In response to the recent e-scooter crackdown by City of Atlanta officials, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on Wednesday unveiled her “Action Plan for Safer Streets” which promises “accelerated safety designs” to some of the city’s most trafficked roadways.
The two-year, $5 million project will accelerate the development of protected bike lanes, and establish connections between in-town neighborhoods including Midtown to Downtown and the Westside BeltLine Trail to MARTA.
On many of the city’s most trafficked streets traffic crash rates are four times higher than the Georgia average, and the sudden existence of thousands of motorized scooters ridden by tourists and locals alike predictably led to some major issues. Many municipalities, including Alpharetta, Athens, and Decatur, banned them outright. In Atlanta though, they remained a roaring success, generating more than three million trips since February 2019 alone.
However, safety concerns remained. Four scooter-related deaths over the course of 2019 drove the issue to a boiling point, as Bottoms in July released an executive order prohibiting the issuance of any new permits for e-scooters, then a week later prohibiting their use during nighttime hours and limiting their top speed on certain routes such as the BeltLine. She also, along with the City Council, listened to feedback from a local population that kept coming back to the same refrain: the need for safer streets.
“We have heard from residents of Atlanta loud and clear – people want safer streets, and they want to see real changes before another tragedy occurs,” said Mayor Bottoms Wednesday.
As the city waits patiently on the 2015 Renew Atlanta Bond and 2016 Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (TSPLOST) to bear fruit, the Safer Streets plan will give a head start to providing safety on some of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Protected bike lanes will keep scooter and bike riders separated from cars and buses, heavily reducing the risk of accidents for thousands of commuters and locals who traverse the city daily.
See the city’s (quite complicated) map of the plan below:
Never wanting to be left out of a good debate, the state legislature too is studying e-scooters. A Senate study committee chaired by Sen. Steve Gooch (R-Dahlonega) held its first meeting Monday to begin evaluating the current laws surrounding e-scooters in the state. Listing public safety as the chief concern, lawmakers will hear from law enforcement, local university officials, and transit experts before reporting their findings by the end of the year. Also likely on the docket – how to make sure the state is getting its fair cut of an explosive industry that has seen little regulation since coming onto the scene in 2018. A House bill seeking to place regulations on “motorized mobility devices” stalled during the 2019 session.
