Public outrage prompts Melbourne e-scooter ban

The Australian city of Melbourne has banned rental electronic scooters with officials saying they posed unacceptable safety risks.

The U-turn by the city’s council comes after it first welcomed the scooters in February 2022, saying they would operate a two-year trial.

However, hundreds of accidents since then have sparked complaints and outrage from the public.

Melbourne's mayor said he was "fed up" with the bad behaviour of some scooter users.

“Too many people [are] riding on footpaths. People don’t park them properly. They’re tipped, they’re scattered around the city like confetti, like rubbish, creating tripping hazards,” Nicholas Reece told local radio station 3AW.

Melbourne is just the latest city in the world to remove hire scooters - which can go at up to 26km/h (16mph) - after a brief period of operation. The French capital Paris outlawed them last September - Mr Reece said he wanted to copy "the Paris option".

City councillors voted 6-4 on Tuesday evening local time to ban the scooters almost immediately.

Operators Lime and Neuron have been ordered to remove the scooters within 30 days.

The companies still had six months left on their contracts to operate the vehicles and had been campaigning heavily in recent weeks, urging users to petition the council.

Both companies said they had invested significantly in recent months to improve safety and regulations around the use of scooters - with Neuron saying it was planning on installing AI cameras on scooters to prevent misuse.

A spokesman for the company decried the city council's blanket ban on Tuesday, saying they had been in discussions with city officials to introduce measures like restricting the scooter use to less congested parts of the city, or setting up riding zones.

“This goes over and above the reforms announced by the state government,” Jayden Bryant from Neuron had earlier told Australian media.

“It is very odd that [a different] tabled proposal for the introduction of new e-scooter technology can change to become a proposal for a ban.”

About 1,500 Lime and Neuron scooters had been distributed across the city since the trial's inception in February 2022.

Melbourne city council had previously reported that scooters had cut the city's carbon emissions by more than 400 tonnes and encouraged greater take-up of public transport.

But there has also been growing evidence of the scheme's flaws. One of the city's main hospitals, the Royal Melbourne hospital, published a report in December 2023 which found close to 250 scooter-riders presented at its emergency department with injuries in 2022. A majority of these involved factors such as intoxication, speeding and not wearing a helmet.

A hospital spokesman said e-scooter accidents had even caused deaths and brain damage, with injuries mainly among younger patients.