Raise your hand if you, too, have been personally victimized by a haphazardly parked dockless scooter.
It’s an enduring mystery why some D.C. scooter-riders park the dockless vehicles in ways that are practically guaranteed inconvenience someone. But the city has a solution for us all: the installation of 100 off-sidewalk parking corrals specifically for people to park their dockless bikes and scooters. People will also be free to park their personal bikes and scooters at these corrals, according to the District Department of Transportation.
The corrals will be placed in no-parking zones near intersections, DDOT says, ensuring that cars can’t illegally park in these areas and block others’ view of traffic. The new locations for the corrals will be concentrated in “residential areas where sidewalks are narrower and more likely to be blocked by an improperly parked dockless vehicle,” per the agency’s press release.
The corrals will be installed over the next several months, and they’ll be placed across all eight wards, per DDOT.
The agency has already set up some corrals for dockless vehicles via a pilot program, mainly in business improvement districts and commercial areas where sidewalk-traffic is high and the agency expected more people to need to park their scooters and bikes.
It remains to be seen how much the new corrals are being used by people accustomed to leaving their dockless vehicles pretty much wherever. In Arlington, officials installed scooter parking near Metro stops, but riders ended up using them less than officials had hoped.
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Natalie Delgadillo