Despite the obvious safety risks, the City of Spokane is pushing forward with more Lime scooters

In a strange twist of fate, within 30 days of the City of Spokane announcing Lime scooters are back in Spokane with a new scooter model that promises to be safer, better handling and cheaper to run, a scooter rider was hit and injured on-route to a Shania Twain concert.

This, as Krem 2 reports, this was not the first time a scooter related accident has happened. In 2019 a man was killed on a Lime scooter; a women broke her jaw when the scooter un-expectantly engaged its brakes and in 2020 a man received life threating injuries when he was hit by a car.

Obviously, safety is and should be, the primary concern of local governments who could be liable for granting the use of public right of ways for scooter use. While the city has issued scooter use safety guidelines, they are just that – guidelines.

The scooters are in close proximity to large cars and trucks and riders are at risk of serious injury and death, as history has, unfortunately, shown.

And that doesn’t include the scooters that end up in ditches on the side of the road.

Many local governments that are pushing the benefits of having electric scooters in their downtown areas don’t really understand the overall impact. As with many feel-good policies, the benefits of scooters are frequently inflated while costs are diminished or altogether ignored.

For now, the only benefit of using scooters no one can really argue against is how fun they are for tearing around like you did as a kid. That’s about where it ends, though. Cities and towns should reconsider the total environmental cost and public benefit of scooters before allowing them into our downtown areas as a serious mode of urban travel.

Spokane has now become the latest casualty of another poorly implemented scooter deployment and apparently hasn’t learnt the lessons from its previously failed scooter deployments.

-— Mark Harmsworth is the director of the Small Business Center at the Washington Policy Center. Email him at mharmsworth@washingtonpolicy.org.