Riders will soon be banned from parking hire e-scooters on half of the streets of the City of Yarra after a council vote on Tuesday night where the mayor likened hire operators to naughty children who needed detention.
Under the new rule, the municipality will ban hire e-scooter parking on footpaths less than two metres wide. The ban will not apply to private e-scooters.
E-scooters parked on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy.Credit: Simon Schluter
It was revealed at the meeting that the council – which takes in Richmond, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Cremorne – received about $180,000 a year from scooter providers to allow them to operate, which was outstripped by council costs for responding to complaints of obstructed footpaths and compliance.
“We all complain about the federal government subsidising the coal industry; we’re subsidising your companies,” Mayor Stephen Jolly said to representatives from e-scooter hire providers Lime and Neuron, who were in the public gallery at Richmond Town Hall.
“If you walk through any of our activity centres, any morning, any afternoon, any weekend, the footpaths are full of e-scooters just being left there. You know – and I know – that you could have fixed that … and you chose not to.”
The council is currently fighting a discrimination claim brought by Richmond resident and wheelchair user Shane Hryhorec under the Equal Opportunity Act for failing to enforce its own rules to stop hire e-scooters obstructing narrow streets.
Jolly said while e-scooters were an important part of the transport mix, there had to be a reset of the rules.
“Sometimes a naughty child has to go to suspension or even expulsion temporarily,” he said.
Greens councillors Sophie Wade and Edward Crossland were the only councillors to vote against the final motion – which was not recommended by council officers.
Wade unsuccessfully attempted to amend the motion to defer the two-metre rule until scooter contracts were up for renegotiation in April. She argued the parking ban would render the scheme unusable and could lead to the operators leaving Yarra.
“Most of Fitzroy, all of Cremorne, most of Richmond … are out of action,” she said.
Scooter user Rory Brown said geofencing 50 per cent of streets had safety implications, “as you can be forced to park at the end of your street, as opposed to near your front door at night”.
But Jolly said the prospect of the companies leaving Yarra “left him cold”.
“I don’t really care,” he said.
City of Yarra’s newly elected Mayor Stephen Jolly and Deputy Mayor Sarah Mckenzie.Credit: Yarra Council
The vote also called for dedicated scooter parking spaces to be expedited.
Lime operations manager Lara Nickless said the company was committed to providing parking spaces.
“Lime is ready to invest in our program in Yarra and work with the council to build parking infrastructure quickly so Yarra will start to see results as soon as possible,” she said.
A Neuron spokesperson said there was already 10 fully marked parking stations but said the council needed to provide more.
“If there are too few approved places to park, it could negatively impact the adoption and success of the program,” they said.
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 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.
Four councillors – Jolly, Sharon Harrison, Evangeline Aston and Kenneth Gomez – were successfully elected as “independents” but ran together under the banner Yarra For All, and pledged to ban scooters from footpaths if elected at the recent October elections, among a laundry list of other initiatives.
Two other successful independent councillors – Andrew Davies and Meca Ho – are now voting with the group to make a majority bloc on the nine-person council.
Jolly hit back at governance questions raised by some members of the public about a now-deleted online newsletter written on behalf of the bloc of councillors, which was published last week and committed to the footpath ban before the council meeting.
“The independents won in most of the wards. So the way it works in Australia is majority rules, and the majority will implement their program,” he said.
“Whether people like that or not – they have another opportunity in four years’ time to vote us out. But for now, we’re running the show … we’re making no apologies to anybody.”
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correction
A previous version of this story stated Labor Deputy Mayor Sarah McKenzie voted against the final motion. This was incorrect and the article has been updated.