You see them most everywhere now, the so-called dockless scooters, electric scooters and other two-wheelers available for rent, picked up off the street, ridden around town and then, in most cases, simply abandoned on the sidewalk or alongside the street. They are a big business, a big problem, and they both aid and impede transportation. The challenge is to put them in their place, and there is a solution.

To be more technical, here is the definition of a dockless scooter from an Atlanta law regulating them:

“Shareable Dockless Mobility Device: an electric/motorized or human-powered device that permits an individual to move or be moved freely, is available for rent to the general public for short-term one-way trips without the installation of any infrastructure in the public right-of-way and shall include but not be limited to a bicycle/e-bicycle, scooter/e-scooter and shall exclude any motor vehicle required to be registered with the state, in accordance with state law.”

It's a fast-growing business. Even Uber is into it, with a startup last year, Uber Bike, in San Francisco. Now Lyft has just rolled into town to join the fun with hybrid e-bikes, even as it is in a lawsuit with the transportation authority over what Lyft claims was an exclusive deal.

The always-innovative Uber is offering a new deal in San Francisco and Chicago. For $25 a month you can have discounted Uber rides, free Uber Eats food delivery, and free JUMP bike and scooter rides. Uber bought JUMP Bikes in 2018 for $200 million. Bird, the largest of the e-scooter ride companies, has grown to a value of $1 billion, the fastest any startup has reached that mark. Lime also achieved that value quickly.

There are problems of all kinds everywhere with the dockless scooters. When Bird, Lime and Spin launched in San Francesco in March 2018, without benefit of permits, complaints of improper parking jumped from 624 in the prior six months to almost 2,000 in the six weeks after the new e-scooters appeared. It is likely to get worse for the city because even though the city has kept a tight rein on the e-scooter business, it is expected that the number of e-scooters there will soon double to 2,500 under an expansion program of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency if operators sign up more low-income people for discounted rides.

This invasion of scooters has brought on “scooter rage” in some quarters, with people burying them in the sand so they can't be found and rented, and throwing them into rivers, all of this and more, including examples of the common misuse of scooters, documented in 386 Instagram posts at “Bird Grave Yard.”

While for the average person, navigating around and through the piles of cast aside dockless scooters is largely an inconvenience and an opportunity to utter a few expletives, for those who use assisting devices in walking and those who use wheelchairs, they have become a complete barrier to mobility.

In January, Disability Rights of California brought a class action against San Diego, Bird and Lime under the Americans with Disabilities Act and similar provisions of California law. The complaint begins with:

“This action challenges the failure of the City of San Diego and private companies to maintain the accessibility of the City's public sidewalks, curb ramps, crosswalks and transit stops for people with disabilities, in the face of an onslaught of unregulated dockless scooters. Private scooter companies have been allowed to appropriate the public commons for their own profit, regardless of the impact on the City's residents. Persons with mobility impairments, including people who use wheelchairs or walkers, and people with significant visual impairments are thereby being denied their right to travel freely and safely on our public walkways.”

In late 2018, a group of pedestrians brought a class action against Bird and Lime in Los Angeles, claiming strict products liability, negligence, and public nuisance, among other things, and alleging numerous injuries from tripping over e-scooters carelessly set adrift and the loss of accessibility for those with physical disabilities.

The Atlanta ordinance has extensive restrictions on where dockless scooters can be parked, addressing the need to protect loading zones, vehicle parking, pedestrian and wheelchair access, bus stops, bikeshare stations, signage and traffic control devices, and “emergency service infrastructure,” such as fire hydrants and defibrillators. What do you think the chances are that dockless scooter riders carefully read, and scrupulously follow the mandates of, the 19-page, single-spaced ordinance?

The ordinance includes certain enforcement provisions, such as the right to reduce the number of e-scooters allowed under an operator's permit and to impound and even dispose of the e-scooters. However, no enforcement provisions are going to solve the fundamental problem that there is usually no place to put these things when the riders are done testing Darwin's theory on the street.

In the world of the startup begets the startup, along comes GetCharged Inc. with a great idea on how to solve the problem. It recently initiated a program in Atlanta working with owners of parking garages and other property owners to provide charging stations and a place to dock the dockless, getting them out of the way, quelling the mayhem, and bringing the providers of the scooters into compliance with the law. Their docks store, charge, and service up to 10 otherwise orphaned scooters in a single car parking space. The company claims it has contracts already for 2,500 locations.

Sal Cassano, safety adviser for GetCharged and former FDNY commissioner, says that GetCharged “has identified a key solution to help city planners keep our streets organized and safe. The docking stations will also help to prevent fires that have become more common in homes and warehouses where lithium ion e-scooter and e-bike batteries are often charged in unsafe conditions.”

Looks like this is an idea whose time has come.

Attorney Dwight Merriam is a member of the Connecticut Law Tribune's editorial board.