Question of the Day - 30 July 2019

Stand-up electric scooters and electric-assist bicycles have suddenly become a big thing in cities around the world, with popularity growing by leaps and bounds.

According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, riders in the U.S. took nearly 40 million trips on rentable scooters in 2018, accelerated by the arrival of e-scooter companies, such as Bird and Lime, that seem to show up in cities unannounced, drop their scooters on the street, encourage riders to sign up for the app, and rent them by the minute.

It costs $1 to unlock the scooters on the app, then around 15 cents per minute to ride. Some scooters must be returned to the same location where they’re picked up; others can be dropped off just about anywhere.

Recently, a handful of cities have taken issue with the e-scooter companies. Milwaukee, Boston, and a number in southern California have either banned them altogether or insisted that they apply for permits. Reno kicked out Lime last March after an uproar over safety concerns about the company’s “surprise rollout” of 100 or so e-scooters in the Midtown neighborhood (some scooters wound up in a scrapyard downtown).

Toward the end of the Nevada Legislature’s biennial session that recently adjourned, Governor Steve Sisolak signed a bill that authorizes local governments to create their own ordinances regulating the use of electric scooters. The bill also requires electric scooter riders to be over the age of 16.

Right afterwards, the City of Las Vegas issued a statement: “We will continue to allow electric scooters to be rented from storefronts where they are checked-out/in from the same location. However, companies that allow scooters to be left anywhere — streets, sidewalks, etc. — have not been licensed.”

In the county, commissioners were in discussions with e-scooter companies about a pilot program in Summerlin, though that didn’t get off the ground, while Henderson has considered a temporary operating agreement with Bird for 500 scooters. But everyone was waiting for what the legislature was going to do before making any final decisions and that happened too recently for anything to change, as far as we know.

One Clark County commissioner reportedly stated that scooters "would never be acceptable on the Strip”; a majority of the injuries have been sustained by riders cruising along on sidewalks.

It remains to be seen how electric bicycles will be dealt with, depending on if they’re determined to be or not to be in the same category as e-scooters.