Updated at 3:18 p.m.: Revised to include comments from the Dallas City Council briefing.

Razor has told City Hall it will bring its scooters to Dallas — about 1,000 of them. I used to groan at such announcements when they came from purveyors of cheap rental bikes looking to clutter the city's sidewalks and crowd each other out of the market. But for the moment, I welcome our new two-wheeled overlords.

City Hall does, too. On Monday, the City Council's Mobility Solutions, Infrastructure and Sustainability Committee got an early look-see at how those motorized scooters are doing — early, because we're not quite four months into a six-month trial period that expires two days after Christmas. If the council chooses to do nothing, scooters go bye-bye over the holidays. But Michael Rogers, the city's newish transportation director, suggested the council approve an extension that stretches into June 2019 —and the committee wholeheartedly endorsed his proposal.

I didn't hear even a whisper of dissent. The council used to talk forever about the bikes. Scooters took up 15, maybe 20 minutes Monday — and most of that was Pleasant Grove's Rickey Callahan talking about riding electric scooters with buddies down in Austin.

Council member Adam Medrano, who represents part of downtown and Deep Ellum, said the only calls he gets about the scooters are safety-related. Like maybe someone on a scooter darted out in traffic or nearly ran down a pedestrian, which happens because people don't know it's illegal to ride them on downtown sidewalks.

But other than that, Medrano said, "Everybody else is having fun."

City transportation officials also said all indications are that things are going well.

The city has learned from its Wild West bike days. Rogers also wants to bring in a third party — such as Southern Methodist University or another college — to figure out fees and rider education. And maybe they can tell the city how to keep the scooters from becoming the eyesore we had with bikes before they wound up tossed into the recycling pile. The rental bikes may have been ridden out of town — Ofo moaned about high fees and tough rules before schlepping its yellow stockpile to a couple of charities and the dump — but scooters are about to multiply even with the city's regulations.

Case in point: in scoots Razor.

Brandon Cheung, Razor's head of governmental relations, reached out to City Hall just as officials were assembling Monday's briefing. Cheung told Jared White, the man at 1500 Marilla who rides herd on all transportation alternatives, that Razor will start with the 1,000. And after that, who knows, because Dallas will be Razor's fifth market, along with Long Beach and San Diego, Tempe and Denver.

But Razor isn't new to this game. Since 2000, it has made famous the creation of a former Swiss banker named Wim Ouboter, who came up with the idea because he once wanted a bratwurst and realized his journey was "too short for the car but too long to go by foot."

Only last week The Atlantic ran a piece about Ouboter that said scooters aren't the future, but only because they were the present long ago. They have been sold and marketed as kids' toys — even winning, in 2001, the award for "best toy designed for outdoor play." But as The Atlantic's Sarah Holder just wrote, the scooters were always intended "to fundamentally change urban transportation."

Until now, Razor has ceded that transformative micromobile marketplace to Bird, which has 3,000 scooters in Dallas, and Lime, which replaced most of its green-and-yellow rental bikes with around 2,000 rental scooters, according to docs prepared for the briefing. Clearly Razor grew tired of missing out on the business it essentially created — especially now that Bird is up to $1 billion in funding, making it what CNBC recently called "the burgeoning industry's first unicorn."

Lime and Bird have already shown these things work. The companies gave the city stats that show rides span just more than a mile and take, on average, about 13 minutes. The companies say people are riding twice as far on the scooters as they did on the rental bikes — yet their rides are six minutes shorter.

"The scooters are very, very popular within the city," Rogers told the council Monday. At least until those electric bikes show up.

Rogers told the council that of the 5,533 crashes in Dallas since July 1, only four involved scooters. And none have been fatal, save for the incident last month involving Jacoby Stoneking, found unresponsive at 4 in the morning by a Lyft driver along the 500 block of South Munger Boulevard. That incident remains under investigation — because the Lime scooter was found broken in half far from where his body was discovered.

Meanwhile, 23 people have died in car wrecks since July 1. Eight were killed while just walking.

The scooters aren't perfect. Anyone who has had a scooter buzz by them on the sidewalk knows that. And not enough people wear helmets like they should.

But every day, I see maybe 50, maybe 60 scooterers traversing Uptown and downtown — or at least trying to figure out how to unlock the two-wheelers. And that means 50, maybe 60 people trying to get to work or grab a bite or see some sight without putting a key in a car. And that's a start.