Now he wants the City of Port Phillip − which includes the tourist playground of St Kilda − to be the first council in Melbourne to trial e-scooters over summer. Loading This month the council voted in support of a three to six-month trial of up to 500 e-scooters in certain areas of the municipality, such as the foreshore, dependent on managing insurance and safety risks. But the main stumbling block is Victoria’s road rules, which prohibit electric scooters on footpaths from travelling faster than 10km/h or having a power output of more than 200 watts. Any e-scooter that is faster or more powerful than this cannot be legally used on a road, footpath, shared path or public area. The fine for an illegal device is $826.

Cr Gross said he was seeking an exemption from the state government for the summer trial. In Brisbane, e-scooters can travel at up to 25km/h on footpaths, including the bicycle side of a shared path. Helmets are a must. The scooters cannot be ridden on Brisbane CBD roads. Cr Gross said his vision was for e-scooters on bike lanes, shared footpaths and small roads. A state government spokeswoman said Victoria was working with the National Transport Commission as part of a national approach to investigate how e-scooters could be safely trialled. "The safety of everyone sharing our road is our top priority, which is why our road safety experts are taking an evidence-based approach to assessing whether e-scooters can be safely used on our roads," she said.

E-scooter share schemes first started to roll out in San Francisco, Washington DC and Los Angeles at the end of 2017 without regulatory approval. Cities were caught flat-footed. The arrive-first, ask-later tactics enraged authorities, which were flooded with complaints about e-scooters clogging up footpaths, being carelessly discarded and creating obstacles for people with disabilities. There are also concerns around accidents and fatalities, including a man who died in Brisbane after he fell down stairs while riding an electric scooter. Shared e-scooter schemes already exist in more than 100 cities including Paris, Rome, Berlin, Auckland, Brisbane and Adelaide.

“There have been a lot of thorny issues. People either love or hate them,” said Hussein Dia, Professor of Future Urban Mobility at Swinburne University. Some cities have issued temporary bans. Others have required companies to apply for permits and are using regulations to control the new players. Professor Dia said a trial in the City of Port Phillip could pave the way for e-scooters to be rolled out in other Melbourne municipalities. He said e-scooters could replace short commutes in cars to ease congestion and improve amenity. They could also address the so-called last-mile problem, where people find the nearest train or bus stop is too far to walk and they struggle to find a car park at the station.

Professor Dia also said scooter-sharing companies had learnt from their earlier stoushes and were now working collaboratively with authorities. US company Lime said a City of Port Phillip trial would be a “big boost” and it would work carefully with the council if it was successful in the tender process. Head of government relations Mitchell Price said every scooter it deployed in Australia had a helmet and its scooters couldn’t accelerate above a set speed limit (it is proposing 20km/h for the Melbourne trial). He said the scooters had GPS and Lime paid people, known as juicers, to retrieve them and charge them overnight. To complete a ride, a user must lock the scooter using the app and submit a photo of it parked. This is designed to reduce the likelihood of it blocking a footpath, bus stop or shop entrance.

In November last year, Lime conducted a trial at Monash University’s sprawling Clayton campus, which is two kilometres wide. “It was enormously successful and students loved it,” said Paul Barton, the director of business support at Monash University. Over a month almost 9000 trips were taken by more than 2000 riders. The university also learnt lessons. Mr Barton said it asked Lime to reduce the speed from 25km/h to 15km/h to reduce the risk of scooters colliding with pedestrians, and geofenced around the campus centre so students couldn’t park too close. (Geofencing is a technology that enables companies to use GPS to restrict scooters operating in certain areas.) Melbourne is still scarred from its disastrous oBike experiment. The Singaporean bike share company pulled their yellow bikes out of the city after just a year after they were abandoned and dumped in the Yarra River (leading to a viral video outlining instructions for the new sport of oBike fishing).

However Cr Gross is optimistic that GPS tracking and the fact the e-scooters would be collected and charged overnight means there will not be a repeat of the oBike debacle. “I’m super-pumped,” he said.