The city council in Estherville has begun discussing the potential of regulating electric scooter and electric bicycle use on public property, like city streets.
Estherville Police Chief Brent Shatto said they’re gathering information about ordinances in other cities. “What their enforcement efforts are and how they’re handling it and how the community’s handling it,” Shatto said, “because we know there’s going to be some push back once we start dealing with it more, once we pass some ordinances.”
Finding the “appropriate consequences” for kids who’re using motorized scooters and skateboards is the biggest challenge, according to the police chief “There’s not a criminal justice system in place, really, to deal with 8 year olds to 10 year olds, 12 year olds, so it’s hard to issue them with a citation or charge them with a crime,” Shatto said. “Juvenile Court Services, they don’t really want to deal with kids that young. They will in a severe situation or a major case, but on simple things they don’t really want to address that with those kids.”
Shatto thinks it’s mainly a parenting issue. “Parents need to step up and take some responsibility for their kids out operating these scooters and how they’re operating them, where they’re operating them and that they operate them in a safe and respectful manner on sidewalks and trails and even on the street,” Shatto said. “We’ve had some reports of kids running through stop signs and things like that. Somebody’s going to get hurt or worse killed before we get a good ordinance in place and we don’t want that to happen.”
Several Iowa cities have adopted ordinances to regulate the use of e-bikes and scooters. Marion, for example, has set a 10 mile per hour speed limit for sidewalks. According to the Iowa DOT, motorized bicycles and electric scooters require more stopping distance that a traditional bicycle and not all products marketed as an “e-bike” are legal or safe to operate on public roads or trails.
(Reporting by Ed Funston, KILR, Estherville; additional reporting by Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson)