San Francisco had made it to the headlines when the city imposed a temporary ban on electric scooters and renting services, arguing that the officials need time to build regulations for this new type of vehicles. Now, after the temporary ban period, e-scooter services are coming back to the San Francisco streets. Apparently, the city officials have created some effective rules and regulations to make sure that the services can work smoothly, without disrupting the other means of transportation. As of now, two companies namely Scoot & Skip are allowed to provide e-scooter rental services in some part of the city.
One of the major regulations imposed by the officials is to bring the vehicles to the bike line from the normal roads. In addition to this, sidewalks must not be used for storing the vehicles. E-scooters taking up the space from sidewalks was one of the major claims of criticism. The current pilot program is expected to help the city officials understand the possibilities and limitations of the use of e-scooters as a parallel transportation method, considering that public transport and taxi-based services are making lives more congested for the common consumers.
It does not come as a surprise that San Francisco is heavily targeted by technology start-ups from across the country. The city is in close proximity to Silicon Valley, where most of the technology disruptions do happen all the time. This proximity has made San Francisco the hub for the launch of parallel transportation methods and more companies are looking forward to the expansion programs. The ban, however, happened when a huge number of complaints started popping up from the neighbourhood. Now, the sought-out solutions are somewhat temporary. For instance, biker community is not completely with allowing e-scooters to use the bike lane.
