E-Scooter Parking: A Guide

A new guide from the University of Oregon's Urbanism Next Center offers best practices and recommendations for managing shared e-scooter parking in cities. Kea Wilson describes the guide’s key recommendations in Streetsblog USA.

Since dockless scooters rolled out, the ability to leave them ‘anywhere’ has been a problem, with entire social media accounts dedicated to photos of scooters in unlikely, inconvenient, and sometimes dangerous places. The authors of the study argue that cities can prevent this “by rolling out clear, easy-to-follow parking rules and great infrastructure to match.”

The guide recommends, first and foremost, “ample scooter parking everywhere they might expect someone to ride” — dedicated racks or parking zones spaced out every 200 or so meters. It also suggests using scooter parking as daylighting “by locating scooter corrals directly on street corners, rather than letting a car park there and block the view of oncoming road users.”

According to Nathan Pope, senior city planner for Denver DOT, “If you're concerned about scooter riding on the sidewalk, well, the best place is to give them a dedicated, separated place from cars and pedestrians. The solutions here work for the person riding, but also for the person who doesn't use as well.”