Charlotte leaders worry about e-scooter safety. Here’s why they won’t regulate them.
Charlotte won’t impose local regulations on the electric scooters that have become ubiquitous in uptown and surrounding neighborhoods, instead waiting for statewide rules that are expected from the legislature.
The dockless e-scooters — which users rent by smartphone app and can leave wherever they want when they’re done — will continue to operate on city streets with no changes for now.
Staff told the Charlotte City Council’s Transportation & Planning Committee on Monday that pilot rules, which allow 400 e-scooters each from Bird and Lime, will remain in place. The scooters have proliferated in cities across the U.S. over the past year, confounding local officials trying to deal with the influx of silent, electric two-wheelers zipping along sidewalks and side streets at up to 20 mph.
“It kind of reminds me of what it must have been like when automobiles started traveling streets,” said Assistant City Manager Danny Pleasant. “It was pretty disruptive. There weren’t any laws to govern car use.”
Instead of passing new, local rules about where riders can go, whether they must wear helmets or how fast they can ride, for example, the City Council will see what the General Assembly does. Staff said at least one e-scooter company has already started lobbying legislators. Local officials fear that if Charlotte passes strict rules about scooters, they’ll be overruled by state lawmakers in Raleigh.
That’s what happened in 2015, when the city struggled for more than a year over how to regulate new ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft vs. traditional taxi firms.
The taxi companies, and some on the City Council, wanted more rules on background checks for drivers, pricing and permitting than Uber and Lyft required. The General Assembly ultimately passed uniform state regulations that allowed Uber and Lyft to operate as they had been, as long as the company conducted its own background checks on drivers and had their cars inspected annually.
“We tried to have local legislation and the state said no, we’re going to regulate it,” said Mayor Pro Tem Julie Eiselt. “So it took it completely out of our hands.”
Other cities have taken a harder line on e-scooters than Charlotte. This month, Durham enacted rules requiring the companies to pay $1,000 for a permit, $100 per scooter and $50 each time the city has to move a scooter out of the right-of-way. Raleigh is considering rules that would bar scooters from sidewalks and regulate where and how they can be parked. Nag’s Head, in the Outer Banks, banned them outright.
Charlotte City Attorney Bob Hagemann cautioned council members against putting in place rules like those enacted in Durham.
“We’re just as likely to provoke something negative from the legislature pushing back against that,” he said. “I think the staff’s recommendation is let’s keep on keeping on with what we’ve been doing.”
Since the e-scooters debuted on Charlotte streets in May — without the city’s permission, in a move that rankled local leaders — Bird and Lime have become wildly popular. Riders logged more than 140,000 trips on the 800 or so scooters in Charlotte during August. That number dipped slightly in September, to about 120,000 rides, driven in part by Hurricane Florence, which prompted Bird and Lime to take their e-scooters off the streets.
They’ve rapidly outpaced shared bikes. The number of shared bike rides dropped to under 20,000 in September, despite almost twice as many shared bikes as e-scooters available on Charlotte streets.
Scooters are already defined as “vehicles” under North Carolina law, Hagemann said. That means they must follow the standard rules of the road: Go the right way on streets, obey traffic signs and signals and yield to pedestrians. Also, no drinking and scooting. It’s still unclear whether scooters meet the state’s definition of “motor vehicles,” however. That would require them to be tagged with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and ban them from sidewalks.
Hagemann said the legislature could take similar steps to how they treated Segways in the early 2000s, which were specifically exempted from motor vehicle laws in North Carolina to allow them in cities and on sidewalks.
Safety campaign
The e-scooters cost $1 to unlock and 15 cents per minute to ride. People known as “juicers” pick the scooters up at night, charge their batteries and redistribute them for riders in the morning.
Most of the concerns about e-scooters have centered around safety. Riders rarely wear helmets, and pedestrians have complained that they fear being run over by the scooters when they’re on sidewalks.
“We hear a lot about not yielding right of way to pedestrians,” said Dan Gallagher, Charlotte Department of Transportation planning manager.
But the scooters have plenty of support, as evidenced by their sky-high ridership. Advocates see the scooters as an alternative to cars for many short rides. They’re also viewed as a new tool to encourage transit ridership by helping people who want to take the rail or bus to go the “last mile” from the transit stop to their destination.
There haven’t been any fatalities reported in Charlotte as a result of the scooters, but council members are still worried. Council member Larken Egleston said he saw a scooter with two people on it being ridden on Interstate 277, while council member Tariq Bokhari witnessed a wreck uptown in which a woman was seriously injured on a scooter near the Transportation Center.
In September, Bokhari said the scooter hit an oncoming vehicle while going the wrong way down a one-way street. He called the crash “one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen.”
But Monday, Bokhari said more safety regulations wouldn’t have stopped that crash.
“There was nothing we could have done other than make scooters gone from Charlotte to prevent that,” he said.
Gallagher said the city would start a safety campaign to educate riders about the rules and emphasize that they need to be followed. They’ll look to work with Bird and Lime.
Council member Braxton Winston said the city needs to go further than looking at a specific business model. He called for the city to plan for a future when electric scooters are much more widespread, with their own lanes and transportation network.
“We’ve got to think of a place where everyone will have a scooter, regardless of whether they’re renting or owning,” he said.
This story was originally published October 22, 2018 at 2:37 PM.