100 electric scooters, child car seats, other items pulled from Arkansas River in Wichita
About 100 electric scooters, roughly 50 skateboards, child car seats, shopping carts, bicycles, light fixtures, speakers and other items were pulled from the Arkansas River near downtown Wichita this week.
The city lowered the river roughly 2 feet to make “some minor modifications to the fish ladder/boat pass in order to reduce long term sediment build-up,” the city said in a news release.
Veo took advantage of the lowered river to get out its rental scooters and other items. Veo operations manager Steven Miller said they also had volunteers from Boats & Bikes and Kansas Alliance for Wetlands and Streams help with the cleanup on Tuesday and Wednesday. They spent about 250 person hours.
Miller said some of the scooters were several years old.
There were also about 100 skateboard and a 12-foot chain link fence that they weren’t able to get to with a grapple hook. Walking out into the muddy slush would be nearly impossible, he said.
“It’s not a scooter problem. It’s just a problem with bad actors doing bad things, and it’s unfortunate,” he said, adding he wishes he had an area of river like Wichita does where he lives in Oklahoma. “It’s such a pretty area to go out and enjoy time with your family and friends. I don’t know what drives people to do those kinds of things but it is just sad to see that people want to destroy the nice parts of the city and/or vandalize property. It’s just sad.”
He said the scooters had been accumulating for as long as five years.
Most of the scooters will have to be scrapped, he said. A scooter pulled out of the water within a couple hours would still be OK, but they deteriorate over time.
Miller said he figures this would be a problem in any area where there are rivers or lakes, but he didn’t know for sure if it was a problem for Veo elsewhere.
The problem, he said, isn’t the customers, but others taking advantage of the scooters being left close to the river.
Veo has tried to eliminate that temptation.
Starting earlier this year, people who try to park the scooter along the river walk will be directed to nearby, designated parking areas.
He said scooters still get vandalized elsewhere, but he hopes the change will minimize the destruction. He wouldn’t say what the cost of a scooter is or what the loss amounts to.
“It’s not something that wants to cause us to shut down” in Wichita, he said, adding they are the only ride-share electric scooter company in town.
They’ve also started restricting use along the river to daylight hours. He said most of the river dumping happens after dark.
Miller said the GPS on the scooters will tell them when it was dumped into the river. They try to quickly retrieve them, he said, but if they can’t get to them before the signal is lost then they still will have its last location.
He said they first started getting an idea of how many scooters were still in the river when they were exposed during a drought this summer. Based on that and last known GPS coordinates, Miller said he had assumed they had about 50 scooters in the water.
He said they have about 300 scooters in Wichita during peak times.
Miller said he thinks some of the retrieved light fixtures were ripped off from downtown bridges and some of the speakers were being used during downtown events when the scooters were tossed in.
The cleanup was a success, he said, adding he hopes to do it again, possibly annually, and bring in other partners to help.
Veo started in Wichita in 2019, left during COVID, but came back last year.
