Not So Convenient: Why So Many Scooters Are Ending up in Canals
Scooters like these are thrown into Roosevelt Water Conservation District's canals on a regular basis.
B
y now, residents of most cities in the United States are familiar with the electric scooters that have sprung up like mushrooms on every street corner. While they are convenient and quick for commuters, they pose an annoyance, a liability, and a hazard for canal owners. Arizona’s Roosevelt Water Conservation District is one agency that has had problems with these scooters. In this interview, RWCD General Manager Shane Leonard speaks with Irrigation Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about the recent spike in scooters being thrown into his agency’s canals and the massive headaches and possible lawsuits they are causing. Kris Polly: Please tell us about your issue with scooters and rental bikes.
22 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Kris Polly: Has anybody fallen into a canal while riding a scooter on its banks? Shane Leonard: Not that we are aware of. That question is a lot like another one we are often asked: How many people get into our canals and get out without a problem? We don’t know, because people don’t call us up to tell us that they were trespassing. Typically, we find the scooters after they’ve moved down the bigger canal systems and gotten wedged underneath a gate or gotten trapped in a fish grate or trash rack. These things aren’t light. I have guys out there straining themselves physically trying to pull them out. Eventually, we have to send out a piece of equipment to pull them out using a chain or rope. It costs several hundred dollars in equipment and labor costs to pull a worthless scooter out of the system and stock it. Kris Polly: Do people throw other stuff into the canals? Shane Leonard: Oh, yeah. Some of the things are what you would expect, like shopping carts, but we have even found artificial limbs. One thing that freaked us out a year or two
PHOTO COURTESY OF FLICKR.
Shane Leonard: The problem is that our canals and open conveyance systems have become a dumping ground for everybody who does not feel like paying the bill for their scooters. We have collected between 50 and 100 of them from our canals. If I understand correctly, in order to use one of these scooters, you enter your credit card information into a crediting system, and when your allotted time runs out, the scooter locks up. People who don’t have anything else to do are figuring out ways to make these things run when they’re not supposed to, but the scooters still have GPS tracking systems. When these people get where they want to go, they throw the scooter in the water so that everything fritzes out. One of the things that we’ve gotten concerned about is that the scooters are battery operated. Chemicals leach out of their battery packs into the water. The scooter companies don’t seem interested in collecting them and the state doesn’t regulate them. When you call a scooter company and ask it to come pick up its scooters, and also tell it that the scooters got lodged underneath a gate and caused damage, it says that the lack of regulations exempts it from damages. One company actually wanted us to pay
for damages to its scooters on the theory that if our canals weren’t there, they wouldn’t have been thrown in. It wanted us to replace all of them. In my personal opinion, it’s a bad idea to give folks unfettered access to motorized, battery-operated pieces of equipment without a code or theory on how to collect them. It’s no wonder that people throw them away. The lack of regulations is a problem for local cities and towns too. A municipality around here was hit with a Persons with Disabilities Act lawsuit because scooters were left on ramps and sidewalks and folks in wheelchairs couldn’t get around them. People also use the scooters in places where they’re not supposed to, like our canal banks.
