What can Denver do to make rentable e-scooters and e-bikes safer for riders, pedestrians and everyone else?
That’s the question Denver City Council members will take up Monday when Councilmember Chris Hinds presents his vision for a new set of scooter rules.
His hope: Spark discussion, and get policy passed before Denver renews its contracts with Lime and Bird, which run the city scooter fleets.
A few of Hinds’ ideas:
- Mandatory sidewalk riding technology that limits where people can ride and how fast they can go on sidewalks.
- Mandatory dock zones where scooters must park, instead of allowing people to leave them blocking sidewalks and more.
- Education about the rules and reporting about crashes and rule violations
He also wants council to discuss sobriety tests, ID requirements, and fines for riding and parking in the wrong place or violating the speed limit.
The ideas are in their early stages, but Hinds says city and company officials sound interested.
Cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC have recently passed new regulations on scooters. Denver, as he sees it, needs to catch up. His residents are regularly demanding it.
Scooter debate is nothing new in Denver.
Micromobility drama has raged across the city since Lime surprised the city’s transportation department by dropping off dockless electric scooters on the city’s sidewalks without any sort of plan back in 2018 — a move that led to this cranky tweet from the city’s public works department at the time:
“No, @limebike did not work with us on this launch. We were not notified of their plans to deploy in our community today until a couple of days ago. We are concerned about the use, placement, & quantity of these scooters operating on Denver's sidewalks where we see a lot of peds.”
The city may have grumbled, but the scooters came anyhow.
The city has seen more than 23 million scooter rides since 2018 — nearly half of those trips replacing cars, according to a presentation Hinds will deliver to the committee.
In the years since, Denver lawmakers have been figuring out how to handle all the problems scooters have brought: blocked sidewalks, injured pedestrians and scooter-ers in hospitals or worse.
In 2018, the city issued an order threatening to remove any scooters Lime and Bird left in the public right of way. At other times, they were treated like toys and mandated to stay on the sidewalks, Hinds said. Later, they were treated like bikes and banned from the sidewalks in most instances.
Hinds has been talking about the issue since at least 2022 and initially presented ideas for this round of scooter reforms over the summer.
Scooters bring serious issues to the city.
When improperly parked, they block pedestrians and make it virtually impossible for people using wheelchairs to get from Point A to Point B.
Last year, Denver Health alone reported 1,962 scooter-related incidents. The average cost per visit: $19,419.59.
On average, the hospital was seeing more than five scooter-related visits a day – higher than in previous years.
The highest number of ER visits take place on Saturdays and Sundays between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.
