(This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on the increased popularity of personal electronic mobility devices, the challenges they present incorporating them into daily campus and city life, and safety concerns for users.)
by Malcolm Butler
Electric scooters and other personal electronic mobility devices (PEMDs) have quickly become part of the transportation landscape at Louisiana Tech University and around Ruston.
Now the infrastructure, regulations and attitudes surrounding them are trying to catch up.
Louisiana Tech Senior Vice President for Student Advancement and Chief Operating Officer Dickie Crawford said the university has discussed the rapid growth of PEMDs with officials at other universities and found Tech is hardly alone.
“We’ve had conversations with multiple other universities, not just in the state, but outside of our state,” Crawford said. “All universities and communities are seeing this quick uptake in the use of those scooters over the last few years. And so everybody’s kind of scrambling, so to speak, to deal with it.”
But Crawford doesn’t necessarily see that growth as a negative.
Instead, he believes scooters, bicycles and similar devices can fit into Tech’s long-term efforts to maintain a campus core centered more around people than automobiles.
“The positive side — it’s a good thing,” Crawford said. “Just like increasing bikes or skateboards. It’s good, especially when you want to encourage a more pedestrian campus core. You want the cars parked around the perimeter and leave the green space and the campus core more pedestrian-friendly.
“And so part of that pedestrian-friendly environment would be bikes and other devices like scooters, and that’s good.”
The challenge is incorporating a relatively new mode of transportation into a campus that wasn’t originally designed with electric scooters in mind.
Crawford said that requires balancing the needs of everyone using the campus.
“Where bikes, scooters and pedestrians, and then in some cases cars, all intersect, how do we be safe?” Crawford said. “What’s a safe approach, respecting everybody’s safety? If you’re on a scooter, understanding you’ve got to respect the pedestrian and the bike and the car, and vice versa.”
That conversation isn’t limited to Tech.
Ruston Mayor Ronny Walker said city officials have also seen a noticeable increase in the use of scooters, with college students accounting for many of the riders.
At the same time, the city has spent much of the past decade attempting to make Ruston more accommodating to forms of transportation other than automobiles.
“We started about 10 years ago requiring a 4-foot sidewalk on one side of the street and an 8-foot bike trail on the other side — bike and running trail,” Walker said. “The reason we did that was for people who wanted to ride bikes or run, and we didn’t want to mix those who want to walk and those who are riding bicycles and stuff.”
Walker believes those wider paths can also provide space for the growing number of scooter riders.
“I think the fact that we have added so many miles of 8-foot biking, running and, I would say, scooter traffic within our city, we’re way ahead of most cities when it comes to that kind of infrastructure,” Walker said.
But there are limitations.
The Rock Island Greenway, for example, is a path intended for walking, running and bicycling and stretches nearly 6 miles across Ruston. But city rules currently prohibit motorized vehicles on the Greenway.
That distinction illustrates part of the issue confronting communities as technology changes. Infrastructure designed to encourage walking and bicycling doesn’t automatically accommodate electric scooters and other motorized devices.
Walker believes the city will continue developing sidewalks and wider paths. The East Kentucky Avenue corridor improvement project is one example. Walker said the project will include the same type of 8-foot walking and riding path the city has incorporated elsewhere.
“We’ve added so many sidewalks that are for walking and riding, and we will continue to do that,” Walker said. “Just like right now we’re doing Kentucky, which is not near the Tech campus and not near downtown, but it’s going to have that same 8-foot walking or riding trail path on it.”
Louisiana Tech has already had to consider whether its infrastructure is prepared for even greater scooter use.
Several years ago, the university explored the possibility of allowing a company to establish a commercial rental scooter operation on campus.
Tech Assistant Police Chief Bill Davis said university officials ultimately determined the campus wasn’t ready.
“Several years ago, Dr. Guice and the SGA were genuinely considering hiring a company to come in and provide rentable scooters for campus,” Davis said. “But then we got looking at the infrastructure. We didn’t have the bike lanes — where we have now even — and those aren’t adequate enough to do something like that.
“We talked to some other schools that had them and jurisdictions that had had them, and it became a general nightmare because scooters were just being dropped and left somewhere, being parked, not being secured. And we quickly realized that was not an option for our campus at this time.”
Tech wasn’t the only local entity approached.
Walker said commercial scooter companies approached Ruston approximately eight or nine years ago, and he recalled two or three contacts over the years. No agreement ever materialized.
Crawford said companies have continued to express interest in establishing a fleet at Tech where students could rent scooters for free or for a small charge.
“We’ve had companies that want to bring a fleet of them to our campus so students can use them, either free or for a small charge,” Crawford said. “We’ve talked to the companies, and then they’ve talked to the city as well, and up to this point, we haven’t agreed to sign any contracts to do that, and the city has not either.”
Walker believes any future commercial rental system would almost certainly require cooperation between Tech and the city.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it because you’ve got 12,500 students on the Tech campus, and that would be the majority of the users,” Walker said.
For now, however, privately owned scooters are driving the local growth. That has required Tech to establish a framework for their use. The university’s regulations address issues ranging from where PEMDs can be operated and parked to their storage and charging.
“I think [the challenge is] to try to give them some flexibility in use, educate them on the safety of it, without resorting to a total ban of them,” Davis said. “It’s not difficult to find a majority of people on this campus, whether they’re students, faculty or staff, that don’t like them being here.
“And so to try to respect their position, but yet still try to provide students a reasonable avenue to use them.”
Tech officials are also comparing notes with their counterparts elsewhere.
Davis said University of Louisiana System police chiefs have discussed how their campuses are addressing the issue, including what approaches have and haven’t worked.
“We’re communicating with each other and trying to figure out what works best, what hasn’t worked, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak,” Davis said.
Ruston could eventually face similar decisions.
Walker said continued growth in scooter use may require the city to examine whether additional local regulations are needed.
“I think we continue to do what we’re doing with the sidewalks and bike trails, but I think what’s going to happen is we will probably end up having to do some kind of ordinance about their use,” Walker said. “We will definitely be researching that and looking at what other cities have done.”
Ruston Police Chief Eric Watson said the devices have not developed into a significant enforcement problem for his department.
Watson has occasionally seen riders traveling unsafely around the Tech area, including students riding in the middle of West Alabama Avenue near the university’s baseball facility, but said those incidents have been relatively isolated.
“Definitely unsafe if not operated correctly,” Watson said. “But not a huge issue right now.”
For university and city officials, the issue is ultimately about accommodating a form of transportation they expect to remain part of the local landscape.
Ruston has spent years developing infrastructure intended to give pedestrians and bicyclists alternatives to streets designed primarily for automobiles. Electric scooters have added another group to that transportation mix — one that barely figured into the discussion when some of those projects were first conceived.
Louisiana Tech is undergoing a similar evolution as administrators consider how PEMDs can complement the university’s goal of maintaining a pedestrian-friendly campus while still balancing the needs of everyone who uses it.
Crawford believes Tech and Ruston are ultimately moving in similar directions.
“I know that Mayor Walker wants to provide a more bike-slash-scooter-slash-pedestrian-friendly community as well,” Crawford said. “Bigger sidewalks and pathways. And we want to do the same thing on our campus, but it just needs to be safe.”
