E-scooters blocking footpaths at centre of disability discrimination case

A wheelchair user who says parked scooters blocking footpaths have frequently obstructed his trips to visit friends or the gym has taken Yarra City Council to court for discrimination.

Richmond resident Shane Hryhorec lodged a discrimination claim against the council under the Equal Opportunity Act earlier this year for failing to enforce its own rules to stop hire e-scooters obstructing narrow streets in Richmond, Collingwood and other nearby suburbs.

Shane Hryhorec wants parking rules properly enforced. Credit: Jason South

About three out of every 10 journeys from his home would involve coming across a partially or fully blocked path since Yarra introduced a hire scooter scheme in 2022, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal heard on Wednesday.

“In many ways, this is a classic discrimination claim. As a direct result of actions taken by Yarra City Council, people with physical disabilities who use wheelchairs are being obstructed from using the local footpaths,” Hryhorec’s lawyer, Andrew Paull, said during closing arguments.

Paull said Hryhorec had lived and ran a business in Yarra for nearly 20 years and had an active life that included going out with friends and exercising at a local gym.

“It’s the introduction of this further obstacle in obstructive e-scooters that has significantly impeded his ability to continue doing these ordinary day-to-day activities,” Paull said.

Lime scooters have been banished from the CBD.Credit: AAP

Growing complaints about parking, footpath riding and other safety concerns led the City of Melbourne to abruptly end its partnership with hire companies Lime and Neuron in August.

That has left Yarra and the City of Port Phillip as the only Melbourne council areas with scooter schemes operating. However, Merri-bek, Darebin and Moonee Valley councils have all said they intend to introduce them. Lime and Neuron have 2500 scooters deployed in Melbourne and they pay local councils $1 a day per scooter.

Under the scheme’s rules, scooters must not be parked on footpaths narrower than 1.5 metres. In Yarra, that means about 100 kilometres of pathways should be off limits, out of 400 kilometres in total.

But Paull said the rule was not well enforced. Yarra councillors passed a motion in May 2023 to continue operating the scooter schemes while establishing dedicated “geo-fenced” parking areas as “soon as practicable”.

And evidence tendered during the hearing showed the City of Yarra’s CEO, Sue Wilkinson, wrote to Lime and Neuron in June confirming the council would extend the arrangement on the condition that geo-fencing was rolled out across the municipality.

“There’s an acceptance by council it needs to do more to offset to impacts of the scooter scheme,” Paull said. “Clearly, this hasn’t happened.”

A City of Yarra official told the tribunal that Hryhorec, a disability advocate, had overstated the prevalence of footpath blocking, with the hire companies reporting that between 74 per cent and 90 per cent of users parked properly each month between January and July 2024.

However, Paull said that when this was extrapolated across 1.1 million scooter trips, it showed there had been “hundreds of thousands of instances of improperly parked scooters”.

Hryhorec did not want Yarra to end the e-scooter schemes but wanted the council to properly enforce its rules about where scooters could and couldn’t be parked, Paull said. It should do this by using geo-fencing to ban parking on small streets, or limiting parking to dedicated bays, as is the done in some cities.

Yarra’s barrister, Tim Jeffrie, told the hearing that although Hryhorec’s concerns were legitimate, the council could not be held to have discriminated against him because maintaining footpaths was not a “service” that the Equal Opportunity Act applied to.

Jeffrie also said putting a geo-fencing ban in place on narrow footpaths also risked pushing too many e-scooters onto other streets, while limitations on parking could “undermine the functionality” of the scooter schemes.

The tribunal heard that Yarra was working on solutions to the parking issue, but Paull said those plans were so “vague and contain such little substance” that they could not be accepted.

VCAT senior member Charles Powles said he would hand down a decision early next year.

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