CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you spend any time around uptown Charlotte, especially on the weekends, then you're familiar with the rentable electric scooters zipping around town.
After making a controversial debut over a year ago, the scooters have remained a popular way to get around the Queen City, particularly in uptown and South End. It wasn't long until safety concerns were raised and new regulations were passed.
In January, the City Council voted 7-3 in favor of new rules that put a speed cap of 15 mph on the scooters, banned two people riding at the same time and barred them from certain streets in uptown. Charlotte isn't alone when it comes to people worried about scooter safety.
The mayor of Nashville, Tennessee is recommending a complete ban on e-scooters after a deadly accident earlier this month. In that crash, police said the man who was killed went into the street and was hit by an SUV. He reportedly had twice the legal amount of alcohol in his system.
“Nashville prides itself in being a friendly and welcoming city for the thousands of tourists visiting us each month, but we must also be a safe city. Based upon what I have witnessed firsthand, the recent influx of scooters in our city is causing us to be less safe and more visually cluttered,” Mayor David Briley wrote to the seven scooter companies operating in the city.
Briley said he received proposed changes but they weren't enough to consider keeping the scooters on Nashville streets.
Briley said he will work with the Metro Legal Director to draft the amendment that would "terminate the existing scooter pilot program, immediately remove all electric scooters from Nashville streets, and direct the Transportation Licensing Commission to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP) within 90 days of the Council's approval of the ordinance."
Briley said he would consider adding back one or two scooter operators in the future to provide a limited number of scooters that meet requirements "for safety and accessibility," which is the purpose of the RFP.