Scooter rules address ‘utter chaos,’ ready for final approval

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – The city of Indianapolis is one step closer to passing an ordinance that would regulate motorized scooters.

People have been zipping around city streets for weeks on the scooters, and under current regulations, they can go anywhere.

City leaders want to add regulations, but exactly what those regulations look like remained unanswered after Thursday night’s meeting of the Indianapolis Board of Public Works.

The committee focused on other issues, including how the scooter companies doing business in Indianapolis operate.

“It’s literally happened immediately,” said City-County Councilor Jeff Miller. “The audacity of someone to just throw their scooter in a front lawn. We need to find a way to curb this, because it’s going to be chaos. Utter chaos.”

The Board of Public Works grappled with the scooter conversation for more than two hours, opening the floor to both committee member and public comment.

What to do with the motorized scooters that hit the street of Indianapolis this month.

Indianapolis Department of Business & Neighborhood Services proposed an ordinance that would set tighter rules for use of the motorized devices but not put the brakes on scooters altogether.

“The city doesn’t want it to go away,” Miller said. “We just want to know what the rules are.”

Here are some of the biggest stipulations required of scooter providers like Bird and Lime-S under the new proposal:

• A license fee of $15,000 per year, plus $1 a day per device
• Scooters will be required to be parked upright and leave six feet of passage on any public right-of-way (or in an existing bike rack if available)
• An image of a properly parked device must be provided
• Devices may not be parked in streets or alleyways 
• In determining whether to issue the license, the Business and Neighborhood Services Department may consider the extent to which the business has complied with current law

“We don’t have to ban them from Indianapolis but regulate the people who drive them,” said Brian Madison, with the Business and Neighborhood Services Department.

Even after giving committee approval to advance the proposal, councilors had not determined where the scooters will be allowed to legally operate, on sidewalks or streets.

The unresolved issue had both community members and city officials concerned. 

“The initial consideration is about business licensing rather than the immediate public safety aspect of, ‘OK, you have people who could get hit on sidewalks or get hit on the road,’” said Andrew Zeller, an Indianapolis resident.

“I am scared to walk my son, who is 12, on the sidewalk when people, not all of them, but some are rude and fly past you,” Miller said. “I don’t want to wait until a kid is run over for us to go ‘We really should have done something.’”

When asked if the committee needed more time to hash out details, representatives with Lime-S said they would consider shutting down operation of the company’s scooters, but only if Bird shut down as well. 

Bird representatives at the meeting did not comment on whether they, too, would shut down operations to give city officials more time to discuss possible regulations.

City officials said any issues regarding how people use the scooters and where the scooters are allowed to be ridden would be addressed at a later time.     

The proposal is scheduled to be sent to the full City-County Council on July 16.