On Development: Economic models Spin-ning out of control

The narrow bicycle lanes between parked cars and speeding ones are too-often littered with Veo and Spin scooters and bikes. 

I hate to sound like a 70-year-old white guy (though I will become one next week), but it’s not my age that triggers frustration as I swerve around scooters dumped in the bike lanes. I don’t think the users of bike-share and scooter services are entitled brats. More likely, they are simply not thinking about other users of the public right-of-way.

Kind of like the DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub drivers who prefer to park in the middle of the bike lane instead of taking an extra 15 seconds to back into a nearby parking space. This applies to Amazon drivers, too.

Personal convenience can come at significant social cost.

It’s amazing that we can pull out our pocket-phones and order some random consumer good from a multi-national corporation that will – with its vast number of warehouses, railcars, trucks and vans – get it to our easily accessed front porch in a day or two. Likewise with our meals: Our phones will link us to a commercial kitchen, which will connect with a piece-work courier, who will pick up the meal, wheel it to our house, and take a picture of it on our doorstep.

We can share the meal with our friends, who can grab a bicycle or scooter from a corner corral or, more likely, the middle of some sidewalk or bike lane, and scoot on over to our place. 

Very convenient. Like magic. But the food preparers have to adjust their preparation and pricing to ensure that the couriers get their share of the pie (or chicken wings). Then the distant, invisible app creators get their share, too – often causing the local restaurants to shrink their own profit margins a bit to reach this growing segment of the market.

That puts a lot of trucks, cars, and bicycles on the road – but not as many as it would take if everybody drove their own vehicle to the shopping center, chain restaurant, or hip neighborhood.

My ideal would be to reinvent local economies with locally owned markets and restaurants occupying the century-old two- and three-story storefront buildings. Many such buildings are currently rotting while the investor-owners wait for some big developer to buy the corner property, demolish the old building, and construct a huge new mid-rise tower with empty ground-floor commercial space suitable for an Amazon-box cardboard recycling center.

The scooter and bike companies operating in Columbus are based in California: Veo is in Santa Monica and Spin, which will operate here through 2025, is in San Francisco. Amazon’s central Ohio presence exists mostly in the form of giant, ugly warehouses and traffic. The companies put little into Columbus but take a lot of profit out of it.

That’s the way economic development works in Ohio. JobsOhio is a private company that former Ohio Gov. John Kasich created to suck up state dollars, dole out the money to large corporations that decide to locate here, and then claim credit for growth in Ohio. Supporting Ohio-grown companies is not the priority. Fostering and nurturing new Ohio industries is not a priority.

Developing regional or statewide food systems would seem to be a no-brainer for the state. Farmers’ markets and community gardens have very little to do with food systems – they are outside the food system, though they serve a nice function for a slice of the population. More generally, however, much of what is produced here is processed elsewhere and then we buy it back at higher prices. It’s as if we’ve been colonized by outside corporations.

Let’s encourage farmers to diversify their crops and livestock herds – which is good for the soil and environment. Let’s support the expansion of small meat-processing plants. Let’s develop facilities to efficiently aggregate and distribute Ohio meat, produce, and dairy products to school districts and universities around the state, creating new jobs in our cities and rural areas. Let’s promote businesses and industries that reinvest profits in Ohio.

Let’s help local groceries, large and small, grow beyond soft drinks, beer, lottery tickets, and chips. And find entrepreneurs who can develop such products as prepared heat-and-eat meals for sale in stores that are convenient to a growing population in denser, walkable neighborhoods.

By doing so, we can fill vacant storefronts across the city, make neighborhoods more vibrant, keep more of our money recirculating in the local economy, and clear some of the clutter from the bike lanes.

Brian Williams is a retired journalist and planner.