Adding a New Chapter 5.57 to the Lakewood Municipal Code Concerning the Licensing of Commercial Micromobility Companies

I read all the Narrative Comments available here, and see these trends:

1) People who work in downtown Denver or have visited there recently tend to be against dockless scooters because of dangerous operators and unsightly/dangerous clutter of abandoned scooters. These responders have more expertise than the rest of us who haven't seen scooters in operation.

2) Some people welcome scooters and would actually ride them.

There are large numbers of people who answered the survey who said they'd NEVER ride scooters. I suspect many people with that opinion are older, but 'older' in this situation can even mean those with children. Once you have children and need to haul them and their gear, scooters are not possible. People who are old enough to actually FEAR scooters would include the ones well aware of how catastrophic for them a collision injury could be.

To a large extent we are talking about young people who would love to ride scooters and who are basically fearless, and others including the aged who have grounds to fear those young operators. Youth is short, childbearing changes everything, and then you have decades of gradual decline, so I think the youthful operators are a much smaller group, and the group leery of their reckless and lawless antics is much larger and would bear a higher toll of life-changing injuries in collisions.

With more cities that formerly allowed dockless scooters now outlawing them, I think authorizing their use in Lakewood is unwise.