Charlotte could see a sharp spike in e-scooters in 2019

Charlotte could soon see more of the e-scooters that have quickly become ubiquitous on city streets, as the City Council is considering rules that could allow a sharp increase in the personal electric vehicles’ numbers.

The move comes as other cities around North Carolina are taking more steps to curb, tax or even forbid e-scooters from new companies like Lime and Bird that have exploded in popularity nationwide in less than a year. Last month, Charlotteans took e-scooters for about 120,000 rides — an average of nearly 3,900 per day.

“I’m a big fan. I use them even in heels and a dress,” said Mayor Pro Tem Julie Eiselt at the City Council Transportation & Planning Committee meeting Monday. Users have racked up more than 1.5 million miles on e-scooters in Charlotte since May.

Lime and Bird, the two companies providing rent-by-smartphone e-scooters in Charlotte, are still operating under the terms of a pilot program that started in May. In Charlotte, they’re each allowed up to 400 scooters, which users find via GPS on their phones and rent through an app for $1 to start and 15 cents per mile. “Juicers” drive around and pick the scooters up to recharge their batteries and redeploy them around the city each night.

The new rules City Council is set to consider could create “scooter corrals” for parking the electric rides in high-use areas, such as uptown, and could also define areas where riders aren’t allowed on the sidewalks.

And the rules could include much higher caps on the number of e-scooters allowed. One option would be to eliminate the caps entirely and let the companies decide how many e-scooters to provide. Council member Tariq Bokhari said he favors a “dynamic cap,” which would allow the companies to provide as many e-scooters as they want, provided they hit a minimum demand threshold to avoid swamping the cities with unused vehicles.

“I’m a strong advocate of this dynamic cap principle,” said Bokhari. “Have as many scooters as you want, as long as you’re averaging three rides per day.”

The companies are averaging roughly six rides per day on their e-scooters (they don’t always have the full 400 e-scooters they’re allowed on the streets every day). A standard of at least three rides per day would imply about 1,300 e-scooters could be on the streets right now, a number that would rise if demand rose further.

That would be a nearly 63 percent increase over the 800 e-scooters allowed under the current cap.

Such a system could avoid the glut of dockless bikes that briefly flooded Charlotte streets. Mobike and Ofo, two of the four companies that put out dockless bikes (which users also find via GPS and rent through apps on their phone) have now quit the Charlotte market.

In Raleigh, leaders recently approved new rules that will limit the number of e-scooters to 500 per company starting in December. That would cut the number of e-scooters allowed from about 1,400 to 1,000. Raleigh is also charging the companies $300 per e-scooter, while Durham is charging the companies $100 per e-scooter. There’s no such fee in Charlotte.

Meanwhile, Winston-Salem leaders voted last week to ban e-scooters, at least until regulations can be finalized. Crews confiscated the vehicles from city sidewalks, according to news reports.

Charlotte City Council has been reluctant to consider stringent regulations for e-scooters because the General Assembly could block such rules. The city has been burned by such measures several times in recent years, including when the City Council tried to establish local rules for licensing Uber and Lyft and in the aftermath of a local nondiscrimination ordinance for LGBTQ people, which the state overturned.

But some council members said Monday that the city needs to find some way to tax the companies, which use taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

“This isn’t something we should roll over and play dead on,” said Eiselt. “These are our streets and we pay a lot of money to maintain them.”

Another unresolved issue: Safety regulations. The e-scooters can generally go 20 mph (or faster downhill), and riders zip silently along sidewalks and sometimes weave through traffic in congested areas like uptown.

Although no one has been killed riding an e-scooter in Charlotte, such deaths have occurred in other cities, including Washington, D.C. The city started a public safety campaign in November, with Bird and Lime giving away helmets to riders and encouraging them to ride carefully and obey traffic regulations.

“I don’t think that message is getting through, perhaps because there’s no enforcement,” said Eiselt.

Council member Larken Egleston pointed out that the only Charlotte riders wearing helmets are generally in city-sponsored public service announcements about safety.

“I’ve only ever seen one person with one on,” said Egleston.

This story was originally published November 26, 2018 at 1:38 PM.