City council halts electric bike & scooter companies from coming to Santa Cruz

The city council unanimously voted to halt anymore electric bike or scooter companies from coming to the city. This comes just a few weeks after the company “Bird” dropped off more than 100 electric scooters around Santa Cruz.

The city said they aren’t against having new ways of transportation. They launched electric jump bikes just a few months ago, but the city said the company did not go about bringing in these scooters the right way.

Transportation planner Claire Fliesler told KION “Bird” emailed the city the night before dropping off the scooters. That next day the city told bird to pick the scooters up, but they didn’t comply.

“Bird declined to participate in that and subsequently continued to release scooters which the city has been impounding. Some of the issues surrounding that are that there’s no framework in place for maintenance or monitoring. No one in the public has a way to know who to call and what the rules and regulations are around it and there’s no agreement between Bird and the city allowing them to operate utilizing this public space,” said Flieser.

KION checked on the “Bird” app and it showed there was only one scooter left in the city. The city said this is just a temporary ban until they can put more guidelines in place, and this will not impact the jump bikes at all.

Not everyone favors the ban, KION’s Ashley Keehn will have more from some of those folks at 6 p.m.