So how’s it going with all those scooters on Wichita streets?
Is Wichita’s scooter experiment a success?
Not judging from e-mails provided to the members of the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board on Monday night.
About two dozen people have left comments at a city e-mail address and every one was negative: scooters riding on sidewalks, underage riders, riders ignoring traffic signs and signals, scooters scattered around the streets.
“The scooters are an absolute menace and I hope they go away,” read one of the messages. “I am a bicyclist and the City of Wichita has done a fabulous job with our bike paths and then you go ruining them and allowing scooters to be ridden in and around downtown on the bike paths.”
Almost all of the comments were presented to the board without names attached.
“They make our city look trashy, just lying around everywhere, as if the multitude of homeless drug addicts don’t do a good enough job of that,” another resident wrote. “We can see that the City Council is trying to eliminate the use of cars, in the downtown area, by taking away car lanes and replacing with stupid bike lanes and now for allowing these stupid scooters.”
And another: “I am a downtown resident (Lofts at St. Francis). I am very excited about the transformation that is taking place, with all the new development. I have to say, however, that introducing the scooters is a mistake. I would sum it up in one word — Chaos.”
The bike-ped board wasn’t especially bothered by the complaints.
Board member Jane Byrnes said the scooter users and bike riders are allies in helping fulfill the board’s goal, “to slow down cars (and) to make car drivers more vigilant” on downtown streets.
Board member and City Council candidate Christopher Parisho said having to watch out for the scooters reminds motorists that they have to share the streets.
“It was there before the scooters came along that there was a mindset among motor vehicle drivers that they owned the roads,” Parisho said. “And now they’re having to come to the realization that they don’t, which is a good thing as long as nobody gets hurt in the process.”
Scott Wadle, a senior management analyst for the city, presented ridership statistics showing that the scooters are fairly popular.
The scooters started off with approximately 1,300 rides a day, but after a couple of weeks the novelty wore off and they now average about 1,000, he said. As would be expected, the scooters get a lot more use on weekends than weekdays.
The record day for scooting was Aug. 24, with 2,439 trips, according to the ridership data.
Two companies’ scooters — Zagster and Veoride — are operating as a pilot program and will be re-evaluated after a year, Wadle said.
In the meantime, the city makes 15 cents every time a scooter is rented.
With about 50,000 rides so far, the city’s made about $7,500.
While most of the complaints in the board packet were about users not following the rules, several people wrote that the rules are the problem.
“Wake up!,” wrote one resident. “When you were kids, you didn’t dare ride a scooter in the street. Your parents & the police would have arrested/smacked you . . . There are hardly any people on side walks anyway.”
Wrote another: “I haven’t rode one of these scooters but the whole ‘no riding on sidewalks’ thing is absolute bs. The street is way more dangerous. What if a car spun out of control and hit some kid in the road? All kinds of bad.”
More information about scooters in Wichita can be found at wichita.gov/scooters. Feedback can be emailed to bikeped@wichita.gov.
This story was originally published September 10, 2019 at 10:53 AM.
