STARKVILLE — Bird scooters are not available for use after 11 p.m., and that won’t change any time soon.
Bruno Lopes, senior manager of government partnerships at Bird, asked the board of aldermen Tuesday to consider extending the scooters’ operational hours past the current 11 p.m. cutoff until 1 a.m.
“The reason for it is pretty simple: to provide a reliable, equitable form of transportation for extended hours, not only to folks that are attending some of the later festivities in town, but also the folks that work at those places,” he told the board.
Bird is an electric scooter ride-sharing service that allows users to reserve scooters and pay for rides from their phones.
Lopes said analytics from the app have shown 5,500 users opened the app to look for a ride between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. so far this year. The demand is there, he said, but safety is another consideration.
In similar college town markets, including Gainesville, Florida, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lopes said there’s only been one incident report made to Bird Scooters between midnight and 2 a.m. Starkville has had zero incidents during that time frame, he said, though the scooters don’t currently operate during those hours.
“I think all of this is good evidence showing we know how to provide a safe program, and we keep safety at the forefront of everything we do,” he said.
Police Chief Mark Ballard disagreed. During a presentation to the board, he said he had several concerns with the request, one being the information Bird Scooters provided about the comparable cities.
Ballard said other police departments and city websites confirmed scooters in Gainesville stop operating at midnight and scooters in Knoxville are only allowed until 11 p.m. Baton Rouge doesn’t restrict the hours scooters can operate, he said, but the police department doesn’t keep data on scooter crashes.
Another issue is the growing research on the safety risks of electric scooters, Ballard said. A Denver Medical Society study in 2022 found that 50% of the scooter-related injuries happened during later evening hours, he said.
He said those risks only increase when alcohol is involved. Ballard showed the board three videos of the Cotton District on the night of a Mississippi State football game. The first two videos showed riders swerving between cars driving down the street, with little regard to the traffic. One of the videos was taken after 11 p.m., he said.
“It doesn’t take much to see the potential problems here, with either the drivers of the vehicles or the drivers of the scooters,” Ballard told the board. “It’s not going to take long before we have an accident.”
The third video proved his point. A rider steers into a seemingly empty intersection when a turning pickup strikes the scooter. Both drivers were intoxicated, Ballard said, asking the board to deny the request for longer hours.
“It is crucial to have laws and regulations governing the use of e-scooters,” he said. “… It’s a difficult area for law enforcement because they are such a new, fun invention, and the laws just haven’t caught up yet.”
Board response
Mayor Lynn Spruill asked Lopes if there is any way for a rider to rent a scooter past the cutoff time of 11 p.m. He said rides beginning before 11 can continue past the top of the hour for safety reasons.
“If they’re on their way home, we don’t know where they are when the scooter shuts off,” Lopes said. “So they could have been riding in a neighborhood they don’t want to stop in, or worse, in the middle of the road.”
Lopes said the company can easily turn off that feature, so the scooters would become inoperable at 11 p.m. regardless of when the ride started.
Vice Mayor Roy A. Perkins said the company needs to abide by the 11 p.m. cutoff and disable the scooters at the time.
“If we legally authorize Bird Scooters Inc. 19 hours out of a 24 hour day each day of the year, regardless of what their policies are, they need to abide by our law,” Perkins said. “When we say 11, we don’t mean 11:05.”
Spruill said she was unsure whether the exact language of the city’s contract with Bird would allow rides starting before 11 p.m. to finish after the hour. She plans to check the specificity of the contract before talking to the company about the cutoff time, she told the board.
“Whatever the language is, that’s what we need to enforce,” Perkins said.
Ward 4 Alderman Mike Brooks said he was a big proponent of bringing the scooters to Starkville, but he finds the disregard for the rules concerning. Brooks moved to deny the request, and the motion passed unanimously.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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