Getting slapped up-side the head by an angry pedestrian — as Eric Lazzari was while riding a scooter downtown Denver — isn’t the only way dockless electric scooters are causing headaches in Denver.
They crowd the sidewalks where they are parked awaiting customers or clog the right-of-way where they get left by riders not following the rules.
The motorized scooters move too fast for the sidewalk, but are banned from bike lanes and the roadway by law.
Helmets aren’t readily available for riders, most of whom have no experience riding the machines when they insert a credit card and zip off either for fun or for serious transportation needs. Accordingly there has been an increase in scooter related injuries.
So, are these devices that were dropped on our city with little notice by profit-making entities worth the headache?
We certainly hope so. Because the little lime-green nuisances hold the potential to overcome some of Denver’s biggest transit woes — getting folks over that last-mile, first-mile hurdle that discourages them from getting out of their single-occupancy vehicle and using transit.
Many things keep two-thirds of commuters in their cars alone while they drive to and from work in Denver — speed, convenience, the need to transport children or stop at a grocery store, the cost of transit, parking problems at rail or bus stations and a sense that riding bikes (or scooters) is unsafe in Denver. Not to mention the incompatibility of riding in dress clothes or adverse weather.
Dockless electric bikes and scooters can alleviate some of those impediments.
The city is working on it with a Ditch Your Car pilot program that offers riders pre-paid cards to access these unconventional modes of transportation.
Dedicated parking spaces for the dockless devices are being painted at transit stops, and city officials were admirably quick in developing a Dockless Mobility Pilot Permit Program and using public works right-of-way enforces to keep abandoned devices from clogging our sidewalks.
But much more needs to be done in the way of safety.
Doctors at both Porter Adventist Hospital and Rose Medical Center report an uptick in injuries related to the devices, and all it takes is one inexperienced rider zipping through traffic, or a driver distracted by a cell phone for this experiment to turn fatal.
All of this is to say, the city should proceed with caution.
Yet, perhaps the greatest solution to all of these issues is creating more dedicated bike lanes, and a corresponding change in the law to allow motorized bikes and scooters to operate in those lanes.
Commuters are more likely to get out of their cars if they feel safe, and cyclists or scooter riders are safest in dedicated lanes. If these soon-to-be-in-the thousands of motorized scooters and bikes turn out to be as popular as the companies investing in them think they will be, it’ll be one more reason to invest transit dollars on bike lanes instead of widening roads.
In November Colorado voters have the opportunity to approve Proposition 110, a sales tax increase that would fund billions in state-wide transportation projects but also will direct money to the municipal level for roads, bridges, bike lanes, and transit. For Denver it could mean $846 million over the next 20 years, and that’s in addition to the $431 million voters approved in 2017 for the mobility portion of the Elevate Denver bonds.
It’ll take money and ingenuity to dull Denver’s collective transportation migraine.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
