Scooters come to the suburbs after crackdown in Miami over safety, clutter complaints

Scooters that were pushed out of the city as an annoyance have found a new refuge in the Miami suburbs.

A pilot program by Miami-Dade County in the Dadeland area now has three times as many scooters as are on the streets of Miami, where a crackdown over complaints has left a lone company still in the business of renting out the electric two-wheelers.

County administrators hope software giving them immediate control over speed and parking for the scooters will mean a smoother ride for the zippy vehicles that tend to inspire strong opinions.

Scooters are hard to rent in the Miami area, where complaints about safety hazards and sidewalk litter have made the devices controversial. Only a few municipalities allow companies to rent them. Until Miami-Dade launched its Dadeland pilot program on March 18, the shared scooter rentals weren’t allowed anywhere outside city limits.

Miami was once the region’s hub for scooter rentals. Last year, seven companies — including Lyft, Spin and Lime — were renting scooters within the city of Miami. But complaints about scooters zipping through traffic and clogging sidewalks led to a crackdown.

The county experiment around two Metrorail stations — Dadeland North and South — is the latest stab at trying to find a tolerable market for scooter rentals in the Miami area.

Scooter rentals are allowed in Miami Lakes and Coral Gables, but most municipalities don’t allow them. In January, Miami commissioners imposed new rules that included requiring riders to wear helmets and for rental companies to restrict speeds to 10 mph on streets and 7 mph on sidewalks.

In Miami-Dade, the rules aren’t fixed. Company apps that riders use to rent the scooters are plugged into government software that lets administrators tweak restrictions on speed, parking and how many can be placed on each block at the start of the day.

Last week, Carlos Cruz-Casas, an assistant director at Miami-Dade’s Department of Transportation and Public Works, said the county was getting ready to downshift the speed on scooters from the state-allowed maximum of 20 mph to 15 mph to better match a bicycle’s pace.

Another tweak made the areas around Metrorail stations scooter-walking zones by capping speeds there at 1 mph. Concerned about crowding, Miami-Dade dialed down the number of scooters allowed on any block to two per rental company from three.

“In real time, we can deploy policies,” Cruz-Casas said. “Before, we’d have to send maps.”

READ MORE: They’re back: Electric scooters make return to streets, sidewalks of downtown Miami

More scooters outside Miami

As of this week, only one vendor, Helbiz, has scooters on Miami streets. That means the county’s largest city only has about 50 Helbiz scooters available to rent on any given day, according to city data.

There are up to 150 scooters available in the county’s Dadeland program, with three companies — Bird, Helbiz and Spin — renting the devices for about 35 cents a minute.

There are no helmet rules in the county program, which runs roughly from Southwest 56th Street to 104th Street, with the Don Shula Expressway forming the western boundary and Southwest 72nd Avenue the frontier on the east.

County staff can add new restrictions directly to the rental companies’ apps, including where scooters can go and how quickly they can get there.

READ MORE: Miami reintroduces electric scooter rentals, again.

After complaints from businesses, Miami-Dade decided to block riders from ending rented scooter rides within the Downtown Dadeland retail district. Cruz-Casas said those rules could be modified once there’s consensus on where to park scooters nearby.

Scooter complaints: sidewalk litter

“We’re basically allowed to provide the rules of engagement,” he said. “We don’t have to have an army of people out there checking where the vehicles are.”

Kevin Amézaga, president of the Miami Riders Alliance, said Miami-Dade and other local governments need more restrictive rules to make shared scooters a permanent part of the local transportation landscape. He said his group urged Miami-Dade to require fixed docking stations for parking scooters, rather than riders being able to leave them on sidewalks when they finish rides.

Scooters “can clutter up already too-narrow sidewalks that force pedestrians, bicycles and scooters to fight for the little sidewalk space we have left for them,” he said.

Helbiz offers riders a 20% discount if they park their scooters in one of about a dozen parking “corrals” available throughout the Dadeland area. Miami-Dade also blocks off parking areas around the Dadeland Mall to regulate how many scooters will be left in heavy-traffic areas.

Miami-Dade is using the Dadeland rentals to test how scooters might work in other suburban areas outside city limits, where the county regulates street use and parking rules. Those “unincorporated” areas are home to about half of the county’s households, mostly suburban areas that don’t have the trolley routes found in cities.

“Unincorporated Miami-Dade is a transit desert, so mobility options are critical,” said Raquel Regalado, the Miami-Dade commissioner who sponsored the legislation to start the scooter program in Dadeland, which she represents. “Scooters and bicycles are an easy first step. And Dadeland is the perfect place for it.”

READ MORE: Miami commissioners order motorized scooters taken off city streets immediately.

Scooter advocates say the shared vehicles are affordable options to provide short-hop trips to nearby mass transit — an arrangement that works well in Dadeland which has two Metrorail stations.

“You can take a scooter, ride it through your neighborhood, and then take Metrorail, and then ride that downtown,” said Vivian Myrtetus, head of partnerships and policy for Helbiz. “And the same thing in reverse. Just grab a scooter downtown.”

POLL: What do you think of rental scooters?

Miami Herald staff writer Joey Flechas contributed reporting.

This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 12:45 PM.