Melbourne council votes to van hired e-scooters from CBD

Hire e-scooters will be banned from Melbourne’s CBD after the council voted to scrap contracts with the scheme's two operators, last night.

Transcript

00:00This ban was prompted by Councillors concerns basically about safety and during a very robust

00:08Council meeting last night, that's the way that the Lord Mayor Nick Rees mentioned that

00:13it was, he said that there was some submissions from Royal Melbourne Hospital and they suggested

00:20that they were seeing up to about 30 people a month coming in with head injuries and other

00:25injuries as a result of e-scooter crashes and combined that's talking about a health

00:31care cost of almost $2 million.

00:34Now apparently that is a real concern for so many of these Councillors that people,

00:40pedestrians that have been hit as well as people coming off after flouting the rules

00:45and not wearing their helmets.

00:47Now Nick Rees had said that he had originally been a supporter when these e-scooters first

00:53came on the scene as a trial in 2022 but since then he had really become quite fed

01:00up with the rule breakers and also the number of e-scooters that had been littering city

01:05streets as a result of people simply abandoning their e-scooters wherever they left their

01:11journeys.

01:12Now there are many traders as well as residents who are also really concerned about the safety

01:17aspects.

01:18Originally the suggestion was to limit the number of e-scooters in the Hoddle grid which

01:22is the main CBD area just across the river here behind me but that then quickly turned

01:28into a motion moved by the LORD MAYOR to actually ban them outright and that effectively is

01:33by cancelling the contracts with the two major operators, so they're Neuron and Lime.

01:39Now this seemed to catch both of those operators quite unawares.

01:42They both made submissions and they said that they were really quite surprised that the

01:47amendment had changed to a potential outright ban.

01:51Under this decision now they have 30 days to basically remove all of these scooters

01:56from the streets.

01:58It's not going to affect private e-scooters, just the shared hired operators and they did

02:04have a six month period left on their contract so the question is whether or not there will

02:10be any legal action now that follows suit but in the meantime I guess that people can

02:15use one of these bikes for hire that are behind me instead of the e-scooters that are going

02:21to soon be disappearing from Melbourne's CBD.

02:24They though still will be operational in the Port Phillip Council which is the St Kilda

02:28beach side area as well as in the regional city of Ballarat.