Oakland

Oakland Residents Say Moped Rideshare Business Brings New Problems to the City

NBCUniversal, Inc.

A new mode of clean transportation is getting the attention of people who live in Oakland who are already dealing with parking problems.

A moped ride-share business has joined the bike-share and scooter programs and it may be creating more problems than its fixing.  Not only that, the mopeds have racked up almost $13,000 in parking fines.

Neighbors around Lake Merritt have taken note of the new mopeds around the city and have seen a thousand of them on the streets since the second week of January.

“What I’ve noticed is that they’re just strewn across the sidewalk,” said Oakland resident Kriselle Caparas.

According to city parking data obtained by NBC Bay Area, revel mopeds racked up 178 parking tickets in the first three weeks of service, 123 in street cleaning zones and another 32 in red zones.

Caparas said her neighborhood lost a lot of parking to rideshare cars and scooters, and the mopeds make it even worse.

“I live in a very congested place.  Everyone just parks here for rideshare, because it’s free meters at a certain point,” she said.

On its mobile app and website, Revel tells users to abide by local parking rules. In a written statement, the company’s founder said, “Riders can only park in legal spaces within the designated service area, including in Residential Parking Permit (RPP) zones and at metered parking spaces. Riders are responsible for any parking tickets incurred within 24 hours of ending their ride.”

A spokesman for the city’s department of transportation said there were parking issues with a car rideshare program that started about two years ago, but those problems cleared up after people became more familiar with using the vehicles. They’re hoping for similar improvements with the moped parking.

“At least with the bikes, there’s a place to park those,” said Caparas. “There’s designated spaces, but the other scooters, those get thrown everywhere too.”

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