What Next for E-Scooter Share in the City of Melbourne?

Melbourne, Victoria

As was widely reported at the time, on Tuesday 13th August, the Lord Mayor of the City of Melbourne moved to ban e-scooters from the City of Melbourne. The motion to end the council’s contracts with operators Lime and Neuron as part of the two-year trial, narrowly passed, six votes to four.

What was less well reported was that the Future Melbourne Committee meeting at which the mayor instigated this ban had been presented with a detailed report, prepared specifically for their consideration. This report, which is publicly available, was authored by Sasha Sheko, Principal Strategic Planner at the City of Melbourne.

It runs to 14 pages of detailed summary and recommends a wide range of new and tightened regulations under which e-scooter share schemes could have continued to operate in Melbourne. Apparently, the report was not even considered before the motion end the e-scooter share scheme contracts was passed.

Meanwhile the position of Lord Mayor is up for re-election as part of statewide local government elections in Victoria which will be held during the second half of October, with the winners expected to be announced by 15th November.

Four of the leading mayoral candidates: Nicholas Reece, Arron Wood, Anthony Koutoufides and Roxane Ingleton, took part in an discussion on Thursday 10th October which you can listen to here:
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/melbourne-drive/mayoral-panel/104458054
The discussion about e-scooter bans and bike infrastructure starts from 37:42 and e-scooters in particular from 41:00. Interestingly three of the four candidates, other than Mr Reece, advocated bringing the scooters back, under various terms and conditions. Mr Reece said, “I would do it again.” He was meaning that he had no regrets about banning shared e-scooters.

In total there are 11 groups of candidates for Mayor and Deputy Mayor including one called “Rip Up the Bike Lanes!”

We could not find any published opinion polls pre-election so there’s no indication of who might win or be in close contention and we’ll all have to wait for the November announcement.