About 1500 e-scooters were available for hire in Melbourne as part of a two-year trial, but they have been the subject of a flood of complaints, from blocking footpaths to endangering pedestrians.
City of Melbourne officers initially recommended e-scooters be permitted to remain with a range of measures to rein in bad behaviour, but the council is now expected push for a ban at the meeting.
Neuron’s Australian general manager, Jayden Bryant, criticised the sudden U-turn and said his company had been in discussions with the council for weeks about how to optimise the city’s e-scooter program.
“It is very odd that a tabled proposal for the introduction of new e-scooter technology can change to become a proposal for a ban in just one day,” he said.
“If the recommendations provided by council officers were adopted, it would make the city’s e-scooter program the most tightly regulated in the world.”
Bryant said thousands of people relied on e-scooters, which boosted Melbourne’s economy, and the company had invested significantly in new technology, including cameras to detect and prevent footpath riding.
The e-scooters have become a hot topic ahead of the upcoming October council elections with Arron Wood, who is running for Lord Mayor at the October elections, and Reece scheduling competing press conferences on the topic outside the Town Hall ahead of the council meeting.
Reece cancelled his press conference, but Wood went ahead and warned that while he proposed a ban on e-scooters in the Hoddle Grid last week, the sudden change by the council meant the e-scooter companies were considering legal action.
“Mr Reece needs to guarantee that not a single rate payer dollar will be going to these e-scooter companies in compensation for this failure of leadership,” he said.
Royal Melbourne Hospital emergency medicine director Mark Putland said he would have supported the original motion focused on improving safety, but there was a strong argument for a ban.
He said the large mix of pedestrians, trams and road vehicles in the CBD, together with restaurants, nightclubs and pubs, made the use of e-scooters more risky, especially when drinking was involved.
He suggested geo-blocking certain high-risk zones within the Hoddle Grid.
“Smart things can be done without losing the utility of e-scooters altogether,” Putland said.
E-scooter injuries cost the Royal Melbourne more than $2 million in 2022, the first year of the e-scooter trial. Putland estimated this would now be $4 million a year with their use in full swing.
A notification sent to e-scooter users by Neuron today.
He said wrist fractures, facial and dental injuries, brain damage and even deaths had resulted from e-scooter use, mostly in young patients.
Stan Capp, president of CBD residents’ group Eastenders, has made a submission to speak at the meeting and will call on the council to ban the hire e-scooters.
“Every resident I know has had an unpleasant interaction with commercial e-scooters, and many fear that they will be the next victim to poor behaviour,” he said.
“The trial has been a failure from everything except possibly financial. While City of Melbourne may have pocketed over $1 million, the operators have potentially made super-profits if their data are to be believed.”
Capp said Lime and Neuron had been unable to remedy poor behaviour by e-scooter users, and it was “optimistic in the extreme” to expect police to enforce the volume of breaches.
“Whether it be placing pedestrians and other road users at risk, not wearing helmets, not riding on footpaths, not riding while intoxicated, not double or even triple-dinking, or not obeying road rules such as traffic lights, the operators failed to materially address these issues and their opportunity to do so over 2½ years means that the trial has not passed its proof of concept.”
Nicholas Wright, whose polling company Sentio was commissioned by Lime to assess public perceptions of e-scooters in Melbourne, said 80 per cent of people supported the scheme as a way to help solve the city’s transport problems.
“The overall sentiment was to fix the issues, regulate them, make them safer, but not outright ban them,” he said.
Wright said the proposed ban was “a classic populist move”.
“It’s taking on an imagined grievance that will appeal to a rowdy minority but does nothing to solve the problem of getting Melbourne moving and increasing transport choice.”
Associate Professor Alexa Delbosc, of the Monash Institute of Transport Studies, said e-scooters played a role in Melbourne’s transport system and there would be fewer accidents with pedestrians if the council provided more separated bicycle infrastructure.
“E-scooters provide connections across the inner city in places where there are no convenient public transport connections, when the trams are packed full, or when the trains aren’t running at all,” she said.
The hire e-scooters also operate in the City of Port Phillip and City of Yarra. Both councils said they did not have any plans to ban the e-scooters.
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