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San Jose May Start Cracking Down On Rampant Use of Scooters (mercurynews.com)
If you've ever visited San Jose, you may have noticed something rather unusual: there are electric scooters littering the streets. The scooters are placed randomly throughout the city and can be rented by users via an app. They're reportedly bothering pedestrians enough for the city to take notice and consider a number of possible restrictions, "including issuing revocable permits to a limited number of scooter companies such as Lime and Bird, requiring the companies to pay a deposit to cover potential scooter-involved damage to city property, and charging annual fees to operate in the city," reports The Mercury News. From the report: In recent weeks, the city has fielded complaints about people zooming down crowded sidewalks instead of riding in the street and parking scooters in front of driveways or leaving them tipped over outside stores. But the city currently doesn't have any rules governing the relatively new scooter-sharing industry, enabling both the companies and users to operate freely. In addition to paying operating fees, [...] the city wants the companies to provide multilingual customer service at all times, and to commit to addressing problems quickly. And like Ford GoBike -- which currently has an exclusive contract with San Jose to operate a docked bike sharing program in the city -- the city says scooter companies should be required to offer discounts to low-income residents and operate in what it calls "communities of concern."
To understand how and where people are riding scooters, the city says it also wants the companies to share their data, something they so far have been reluctant to part with, at least publicly. Most residents at the meeting seemed supportive of having scooters in San Jose, calling them an easy and environmentally friendly way to commute or run errands quickly.
To understand how and where people are riding scooters, the city says it also wants the companies to share their data, something they so far have been reluctant to part with, at least publicly. Most residents at the meeting seemed supportive of having scooters in San Jose, calling them an easy and environmentally friendly way to commute or run errands quickly.
Why not simply allow people to haul away abandoned and/or illegally parked scooters and sell them for scrap? Of course the scooter companies should be allowed to come by and pick up their property- as long as they pay the same reasonable towing and storage fees that tow companies charge for cars.
This isn't something new. The quantity and technology might be but scooters and bikes have been around for years. When I was in college almost 20 years ago, there were plenty of scooters and bikes all over campus and the campus police regularly confiscated and/or ticketed bikes for being illegally chained to lampposts, trees, etc... Bicycles and scooters had to be parked at the official bikeracks that were in front of each building. I would be surprised if San Jose didn't already have laws on the books saying that bikes must be parked properly. They just need to start enforcing those laws.
After searching, I see that what you guys call "scooter" is in fact motorized skateboards. Around here, "scooter" means "moped".
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Legalese: bicycles are not federally regulated, but there is a technical definition that the CPSC uses when defining them, and that most states use as well.
Now then...
1) In pretty much all US jurisdictions the ONLY non-motor-vehicle device that can be used on public roads is bicycles*, and these electric scooters would not technically qualify as bicycles under the Federal CPSC definition. So they would not be legal for adults to use on public roads, at all...
*(-draft animals and drawn carts and wagons are still legal too, on most US roads but not all roads-)
2) Also in most US jurisdictions, the ONLY powered devices that can be used on sidewalks is mobility devices for assisting the handicapped, and they have their own set of requirements under the Federal ADA regulations. Among those requirements is that the person using them is medically handicapped...
3) The last option is if the scooters were declared as motor vehicles--but for that to happen, they would need to meet the Federal DOT regulations for one class of motor vehicles already defined, and the scooters would need to be issued VIN numbers (a standard format serial number issued by the Federal Dept of Transportation). And since the scooters cannot technically qualify as any class of motor vehicle, they can't do this either.
These scooters are only considered to be "motorized toys", and are only legal to use on private property--just like pocket bikes. Absent any special law to exempt them, they cannot legally be used on public sidewalks OR public roads.
This is also the reason that a few communities had to enact special laws for people to use Segways when they first came out.
Nowadays there are some handicapped people using Segways, and in that instance they could qualify for sidewalk use as in point #2 above.