San Jose may start cracking down on use of scooters

In response to the growing number of scooters that have been darting around downtown sometimes bumping pedestrians, San Jose officials are cobbling up a plan to target their use.

“This has garnered a lot of interest,” Ryan Smith, a transportation specialist for the city, acknowledged at a community meeting Thursday evening at City Hall.

The city is considering 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.

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.

San Jose resident Doug Smith said he fell and

hurt his shoulder after being hit by a scooter speeding outside Martin Luther King Jr. Library in March.

“I would like to see some enforcement out of concern for pedestrians,” he said.

To respond to the surge in scooter ridership, San Jose has reached out to a number of different entities for advice, including cities such as Seattle and Washington, D.C., which have also grappled with scooter regulations. The city is also working with the San Jose Police Department on a plan to, among other things, curb riding on sidewalks.

“Many other cities are facing the same challenges,” Ryan Smith said.

In addition to paying operating fees, Smith said 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.

Warren Ahner, who works in Japantown and was one of two dozen people to speak at the meeting, said scooters have made it easy to zip downtown for lunch. Other people seem to be using the scooters to head toward his area, he said, noting the coffee shop Roy’s Station is now teeming with scooter riders.

But several people expressed reservations about limiting the number of scooters in the city, as San Francisco has done, and urged officials to instead

let market forces play out.

Others called for bike lanes to be improved before any rule against riding on the sidewalk is enforced, saying they don’t feel safe in the street. And a couple of people who appreciate the affordability of scooters said they fear imposing fees on companies would ultimately mean more expensive rides for scooter users.

For now, the proposals are just a loose possible framework for handling the scooters. This summer, Smith and other city officials will gather feedback from residents and then refine their suggestions before presenting them to the City Council in September for actual implementation the following month.

Nanci Solomon uses the scooters to get from her home near San Pedro Square to her job at San Jose State University. And while she supports some regulation, she says the city should ultimately welcome innovation.

“I think we should embrace these things,” Solomon said. “Look how popular they are.”