A San Diego City Council committee on Wednesday endorsed updated regulations for dockless scooters and bikes as the city seeks to crack down on unsafe riding and parking habits.
Under the new rules, scooters could only be parked in designated parking areas off the sidewalk. Companies would also have to move illegally-parked scooters within an hour or risk the devices being impounded. Right now, companies have three hours to move them.
Ahmad Erikat of the city's Sustainability and Mobility Department told the council's Active Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that more designated scooter parking would be added across the city.
"We're taking a data-driven approach," Erikat said. "So we'll be tackling the areas where we currently see ridership, and then we have candidate locations for almost every community. And we'll be reaching out to the council offices with these plans once we get to that point."
The committee voted unanimously to recommend approval of the new rules to the full City Council.
The city is simultaneously going through a competitive selection process that will limit the number of scooter or bike sharing companies, though it has not indicated how many will be allowed to remain. Officials expect to choose which companies can stay in the city by July.
Dockless scooters and bikes exploded in popularity in San Diego in early 2018 after the City Attorney's Office deemed them legal. Former Mayor Kevin Faulconer initially took a light touch to regulating the devices before adopting a host of rules in May 2019.
Those rules included a prohibition on riding motorized scooters on sidewalks, and later, a total ban of the devices on the boardwalk from Mission Beach to La Jolla. The updated rules will require companies to automatically detect when a scooter is on a sidewalk and slow its speed to a slow walking pace.
"When these things arrived in San Diego with no rules or regulations in our laws, it was a mess," said Councilmember Jen Campbell. "The vast use of them proved their popularity, but it also showed the need for a regulatory framework."
Scooters all but disappeared from San Diego at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, though one operator, Lyft, maintained a scooter presence primarily for essential workers, according to city staffers. The devices began to reappear in 2021, and there are currently an average of about 6,000 scooters deployed in the city each day.
