San Mateo officials review a brief ban on electric scooters

After nearly two years of piloting a bicycle-sharing program with Social Bicycles, city officials in May approved a contract with the San Mateo-based startup LimeBike to deploy up to 300 bicycles and e-scooters in the city. Though the pilot with Social Bicycles was deemed a success, the shift in charging infrastructure required when the company switched from operating blue bicycles called “Bay Bikes” to a red, electric model dubbed “JUMP Bikes” proved to be a logistical challenge for the city.

Though the option to provide e-scooters among its fleet was included in LimeBike’s contract to provide a dockless bike share operation in the city, Kleinbaum said the startup agreed at staff’s request not to deploy e-scooters on San Mateo streets and focus on a smooth rollout of its bike-share services.

But with several other operators inquiring about the opportunity to provide e-scooters in San Mateo and a growing number of news stories about injuries and operational issues related to them, Kleinbaum said officials felt compelled to enact a 90-day ban on the commercial operation of e-scooter businesses in the city so they could further study the technology and its effects.

“It’s intended to be a temporary ban for us to take a pause and learn … it’s not intended to be anything permanent or in any way a statement of the city’s opposition to scooters,” she said, noting there has been a lot of press about e-scooters with issues such as damaged brakes and batteries or that are left in the public right-of-way on city sidewalks. “We just need the time to work through those.”

Though city staff has received a handful of complaints from residents about LimeBike’s bicycles being left in residential neighborhoods or on narrow sidewalks, officials are hopeful the bike-share program is offering residents a much-needed transportation option allowing them to travel the last mile between a transit hub to their destinations, said Andrea Chow, a city sustainability analyst. She said LimeBike has logged some 6,000 trips each month on the close to 300 bicycles the company has deployed in San Mateo.

Acknowledging the extent to which bike-share models have developed in recent years, Chow said scooter technologies may also change significantly and noted officials are focused on learning as much as they can about the impact and potential hazards e-scooters may present.

“Bikes are an important component of addressing congestion and traffic … we’d love to see it as a successful model for the last-mile challenge for our community,” she said. “For scooters … it’s a very new technology and so we’re trying to understand how that will fit in.”

Chow said a permit program for e-scooters would likely be the mechanism the city would use to allow commercial scooter businesses to operate in San Mateo and could provide guidelines for safe riding practices, data sharing and customer services. She added LimeBike representatives attended the city’s Sustainability and Infrastructure Commission meeting Wednesday during a discussion of the temporary ban and were understanding of the city staff’s desire to study an e-scooter rollout. Chow said commissioners also supported the temporary ban, which is up for review at the City Council’s Monday meeting.

Kleinbaum said staff is also planning to assess the bike-share program the city is piloting with LimeBike with a community survey to be distributed in the spring of 2019. Together with an evaluation of a possible permit program the city could implement, she hoped staff would have more information on these technologies before the expiration of the LimeBike pilot in May.

The council meets 7 p.m. Nov. 19 at City Hall, 330 W. 20th Ave.

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