New rules for electric scooters

San Diego places new safety regulations on popular and efficient dockless electric scooters.

Glenn McDonnell / Asst. News Editor / The USD Vista

On Sept. 19, 2018, an otherwise routine meeting of the San Diego City Council’s Committee on Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods was consumed by over an hour of intense public debate about a trend which many USD students and San Diego residents have come in contact with in some way.  

Dockless electric scooters, as they are officially called, have infiltrated San Diego streets by the thousands ever since they were first launched in February, bringing fun for some, but headaches for others.  While some see the new transportation as a convenient and eco-friendly last-mile option, others feel that their pervasiveness on our sidewalks, boardwalks, and in our parks has become both a nuisance and a safety hazard, for riders and pedestrians alike.  

Since last spring, these scooters have been scattered across the USD campus and popular locations for students such as Mission Beach and the Linda Vista area. Students often use the scooters as a way to speed up their commute to class, or to get food down the street. 

The committee’s agenda item was titled “Update From Dockless Scooter Share Providers,” and was intended to be a chance for the council members to hear from tech giants Bird, Lime, and Razor on how they are working to address the city’s mounting safety concerns.  Following the brief presentations from the companies’ respective spokespeople, the hearing was then dominated by an intense hour-long period of public comment from anti-scooter advocates.

Some San Diego residents who went downtown to express their concerns on Wednesday morning were affiliated with industry or advocacy groups, but the majority were individuals with personal complaints about how the scooters have affected their daily lives.

Under California state law, it is illegal to operate any motorized vehicle, including electric scooters, on sidewalks.  Other laws require that riders wear regulation helmets, stay in bike lanes wherever possible, and maintain a 15 mph speed limit on the road. 

Junior David Hunt has seen a lot of people riding without helmets on sidewalks and doesn’t believe that enforcement of these requirements is realistic.  

“I know you’re technically supposed to have a helmet on, but I really don’t see how it would be possible to stop and ticket everyone who’s breaking the rules,” Hunt said.  “Sure it’s not safe but I don’t know how it can possibly be controlled.” 

San Diego Police Department Detective Sgt. Leonard Flake testified that the department has, to date, handed out 190 citations for sidewalk riding, 58 for riding with a passenger, and 66 for riding without proper license.  

Downtown resident and self-described pedestrian advocate Jonathan Freeman put numbers to the enforcement problem Hunt and others have been noticing.  During his allotted time, Freeman claimed to have survey results indicating that 100 percent of riders ride without helmets and that 75 percent of them ride on sidewalks.  

Whether these numbers are accurate, the number of violators who receive citations and fines is miniscule compared to the thousands of rides reported by both of the two major scooter providers so far this year.  

This past April, San Diego assemblyman Heath Flora introduced a bill which separated “stand up electric scooters,” like Birds or Limes, from other “motorized scooters” for regulatory purposes. 

Wednesday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed and chartered the bill into law, effectively making it legal in California to ride without a helmet on the sidewalk, so long as the rider is at least 18 years of age on a street with no available bike lanes.  

While these changes certainly legalize much of the scooter activity at the state level, the law allows local jurisdictions to enforce their own regulations.  

Whatever the legal status of the scooters, there’s more to Birds than injured pedestrians and traffic violations and safety concerns.

Sophomore Chris Collins started using the Bird scooters last year as a way to get around the beach every once in a while, but has since started making some money off of the scooter enterprise.  

“I noticed at the top of my app something about becoming a ‘charger,’ which is basically an independent contractor role,” Collins said.  “If you apply to do it they send you three of the charging devices to get started and then you go out and look for scooters that need to be charged.”

The company offers different levels of compensation for successful hunting, charging, and repositioning of the scooters based on how long the scooters have remained unused.  

“If you find one in plain sight, the bird will probably show up on the map as green and pays only five dollars, but if it’s red, it could be in a bush or a ravine somewhere and could pay up to twenty-five per scooter charged,” Collins said.  

Casual employment opportunities such as Collins’s were touted by both Bird and Lime during last week’s city council hearing as one of several ways in which their enterprise has been benefiting the San Diego community.  

The Senior Affairs Manager for Bird claimed that an excess of $20 million in earnings has gone to a workforce of 4,600 chargers and repair mechanics ever since the February launch.  

Both scooter providers also emphasized the positive environmental impacts which electric scooter usage has brought about for the San Diego region in recent months.

Lime’s spokeswoman claimed that the use of the scooters as an alternative to driving fuel-powered vehicles has spared the atmosphere over one million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution in 2018.  Bird claimed 2.2 million pounds of carbon emissions avoided so far in 2018, along with a pledge to account for a quarter of San Diego’s emissions reduction goal of 43 million pounds by the year 2020.  

Despite these alleged benefits to both the environment and the economy, many of the City Council members echoed some of the concerns and frustrations of the residents.  

Whether city officials follow other cities and choose stricter regulations, or continue their laissez-faire approach remains to be seen.