Electric Scooter Rage in West Hollywood

Santa Monica announced today that it has made deals with the two biggest electric scooter companies already on a roll on its streets. Lime and Bird will be joined by Lyft and Uber, new competitors in this marketplace, in a program that begins next month.

Most of L.A. County has been grappling with how to regulate scooters for upwards of a year, and the major issues are virtually the same everywhere: riding on sidewalks and/or without a helmet, both of which are illegal; reckless riding that’s created a whole new category of accidents and the callous ways renters deposit their scooters when they’re done riding, anywhere and everywhere, often with a total disregard for the property and safety of everyone else.

Santa Monica was the first to take the bull by its horns, as it also was the first community to be inundated with this new mode of transit, and based on what I have seen, riding a scooter on the sidewalk is not the issue it is elsewhere, because sidewalks in Santa Monica are used by pedestrians to a greater extent and they have exercised force majeure to get most of the scooters onto the street where they belong.

West Hollywood has had a tougher time regulating them in every respect, for reasons that are in part due to the geographical reality of being situated in the middle, squeezed in on all sides by Beverly Hills, Hollywood and the City of Los Angeles, and a motorized vehicle of any kind is able to scoot in and out of Weho by crossing the city’s countless borders that zig zag in many directions. At the get go, riders on electric scooters had their way with Weho and they still use and abuse it, by riding on sidewalks and treating it like a dumping ground- rentals are strewn everywhere, once riders are done. Truth be told, there are still plenty of bicyclists, skateboarders, those who ride other-wheeled contraptions, not to mention jaywalkers, all of whom bend the rules and/or break the law with impunity.

Lime had been the most egregious transgressor of the commercial outfits, when it launched a pilot program in West Hollywood, without permission or even conferring with the City Council, which then voted to ban all electric shared scooters, as a retaliatory gesture, but partially as waving a flag of surrender, since there aren’t enough officers to patrol and ticket scofflaws. Weho residents are able to own and ride their own scooters, as long as they abide by the law, and while it has so far rejected a ride sharing program, it isn’t feasible to prevent commercially shared scooters from entering and exiting West Hollywood from its adjoining three towns….this is the lot of being stuck in the middle, and in its earliest incarnation, Weho was nothing more than a thoroughfare between Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

West Hollywood may hang tough, and stick to its ban, or follow Santa Monica's lead, or decide to wait for Los Angeles to generate its own set of rules, at which point, Weho might consider installing designated drop off locations, then confiscate any scooter found parked elsewhere. This specialized pound would be a revenue stream and likely would prompt rental companies to get a deposit from its riders…once there are fines in place, riders are likely to make a better go of following someone else's better judgment about how they must behave.

It also may be time to consider requiring businesses to be the hall monitors of their adjoining sidewalks, to make sure riders are moved off the curb, as businesses already pool their resources for extra security, at least, there had been a private guard who was paid by a collective of commercial interests on a stretch of Santa Monica Blvd a few years ago…but it doesn’t seem feasible to stop what is likely to be a sensible trend that’s here to stay…an economically and environmentally friendly mode of transportation, that has the potential to be tailor made for this specific place and time.