First Look at Scooters that May Come to Wichita

The Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board, along with Wichita Transit officials, and various city council members got to see a demonstration from Gotcha - a scooter, bike, and ride-sharing company.

Gotcha is already located throughout dozens of cities and college campuses. Offering not only scooters, but bikes, trikes, and electric vehicles.

The sharing service will operate off a mobile phone app much like the popular zagster bikes already located around downtown Wichita. Riders will be able to pick up their scooters from various locations around town - unlock them via the app, and ride away. Fully electric, the scooters have a top speed of around 15mph.

Scooter sharing services have been praised by some for relieving congestion and peoples reliance on vehicles to get around. Others have condemned them for “cluttering up” sidewalks. Gotcha has a unique solution to “stray” scooters - they use geofencing to warn users of parking in unauthorized areas and will even levy fines for doing so. If a user chooses to go ahead and leave their scooter anyways - Gotcha will deploy one of their local team members to pick up the scooter and re-locate it to the nearest authorized parking location.

This showing was purely a demonstration - the city has yet to decide whether or not we’ll even be getting a scooter sharing service, let alone which company will get the bid.