It’s no secret Boise State students prefer using electric scooters to jet themselves from class to class over walking. Scooters are a fast, efficient, dare I say, fun way of getting across campus. With Lime scooters readily available for students at almost every turn, it’s no wonder usage on campus is through the roof.
The rapid increase in Lime ridership, paired with the popularity of personal scooters, strains the university’s infrastructure for regulating and enforcing safe scooter-riding habits, leaving students with the responsibility to hold each other accountable.
At the risk of sounding like a narc when I say this, we must report reckless scooter behavior when we see it.
“[Since] 2020, it’s gone from 21,000 rides to over 136,000 a year, the usage has dramatically increased,” said Tana Monroe, assistant vice president of the Department of Public Safety.
Monroe works closely with Lime to regulate and maintain scooters on campus. Together, they employ strategies to encourage order and safety among riders and pedestrians alike. This includes adding scooter corrals on campus and designating mandatory parking zones.
An orderly place for scooters to park sounds nice on paper, but unfortunately, the corrals are largely ignored and rundown.
Of the 13 parking corrals on campus, half of them lack parking decals or appropriate signage to indicate that it is scooter parking. This prompts students to drive and leave Lime scooters wherever they please, including in the middle of walkways.
“At times, they go in the walkways where people are trying to walk. That gets a little annoying,” said sophomore Theresa Hernandez. “If people stuck to the Green Belt or areas where it was fine to ride them, I’d be a little more supportive of them.”
Theresa’s sentiment is shared by many pedestrians on campus. Unfortunately, there’s little to no actual enforcement of the rules and regulations for riders on campus. Without enforcement, reckless scooter riders roam free, turning the quad into a Formula One racetrack.
“Electric scooters just kind of scare me in general,” Hernandez added. “Because you see and hear about people getting into accidents with them. They go pretty fast but are not as secure as other vehicles.”
While Lime regulates its scooters to 8 mph on campus, alongside several no-riding zones to encourage safety in dense pedestrian areas, in practice, this idea falls flat. No matter the speed, an irresponsible rider crashing into an unprotected pedestrian still causes serious injury.
Freshman Ace Kolb finds the issue is not the speed of the scooters; it’s a lack of responsibility from riders.
“In college, with a lot of the decisions you make, it’s you making those decisions for yourself,” Kolb said. “People should definitely be mature enough to ride a scooter and not hit people.”
Lime encouraged responsibility on its website, telling its users to yield to pedestrians walking or crossing the street, and to ride in the bike lane rather than the sidewalk. They explain that when parking, riders must ensure scooters do not block sidewalks, doorways or transit stops.
Violators are given warnings, additional charges and even platform suspension for breaking any of these rules.
Well, kind of.
The micromobility company cannot always see when violations happen, relying on local governments and other users to be their eyes and ears when their GPS tracking cannot cut it. At Boise State, that duty falls on the Department of Public Safety and the Boise Police Department.
“It’s not really feasible to have someone stationed there at all times. I don’t think you all want to pay for that,” Monroe said.
Sure, the university could force some poor security guard to watch the quad and blow a whistle any time someone charges through on a scooter, but no one really listens to hall monitors anyway.
“When you have some sort of presence, that’s a way to enforce something,” Hernandez said. “Because if there’s not someone enforcing it, people aren’t going to follow it.”
Monroe noted the Department of Public Safety intends to push an educational campaign by next semester to encourage safe ridership among Lime and personal riders.
Reporting incidents, violations and accidents when they happen is the best way to bring attention to this issue. It falls to the students to let these organizations know how accountability and infrastructure are desperately needed by holding riders accountable for reckless scooter behaviors. That way, pedestrians and scooter riders alike can live in harmony with one another on campus.
