More than four years after Lime brand scooters first appeared on Statesboro’s streets and sidewalks, the city’s elected officials are proposing to regulate rental scooters and rental bikes, but not prohibit them.

That either an outright ban or regulations were possible emerged during two recent mayor and council work sessions that included reports from the planning consultant firm TSW about the ongoing creation of a unified development code, or UDC, for Statesboro. This regulatory rewrite was launched mainly to update Statesboro’s zoning, subdivision and sign ordinances.

After Caleb P. Racicot, a principal planner with TSW, reported April 18 that Statesboro is one of only a few Georgia cities where rental scooters are present and that some cities have banned them outright, several council members said they would oppose a ban. But those same council members, particularly District 2’s Paulette Chavers, District 3’s Venus Mack and District 5’s Shari Barr, said they believe some regulation is needed.

“I’m thinking the concern is we want students to still be able to ride, or anybody who needs a less expensive way to get around, but how can we regulate it to make it safer and less hazardous … and the use of the scooters so that they’re not left all over,” Barr said.

Racicot reported back during the Tuesday afternoon, May 16, work session, where drafting the UDC was again one of several topics, with “shareable mobility devices,” now listed as a special subtopic. 

“You may recall at our last work session we had proposed just getting rid of (rental electric scooters) in the city, and several council members had concerns about that, so what we wanted to do was to really put out several options for the council and mayor’s consideration,” Racicot said.

Four ‘options’

His slideshow, which included rental bicycles as well as scooters as potential objects of the city government’s actions, gave these four options:

1. Allow them everywhere, without standards.

2. Allow them everywhere, with some standards.

3. Prohibit them everywhere.

4. Allow them in some places, with standards.

Racicot noted that Option 1 would a “do nothing” approach, keeping things as they are.

“Now, I know I’m not supposed to have an opinion, but I think that whatever you do you should adopt some sort of standards to protect the city from some of the liability associated with these devices,” he said after mentioning Option 2.

Again noting that “there are very few places in Georgia that actually allow these,” Racicot said he had looked at the ordinances of some cities that regulate rental scooters and bikes.

The regulations commonly include a licensing requirement, with the rental companies obtaining a permit from the city for their scooters or bikes to operate on city right of ways. Another common requirement is for the companies to carry liability insurance, which he said would help protect the city.

Fees, limits on the number of scooters, and restrictions on where they can be stored or parked are elements of some of the ordinances. Operational standards can include reporting requirements, such as companies having to periodically file a report on all accidents. The ordinances typically include a termination clause so that the city can cancel a rental company’s license, he said.

Chavers said she referred Option 2, still allowing the scooters to operate anywhere in Statesboro, but with some standards.

Mack at first said she was interested in Option 2 or Option 4, with Option 4 meaning restricting the area where the scooters can be used.

“I do understand what everybody is saying, we do not want to see these scooters downtown, just laying around,” she said. “That’s not a good look for the city. It’s not a good look on campus, either. But I do understand that these students do not have a way to get around. Some of these kids don’t have cars, they don’t have licenses. … So I’m definitely against taking them all the way away.”

But increasing Georgia Southern University students’ access to and interest in downtown Statesboro has been a goal of the city’s leaders. So, after the District 4 council member, John Riggs, said he would “love to see a hundred of them on these scooters coming downtown,” Mack agreed that she was really for Option 2, and did not want to restrict the scooters’ area of travel.

That riders – often students – leave the electric scooters at businesses and in the middle of sidewalks has been a topic of comments at City Hall since soon after the machines first arrived in town.

“The problem with those scooters is there’s no docking station, so they just dump them wherever. It’s almost like rental litter. …,” the District 1 member, Phil Boyum, said during the April work session. “You don’t do that with rental cars, you know. You don’t see Enterprise (saying), ‘Just park it wherever.’”

Safety concerns

The officials also referred to safety concerns, but no data on the number of accidents involving the scooters was reported during the recent work sessions.

However, the tragic death of Tormenta FC 2 soccer player Carter David Payne, 20, was noted during the April session by City Manager Charles Penny. Payne, from Phoenix, Arizona, had been out with friends to a bar and a restaurant and was riding a Lime scooter along or across Fair Road in Statesboro when he was struck by an unidentified motor vehicle shortly before 1:30 a.m. on July 9, 2022. The hit-and-run remains unsolved.

Mayor Jonathan McCollar said he also favors regulation but would not want to see the scooters banned. Some people are riding them to work, he said, reporting that he saw one parked at the UPS center, which is near Ogeechee Tech’s campus and more than four miles from Georgia Southern’s.

“But we’ve got to have some standards,” McCollar said.

Students with disabilities have expressed concerns about dropped scooters being an obstacle on sidewalks, he noted.

The mayor said he liked the permitting or licensing and insurance requirement aspects of a potential ordinance and that other details would have to be figured out.

Council members suggested using another locality’s ordinance as a model and making changes specifically for Statesboro.

Racicot recommended looking at regulations adopted by the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven and by the city of Atlanta, with Brookhaven’s rules, he said, being more straightforward and Atlanta’s more complicated.  Athens-Clarke County, home of the University of Georgia, wouldn’t be a model, since its council enacted a ban on the rental scooters in 2020.

Lime’s website currently lists Statesboro as the only Georgia city with the company’s scooter service.  Another company, Bird Global, operates electric rental scooters in Atlanta, especially in the Georgia Tech and Georgia State University areas.

If developed further as part of the unified development code, the scooter and bike regulations could be presented with the rest of the UDC draft at public information meetings slated for June 13 and July 10. A tentative timeline suggests the council could hold a first reading vote on the UDC July 18, followed by final adoption Aug. 1.