Scooting Around Campus

You’ve been binge watching three seasons of FRIENDS and are surrounded by open textbooks. Pulling an all-nighter was not your plan, but here you are. Glancing at your phone, you realize you only have five minutes to get across campus to class. Now, there are scooters laying around campus to help students in need. To be more specific, these scooters are the Lime Scooters, and they are all over downtown Indianapolis.

The Lime scooters were released Sept. 4, with approximately three hundred scooters. After Oct. 4, Lime Scooters will be releasing three hundred more. While no incidents have been reported on campus, the scooter-craze has already been hit with controversy, when it was reported that a burglary suspect used a scooter as a makeshift getaway car.

To use the scooters, all you have to do is download the Lime Scooters app in the app store or Google Play store. Once it’s downloaded, you enter your debit card and driver license information. Bird scooters, a rival company, have also found their way to campus.

Once you have created an account, you will see a map of scooters near you. You can look on the app or you can just keep an eye out for one. Popular spots for stray scooters seem to be outside of Taylor Hall and the grass outside of the IT Building. To begin your ride, you scan the barcode on the top of the scooter, in between the handlebars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MC2OiVz0Jg

There are specific instructions listed on the California-made Lime scooters, including being 18 years old, wearing a helmet, staying off the sidewalks and parking the scooters out of the way after your ride. If the scooters stranded carelessly around campus, no helmets in site, these rules aren’t being followed. The Campus Citizen reached out to IUPD for a statement regarding student safety, and at publishing time, has received no response.

To ride the scooter around for a hour and a half it would cost you four dollars and fifty cents, which, if you think about is pretty affordable for as many places you can go. Since you have the freedom to go wherever you like in the city, there is a catch: The city of indianapolis can issue fines for scooters that are poorly parked. Such as scooters that are parked in front of crosswalks, doorways and bus stops.

Public Relations intern Hunter Buis hopped on a scooter on publishing day, and found that a scooter ride across campus would only take a little over 5 minutes.

While there are still questions surrounding the safety of these scooters, they may help students that need a bit more speed getting to class.