Atlanta City Council to consider resolution to shorten e-scooter curfew for second time

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) – Nearly five years after adopting an e-scooter curfew after a series of traffic fatalities, the Atlanta City Council will consider a resolution to address whether to shorten the curfew for the second time in two years.

“We want you to be connected, we want you to be in a walkable city, but we’re preventing you from using some of the tools that are eligible for you at night,” said District 12 City Councilman Antonio Lewis, who sponsored the resolution.

The change would shorten the curfew to two hours, 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. It’s currently from midnight to 4 a.m.

For most people, e-scooters from companies like Byrd and Lime are practical means of transportation.

Raegan Turner and Mackenzie O’Brien often work downtown past midnight as servers.

“It’s cool and convenient because I don’t have a car,” Turner said.

Turner believes the change would promote safer movement.

“I don’t have to walk in the middle of the night — as a girl — which is very unsafe in the city,” she added.

But the curfew was originally a safety protocol, running from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., after multiple scooter-accident deaths in 2019.

The Atlanta City Council instituted the curfew, but even at the time, there was concern that the problem was not scooters but Atlanta’s streets.

In 2022, a Georgia Tech study found that the scooter curfew was hurting city traffic, which led the city council to shorten the curfew from midnight to 4 a.m.

Now, it could be scaled back again to help workers who get off late at night.

“It would make it a lot more accessible for different modes of public transportation,” O’Brien said.

In the years since the curfew began, Atlanta’s roads have also changed.

“I think sometimes the roads were a little too tight, like, for cartoon characters,” said Sara Tan, operations manager at EStar Rides in South Atlanta. “The infrastructure is preparing for it. So, they’re redoing a lot of our roads now.”

That includes where Turner and O’Brien ate lunch on Memorial Drive SE on Monday afternoon.

“They just did this, like, I wanna say six months ago,” Turner said, pointing out dedicated lanes separating bikes and scooters from car traffic.

It’s work like the construction on Memorial Drive that has Lewis feeling like Atlanta is ready to consider a change.

“There’s no reason for us to be so hard on folks who want to ride a scooter,” he said.

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