The Board of Supervisors today will consider legislation that would require the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to regulate the motorized scooters that have appeared on city streets over the past month.

As we reported last week, District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin and District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim are sponsoring legislation that would require SFMTA to develop a permitting program for companies that deploy motorized scooters in the city.

The move would allow the Department of Public Works to impound any unpermitted scooters left in the public right-of-way.

The ordinance proposed by Peskin and Kim was “moved forward to the full board with a positive recommendation from the [Land Use and Transportation] committee,” Kim legislative aide Ivy Lee told Hoodline.

The full board’s vote also comes a day after San Francisco City Attorney Denis Herrera issued a cease-and-desist letter to the three companies that have distributed scooters across the city: Spin, LimeBike, and Bird. 

Concerns about the scooters are widespread, but the regulations and Herrera’s cease-and-desist order focus on getting companies to do a better job of requiring riders to wear helmets, ride only on the street and park within authorized areas. 

Herrera gave the companies until April 30th to address the concerns and submit reports on their solutions to the issues, according to the Examiner.

Bird has encouraged its competitors to sign a pledge to "Save Our Sidewalks," a policy that would:

• retrieve all vehicles every night and reposition the fleet to where the vehicles are wanted the next day;
• limit the number of vehicles offered unless existing ones are being used at least three times per vehicle per day; remove underutilized vehicles; and share utilization data with city transportation planners;
• offer $1 per vehicle per day to city governments for bike lanes, safe riding outreach, and bike lane maintenance.

CBS SF Bay Area reported last Friday, that Public Works had already started impounding vehicles in response to public complaints, gathering 66 wayward scooters in one day.

The permitting program will likely be similar to that developed for the dockless bike-share programs that have also emerged over the past year.

SFMTA in January adopted an 18-month pilot allowing JUMP bikes to deploy up to 500 dockless electric bikes across the city to study the effectiveness of the program. The pilot is also intended to help identify permitting requirements that could allow competitors to also deploy similar programs while managing the impact of such bike share programs on other transit options in the city.

It is not yet clear whether SFMTA would develop a similar program for just one of the three scooter companies to test, or if any motorized scooter pilot would be open to all competitors.