone was learning on the fly how to integrate the Birds into a multi-modal transportation system within a multitude of shared spaces. This was true for the Bird riders. It was true for the Bird company and its Bird-herding contractors. It also was true for the rest of us who had no interest in using the scooters ourselves but nonetheless encountered them. One immediate concern was safety. No training or driver’s license was required to rent a scooter: just an app on one’s phone and a digital payment method. In addition to the scooter users themselves, concern came from pedestrians who now found themselves sharing sidewalks with scooters and also having to be on increased alert at street crossings.

A second concern was parking, and this was one that was both readily apparent and eminently photographable. Much of the appeal of the scooters, compared to bike-share options at the time, was that the scooters could be picked up and dropped off anywhere. They didn’t have designated docking stations. Users found available scooters via GPS beacons working through the smartphone app. Likewise, contractors working for Bird picked up abandoned scooters, delivered them to centralized maintenance facilities, and then redistributed freshly recharged scooters to various locations. In this first year of their use, Birds could be found anywhere. A solo Bird perched at the base of a curbside palm tree became a quintessential Santa Monica scene. One also could find flocks of Birds lined up in busy commercial areas—seemingly orderly, but also in the way of pedestrians trying to access their parked cars or perhaps the next bus. Even more striking, to my eye at least, were the isolated Birds that appeared to have flown off course, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, such as half way up the California incline (did the battery suddenly give out?) or on the sidewalk outside some of the most expensive residential properties in California.

As the Birds scattered across the city, Santa Monica residents and businesses responded with signs of displeasure directed against the new nuisance.

Another form of protest was vandalism. I saw Birds discarded in garbage dumpsters or thrown into construction sites. I saw dismembered Birds, headless Birds, lines of Birds knocked over, and also some clever rhyming renegade rebranding of Birds. Perhaps more than any others, these became the images I most strongly associate with 2018, Santa Monica’s Summer for the Birds.