The city of San Diego considered banning dockless scooters in Mission Beach and Coronado does not allow dockless bikes or scooters to be dropped off within city limits — now El Cajon is looking to limit dockless bikes and scooters, too.
"It kind of crept up on us like it did on most cities," said El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells. "And we see bikes lying around in the bushes and abandoned in street corners and in the middle of the street and we realized that our city, like a lot of other cities, have a problem with this and we needed to have some kind of regulatory way to deal with it."
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El Cajon is proposing that companies like Lime and Bird would need to make an agreement with the city covering operation, maintenance and storage of dockless bikes and scooters.
"Basically we’re saying that no companies can dock bikes here," Wells said. "Unless they come to us and enter into a contract that we would agree upon."
Currently, no companies have contracts with the city of El Cajon, so if the ordinance is passed, it would be an effective ban on dockless bikes and scooters.
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"The issue is not the people riding them — the issue is people abandoning them," Wells said. "So the bike by itself, the scooter by itself that’s in somebody’s front yard or in somebody’s driveway, they’re going to call the city and the city is going to come collect that."
The city council held a public hearing on the ordinance Tuesday and will vote to adopt it at it's next scheduled meeting in January.
