Is the era of the badly behaved scooter rider coming to an end?

The ordinance, sponsored by Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Shamann Walton and Connie Chan, calls on San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which regulates shared scooters, to institute that change and to dispatch parking control officers to give traffic tickets to badly behaved scooter riders.

The legislative text chastises Bird, Lime and Spin for moving too slowly in implementing anti-sidewalk riding technology, even though early efforts are reportedly underway. So far, 25 Spin scooters in San Francisco have been outfitted with Drover’s anti-sidewalk riding tech on a pilot basis. The other companies have experimented with GPS-based enforcement tools.

Here’s how Drover’s tech works: A device bolted on to the scooter with a downward facing camera constantly photographs the area beneath the vehicle. Using AI, it can detect when it’s on a road, in a bike lane or on a sidewalk.

Scooters can then be programmed to respond accordingly, slowing to 5 mph or making a crunching noise while on the sidewalk. The noise serves the dual purpose of annoying the rider and alerting nearby pedestrians of the scooter’s presence. The system is more sensitive than GPS-based geo-fences, which can have margins of error measured in dozens of feet and can be disrupted by buildings.

I test rode a Spin scooter outfitted with a Drover device on the roads near the Richmond Marina and found that the technology really worked. Within a few seconds of alighting on the sidewalk, the scooter slowed to a light jogging pace and began emitting the sound of someone munching dry Cap’n Crunch. Once I returned to the road, the noise ceased and the scooter returned to its full speed.

Drover’s camera can also help with parking enforcement and identifying downed scooters on the sidewalk, says co-founder Alex Nesic. That could be a big help for scooter companies regardless of whether The City cracks down on sidewalk riding.

Spin currently pays tens of thousands of dollars in fees for improperly parked scooters in San Francisco each month, CEO Philip Reinckens reported at the conference. Many riders still don’t follow city rules requiring all scooters to be locked to a bike rack — not a street sign or telephone poll.

From January through July of this year, SFMTA issued more than 5,000 parking citations to The City’s three permitted scooter operators, each coming at a cost of $100, according to agency data.

Nesic has empathy for cities trying to regulate this new technology. “People often forget that cities are in this tough position of allowing new modalities to come in and making sure that they don’t violate existing rules,” he said. “Cities are put in the unenviable position of enforcing the unenforceable.”

The data provided by Drover wouldn’t just be for enforcement, however. It can also help cities get a handle on the actual frequency of sidewalk scooter riding, rather than relying on anecdotal accounts. It could also help explain why people choose to ride on the sidewalk on certain stretches of road.

Drover, Nesic said, can help cities “understand what the prevalence of sidewalk riding is, where it might happen, what can you do about it, how can that inform urban planning, bolstering a bike lane that is not protected and is being usurped by delivery vehicles or whatnot.”

The cameras at the heart of Drover’s technology could produce new privacy concerns, but Nesic says faces and license plates are blurred out by the software. The company is also working on approval for deployment in the European Union, which has higher privacy standards than the U.S.

Even if every shared scooter were equipped with a Drover device, and even if those devices work as advertised, the scourge of sidewalk riding wouldn’t be fixed overnight. More and more San Franciscans are buying or leasing their own scooters and e-bikes, which come with no such technology.

At a Drover demonstration on the Embarcadero a few months ago, Ross Blanchard, Spin’s vice president for business development, recalls seeing “every personal scooter and bike and motorized skateboard going by at 25 miles per hour.” Shared scooters represent “just a small fraction of the problem,” he said.

Nesic hopes new technologies to ensure safe scooter riding will inspire regulators to create similar regulations, like speed delimiters, for cars. “There’s no reason why we can’t deploy it across larger vehicles,” he said.

Gary Fisher, one of the inventors of mountain biking in the 1970s and a featured speaker at the conference, put it more pointedly. “They’re putting all these regulations on scooter companies: geofence this, speed limit that. When are they gonna do that to f--king cars?”