TREASURE ISLAND, Fla. — With a quick scan on a phone app, you can ride a scooter for miles down stretches of Gulf Boulevard.

It’s fairly simple to run scooter rentals on the island, as it doesn’t require an employee on site or someone to set up shop and rent them out. That’s just one of the reasons they’re showing up in different areas along Pinellas County’s coastline.

What You Need To Know

  •  St. Pete Beach, Clearwater ban scooters on sidewalks

  •  Treasure Island considering similar restrictions

  •  Safety of pedestrians biggest concern

  • Sharing roadways with cars remains a complicated issue

Now, it’s up to each beachside city to decide how they want to regulate them.

Some cities got ahead of any potential issues and have already banned electric scooters from sidewalks. According to Forward Pinellas, those cities include Clearwater, St. Pete Beach, and Madeira Beach among others.

Roughly half of the affected cities have picked more of a wait and see approach and have been slow to put out any type of restrictions.

On Tuesday night, during a regularly scheduled commission meeting, Treasure Island commissioners discussed banning electric scooters and other micromobility devices from sidewalks in the city and making it so you must be at least 16 to rent one.

Jennifer Srigley, a seasonal resident, walks the pathways in Treasure Island each morning with her pair of walking sticks. She says scooters are intimidating as she can’t get out of the way quickly if they get too close.

“Its scary,” she said. “A lot of them don’t do the bell ring, so you don’t know they’re behind you.”

Srigley and her husband support having a separate area for scooters and electric bikes to ride. Chelsea Favero with Forward Pinellas agrees there’s a safety issue there.

“A lot of areas of Gulf Boulevard only have sidewalks about 6 feet wide and that’s not a very wide space to share with many pedestrians because these are high density tourist areas,” she said.

But some Treasure Island commissioners raised concerns about the safety of those riding the scooters, should they be told they need to stay off the sidewalk.

“We just want to make sure that there’s another area for those scooters to go,” Favero said. “Like a safe place along the roadway or some type of alternate route.”

The Treasure Island City Commission will reconsider the issue during a meeting set for February 21.