City-County Council approves second scooter ordinance
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – For the first two weeks in July, electric scooter riders were able to ride all around Indianapolis on sidewalks, streets, and everywhere in between.
That’s because of a state law that went into effect on July 1 that changed the wording, allowing electric scooters to be ridden on sidewalks and greenways, something that a previous ordinance did now allow.
But the City-County Council has passed a second scooter ordinance that is again restricting where you can ride.
Before the new state law went into effect, people in Indianapolis could only ride electric scooters on the street. The council says safety was the main factor in rewriting the ordinance to reinstate those restrictions.
“The state has a very different issue at hand. Marion County is a very different animal than most of the rest of Indiana, so we have to tailor our ordinances accordingly,” said Colleen Fanning, who represents District 2 on the City-County Council.
Other than the wording change, the restrictions are the same. You cannot ride a scooter on a sidewalk or greenway, which includes the canal.
Jennifer Mattei doesn’t ride the scooters, but said she sees them often and would rather them stay on the street.
“They go fast enough to where I have just seen a lot of people almost collide with them. So it is probably better that they stay in a place where people don’t have to jump out of the way to avoid them,” Mattei said.
There are some cities that have outlawed the scooters completely, but Fanning doesn’t see that happening in the near future for Indianapolis.
“I think scooters are a really important part of kind of our transportation mosaic. I am personally a scooter rider, I ride scooters all the time,” Fanning said. “They are a really efficient way to get around if you if you know how to use them safely.”
Safety includes where a scooter is left when the rider is finished using it, and that is an issue many want to see addressed.
“The way that the bikes have their specific docking stations, I think maybe if we did that, that could be a good improvement. Right now they just seem to be cluttered and all over the place,” says Mattei.
“You know, we still haven’t gotten our arms around that. That is the problem that we have had a hard time enforcing,” Fanning said. “Because really it is incumbent upon, first, the user and then the scooter company.”
If you are caught riding on a sidewalk or greenway, rather than in the street, you could face a ticket of up to $20.