Joe McConnell
The Australian city of Melbourne has banned the rental of electric scooters, officials say they pose unacceptable safety risks.
The city council’s U-turn comes after it first welcomed the scooters in February 2022, saying they would conduct a two-year trial.
Since then, however, hundreds of incidents have sparked public complaints and outrage.
Melbourne’s mayor has said he is “fed up” with bad behaviour from some scooter users.
“Too many people [are] cycling on the sidewalks. People don’t park them properly. They’re overturned, they’re scattered around the city like confetti, like garbage, creating trip hazards,” Nicholas Reece told local radio station 3AW.
Melbourne is only the latest city in the world to remove rental scooters, which can reach speeds of 26 km/h (16 mph), after a short period of operation. The French capital Paris outlawed them last September, with Mr Reece saying he wanted to copy “the Paris option”.
On Tuesday evening local time, city councilors voted 6-4 to ban scooters almost immediately.
Lime and Neuron operators were ordered to remove the scooters within 30 days.
The companies still had six months left on their contracts to operate the vehicles and had been campaigning hard in recent weeks, urging users to petition the council.
Both companies said they have invested significantly in recent months to improve safety and regulations around scooter use, with Neuron installing AI-enabled cameras on the scooters to prevent misuse.
A company spokesperson criticized the city council’s blanket ban on Tuesday, saying the company had begun discussions with city officials to introduce measures such as limiting the use of scooters to less congested areas of the city or establishing designated zones for them.
“This goes beyond the reforms announced by the state government,” Neuron’s Jayden Bryant previously told Australian media.
“It’s very strange that [a different] The proposal presented for the introduction of the new e-scooter technology may turn into a proposal for a ban.”
Since the start of the trial in February 2022, approximately 1,500 Lime and Neuron scooters have been distributed across the city.
Melbourne City Council previously said the scooters had reduced the city’s carbon emissions by more than 400 tonnes and encouraged greater use of public transport.
But there is also growing evidence of the program’s flaws. One of the city’s major hospitals, Royal Melbourne Hospital, released a report in December 2023 that found that about 250 scooter riders presented to its emergency department with injuries in 2022. Most of these involved factors such as intoxication, speeding and failure to wear a helmet.
A hospital spokesperson said e-scooter accidents have even caused deaths and brain damage, with injuries mostly among younger patients.
