Rental scooters and bikes are returning to the streets of Dallas after being banned in 2020 for safety reasons, reported Fox 4.
Dallas plans to license three vendors to provide 500 rental electric scooters and bikes each. New speed and location restrictions will increase the safety of the rental vehicles’ usage throughout the city.
Some areas, such as Deep Ellum, will have programmed boundaries, where geofence technology will automatically reduce the scooter’s speed. Scooter vendors Lime, Bird, and Superpedestrian have this feature.
The new plan for the scooters includes corrals throughout the city, so scooters and electric bikes will not be left lying on sidewalks and streets.
Before the ban, scooters rented out by Uber, Lyft, and Bird could be left anywhere, causing Dallas to be littered with abandoned scooters.
“We are going to be pushing this much-needed transportation mode out into neighborhoods that desperately need them, that maybe didn’t get to see them the first round,” Dallas City Councilmember Omar Narvaez said.
Narvaez, who is also a member of the Dallas Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a meeting Tuesday that he believes the city has learned from past mistakes. It will follow the examples of other cities where scooter rental has been implemented successfully.
“Sometimes it’s nice to follow versus lead,” he said. He admitted that previously the situation may have gotten “a little out of hand in Dallas by having zero rules and zero regulations. But now we’re moving forward, so we have them.”
The city will pick three companies to receive a one-year contract. There will be a “three strikes and you’re out” rule for companies and customers who disobey the regulations.
It is unclear when the electric scooters and bikes will return, but residents and visitors alike can expect to sail city streets “within the next few weeks.”