Golden Valley Seeks New Electric Scooter Contract
Golden Valley and two other west metro cities are hoping strength in numbers–and a streamlined application process–will help attract a vendor to supply rental scooters for citizens to use this summer.
City leaders are finalizing a joint request-for-proposal process with leaders from Hopkins and St. Louis Park to garner contract bids from rental companies.
“These are three cities that are kind of connected geographically so they can kind of locate throughout the three,” said Golden Valley City Planner Myles Campbell. “From an application perspective, we found that in talking to our peer cities, we all were releasing kind of similar requests for proposals, creating almost 50-page documents for these companies to put together. So, streamlining that on their end so that one application for three communities made sense.”
Campbell said the cities are working through the handful of proposals they’ve received so far. For the past two years, Golden Valley contracted with Bird scooters. The city seeks to offer about 50 scooters for rentals.
“We have some transit service, but a lot of it is really low-frequency,” said Campbell. “Where the scooters or bicycles can really fill that need is really those short trips, you know, Brookview to downtown, that’s where we’ve seen the most, in looking at past years, usage. They’re really meant for that quick bopping between stops in the small area.”
Campbell said he hopes to bring a contract with a specific company to city council in mid-April with a roll-out of the service again when summer rolls around, probably by the end of May.
