By Cara Waters and Sophie Aubrey
The City of Melbourne has banned hire e-scooters within its borders – including in the CBD – with the council on Tuesday agreeing to scrap its contracts with operators.
At a meeting on Tuesday night, councillors voted to withdraw from the contracts with Neuron and Lime with five days notice, giving them 30 days to remove their e-scooters from the city.
Melbourne City Council will meet to discuss a scooter ban.Credit: Jason South
While City of Melbourne officers initially recommended e-scooters be permitted to remain with a range of measures to rein in bad behaviour, Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece on Tuesday moved an alternative motion to adopt “the Paris option” – banning e-scooters.
“After two year I have run out of patience at what I’m seeing on the streets and footpaths of our city,” he told the meeting.
“If you stand at the front of this Town Hall on any night of the week, and you look at what is happening there out in front of our own Town Hall, it’s shameful.
“There are literally more people disobeying the law on e-scooters than there are actually following the rules, people riding around without helmets, people double-dinking, people in groups, riding on the footpath, creating havoc on the footpaths of our city.”
Reece said that while the contracts with e-scooter operators had six months to go, the council could not wait that long and that a “fundamental reset” was needed.
A spokeswoman for Lime said after the meeting: “We’re thoroughly disappointed and after all of the cooperation with council, this isn’t just a setback for the current operators, but a setback for Melbourne’s transport future.”
Reece and councillors Davyyd Griffiths, Roshena Campbell, Philip Le Liu, Kevin Louey and Jason Chang voted to withdraw from the contracts, while Jamal Hakim, Rohan Leppert, Elizabeth Doidge and Olivia Ball voted against the move.
Campbell said the e-scooter trial had caused real harm in Melbourne.
“We can’t afford to lose a life because there is a form of transport that we’ve had for two years in this city that has been convenient to some, and if this is inconvenient to you, I apologise,” she said.
Leppert said it would be good if the same logic applied to cars and he was angry that he only found out about the proposed ban in the media.
“I’ve been a councillor for 12 years, and [it] was the first time in those 12 years that I was told by the press before being told by any of my fellow councillors what the motion before the council would be and what the result would be,” he said.
Leppert said it was procedurally unfair to scrap the contracts with Lime and Neuron as the City of Melbourne had committed to communicate freely and constructively with the e-scooter operators to resolve issues and to use independent mediation if necessary.
“To the extent that e-scooters are reducing private vehicle usage and congestion, there is a safety benefit as well as a health benefit and an emissions reduction benefit,” he said.
Dozens of members of the public spoke at the meeting both for and against e-scooters including residents, workers, e-scooter operators and sustainability advocates.
The council’s decision means Lime and Neuron scooters will be removed from Melbourne’s CBD and suburbs including Docklands, Carlton, Southbank, South Yarra, Flemington, Kensington, Port Melbourne, Parkville and East Melbourne from mid-September.
Details of how the ban would be enforced are yet to be revealed.
In July, the Allan Labor Government announced that it would allow hire e-scooters to be used across Victoria – with new rules to improve safety – but they are legal only in council areas that have an agreement with an operator.
Privately owned e-scooters can still be ridden within the City of Melbourne and hire e-scooters will continue to operate in the City of Port Phillip and City of Yarra.
Lime government affairs director Will Peters said the company had spent $40 million on its operations in Melbourne.
Lime and Neuron frantically campaigned against the rental ban, sending alerts to their app users on Tuesday calling on people to “help save the e-scooter program” and “share with the Lord Mayor why the e-scooter program is so important to you before 3.30”.
The Age obtained a letter sent by Lime to the City of Melbourne councillors on Tuesday warning that any decision to terminate its contract without prior consultation or discussion would not be a fair use of public power and “would lack any procedural fairness”.
Lime proposed a pause in operations until a raft of measures are implemented, including cameras to prevent footpath riding, reducing the number of hire e-scooters, limiting new riders to day time riding for their first rides and mandatory dedicated parking spots.
About 1500 e-scooters were available for hire in Melbourne as part of a two-year trial, but they have been the subject of a flood of complaints, from blocking footpaths to endangering pedestrians.
Before the ban, Neuron Australian general manager Jayden Bryant criticised the sudden U-turn and said his company had been in discussions with the council for weeks about how to optimise the city’s e-scooter program.
“It is very odd that a tabled proposal for the introduction of new e-scooter technology can change to become a proposal for a ban in just one day,” he said.
A notification sent to e-scooter users by Neuron today.
“If the recommendations provided by council officers were adopted, it would make the city’s e-scooter program the most tightly regulated in the world.”
Bryant said thousands of people relied on e-scooters, which boosted Melbourne’s economy, and the company had invested significantly in new technology, including cameras to detect and prevent footpath riding.
The e-scooters have become a hot topic ahead of the upcoming October council elections with Reece and fellow lord mayoral candidate Arron Wood scheduling competing press conferences on the topic outside the Town Hall ahead of the council meeting.
Reece cancelled his press conference, but Wood went ahead and warned that while he proposed a ban on e-scooters in the Hoddle Grid last week, the sudden change by the council meant the e-scooter companies were considering legal action.
“Mr Reece needs to guarantee that not a single ratepayer dollar will be going to these e-scooter companies in compensation for this failure of leadership,” he said.
Royal Melbourne Hospital emergency medicine director Mark Putland said he would have supported the original motion focused on improving safety, but there was a strong argument for a ban.
He said the large mix of pedestrians, trams and road vehicles in the CBD, together with restaurants, nightclubs and pubs, made the use of e-scooters more risky, especially when drinking was involved.
He suggested geo-blocking certain high-risk zones within the Hoddle Grid.
“Smart things can be done without losing the utility of e-scooters altogether,” Putland said.
E-scooter injuries cost the Royal Melbourne more than $2 million in 2022, the first year of the e-scooter trial. Putland estimated this would now be $4 million a year with their use in full swing.
He said wrist fractures, facial and dental injuries, brain damage and even deaths had resulted from e-scooter use, mostly among young patients.
E-scooters in Melbourne last month.Credit: Jason South
Stan Capp, president of CBD residents’ group Eastenders, called on the council to ban the hire e-scooters.
“Every resident I know has had an unpleasant interaction with commercial e-scooters, and many fear that they will be the next victim to poor behaviour,” he said.
“The trial has been a failure from everything except possibly financial. While City of Melbourne may have pocketed over $1 million, the operators have potentially made super-profits if their data are to be believed.”
Capp said Lime and Neuron had been unable to remedy poor behaviour by e-scooter users, and it was “optimistic in the extreme” to expect police to enforce the volume of breaches.
“Whether it be placing pedestrians and other road users at risk, not wearing helmets, not riding on footpaths, not riding while intoxicated, not double or even triple-dinking, or not obeying road rules such as traffic lights, the operators failed to materially address these issues and their opportunity to do so over 2½ years means that the trial has not passed its proof of concept.”
Associate Professor Alexa Delbosc, of the Monash Institute of Transport Studies, said e-scooters played a role in Melbourne’s transport system and there would be fewer accidents with pedestrians if the council provided more separated bicycle infrastructure.
“E-scooters provide connections across the inner city in places where there are no convenient public transport connections, when the trams are packed full, or when the trains aren’t running at all,” she said.
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