Tuesday, 29 July 2025

Bills

Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards) Bill 2025

Second reading

Debate resumed on motion of Ingrid Stitt:

That the bill be now read a second time.

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:29): It is my pleasure to rise on the Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards) Bill 2025 and resume the debate. This legislation puts in place a new regulatory regime for the operators of e-scooters and e-bikes across Victoria, it establishes a central point of contact in the Department of Transport and Planning for councils that want to check the bona fides of potential operators and it gives PSOs the powers to issue fines and infringement notices in certain circumstances.

The coalition will not be opposing this bill. That is not to say we do not have a few things to say about it, but we are not going to oppose it. There are some worthy elements, and it is a step somewhat in the right direction for this. I think we can all note that all of this should really be aimed at encouraging an industry so that we can encourage active transport. One underpins the other, and active transport is a great good to be encouraged. Earlier today we passed a condolence motion for the late Honourable Mr Brian Dixon, and notable amongst his many achievements was Life Be In It, which, amongst encouraging all kinds of activity, certainly encouraged riding and an active lifestyle. Life Be In It is one of his great, great legacies. Accordingly we have an opportunity to create some legacy of our own.

Certainly since the time of Life Be In It, across the state programs like Life Be In It have helped encourage active lifestyles and in turn active transport as a genuine public transport alternative that has multiple benefits when done well. First of all, of course it clearly gets cars off the road, and there is widespread research that shows it is very effective in getting cars off the road, reducing congestion and reducing pollution. It is very effective in reducing emissions for the same reasons. It has clear and obvious health benefits. Life Be In It was a world-leading campaign on the health benefits of active lifestyles, and obviously active transport has health benefits. It also increases the mobility of our community. For those who do not drive or those who rely on other means of transport, it means that they have a way of getting around that is more suited to their area, to their means or to their ability. It is not, of course, a panacea to all transport needs, so we should not fall into the trap of glorifying it beyond what it does in a complex society where families and others have complex needs. But the main point is that is we must provide choice. It is about choice of transport according to the situation. Our role in this is actually to remove any friction between choices so that you can move seamlessly from each of those choices to another and that is not an obstacle to getting on a bike or getting into active transport or getting on public transport.

With all those benefits in play, the emergence of e-bikes and e-scooters and ridesharing is really welcome and quite transformational in terms of development because it adds these elements of convenience, it breaks down some cost impediments and it lowers the physical threshold for active transport to be viable. It is a very helpful fillip to push active transport towards a greater mass. There is more of it, and thereby, with greater participation, that generates a positive economic cycle – no pun intended.

Members interjecting.

Richard WELCH: Well, you did not even laugh at the joke. You could at least laugh at the pun – you are laughing on the inside. But if we have a positive cycle where we engender greater participation, greater participation justifies greater infrastructure, design, investment and accommodation in rules and settings, which in turn helps encourage greater participation. I think that points to an important point in this area – design, investment and accommodation in rules and settings – because this bill sensibly tries to introduce some much-needed rigour and structure to this emerging category of transport, and it is really quite an overdue measure.

I think most active transport users and advocates in the community, those who are thoughtful about these things, would recognise that improved professionalism and governance will help and that the initial efforts to introduce ridesharing and e-bikes in our communities have failed, as the Melbourne city example suggests it has. The reason it has failed is largely due to a lack of structure and forward thinking over this new technology. In that respect forward thinking about emergent transport technology is a bit of a familiar tale at any point in the last 10 years. We only very recently had a discussion in this chamber on an electric vehicle charging station strategy, a conversation that was at least 10 years too late and 10 years later than any other jurisdiction that is engaging with electric vehicles. I recall that debate being quite wearisome in some sense, in that we were discussing electric vehicle charging stations as if they were a novel concept and as if we were coming across them for the first time. The tendency of speakers on that bill was to talk up the amazing attributes of electric vehicles to justify having a charging station strategy. We went well into hyperbole about how it would save the planet if we had charging stations, when really it is just a bit of basic, sensible infrastructure that every country that has electrical vehicles has already been contemplating and working on for about 10 years.

There is another example as well, of course. When Uber came along, again, there was a bit of a fumble, it is fair to say. Unfortunately, it has been a case where there have been winners and losers, when it did not need to be, because there was not sufficient foresight into how it would be implemented and the frameworks and the rigour around that. We could also say it about things like AI. AI has been coming towards us, as I say, like a tidal wave on the horizon for years. Anyone with any foresight can see what a disrupter that is going to be. But yet here we are, lacking the frameworks and rigour around it to actually create the greatest benefit and minimise the harms.

You could also say the same thing applies to Myki. The planning and foresight with that was such that we chose, foolishly, to have a bespoke technology. We chose, foolishly, not to leverage technologies, methods and practices that already existed. We tried to reinvent the wheel on it – again, no pun intended – but now we have had a very, very messy implementation. A lot of money has been lost and wasted, and we are having to go back again and re-engineer a solution from a less-than-optimal situation. If we are talking about active transport and if we consider active transport as part of the transport mix, then very logically we should have been considering the fact that e-bikes and e-scooters should have been hireable with a Myki card. You get off the train with your Myki and you put your Myki card down and you pull your scooter out and off you go on the next leg of your journey.

Again, I will invoke the late Honourable Brian Dixon, because again, in transport and foresight he was the pioneer who championed the introduction of compulsory seatbelts in Victoria – and for that matter as a world first. I think it was in fact South Australia that made it also compulsory to have seatbelts in the back seat. I could be wrong, but that is my memory of it. Nevertheless, that is the power of foresight, in that it adapts to evolving needs and to new conditions and has the vision to think about what the future may bring. The Liberals and Nationals are probably doing more than anyone to be thinking about the very significant future needs that we will have to address in coming years. I think it is quite exciting actually. Big problems ultimately need big solutions, and I think we are grappling with them now.

Nevertheless, councils are actively engaged, participating and in some cases considering delaying what they are doing. Operators are wanting to put capital in, but like with any business, they need certainty and they need rules. You need to understand the costs, the taxes, the obligations and the division of responsibilities before you risk your capital, and you need to know you have got long-term tenure in the application of that capital. Planners, too, need certainty, because this will affect urban design. It will affect how and where charging stations are designed and placed, how collection centres are used, what infrastructure goes along it in terms of gathering up vehicles, charging vehicles and maintaining vehicles. The councils, as I said, need assurance that they are dealing with legitimate companies, that something that they implement in their jurisdiction will not be completely at odds with something introduced or implemented next door and that the citizens of their borough are not having to flip between technologies or suppliers – that we have some commonality. And the users in the market generally need to have confidence that the vendors are reliable and trustworthy, that there are no dodgy operators who will not keep to service standards or deploy substandard equipment – that they have bikes without a GPS, for example, or with poor quality batteries. In Western Australia there was a case of a supplier who deployed more bikes than they were authorised to because their strategy was to try and maximise their revenue by saturating areas with bikes and minimise their collection and retrieval costs by not having to gather them up because they were literally everywhere, and they were in breach of their agreements.

For the record, I confirm that I am a very big fan of e-bikes – I own one; my son rides to school on one – and I am a big fan of ridesharing concepts. As I said earlier, they add convenience and they allow more people of all demographics to take it up. Commuters can take it up. Inner-city trendies take it up. I have a vivid, vivid –

A member interjected.

Richard WELCH: Like Dr Heath, like all my colleagues. I have a very vivid memory from when I was living in London, in Soho, of seeing a hipster just seamlessly working their way through the backstreets of London, very elegantly – you know, satchel, flicked-back hair – almost serenely. It was a work of art. It actually made scootering look hipster, which is hard to do. From that moment on, when I saw that in action, I thought, ‘Now, this is actually the future.’ I clocked it. And this was 2014, I would say. Of course, it enfranchises other people, people whose minds are willing but perhaps their knees are not willing, to get around on active transport. And I think that is a great thing, because I have seen in parks around me, as I am sure everyone has, a lot of older people now getting out in the sunshine, travelling a distance they would not be able to walk. They would usually rather take a car or a taxi, but they are now riding through the park to get to wherever they need to go. I think that is a great development only made possible by e-bikes, as it happens. There are also tourist opportunities. I was looking the other day, and in New Zealand there are rail trail tours involving elaborate e-bikes. It opens up whole new sectors of engagement and commercial opportunity.

I am enthusiastic about the range of bike trails that we have across Melbourne, and in my electorate I am advocating heavily for enhancements to trails in the Plenty River area in the gorge, through the Plenty trail. There is a great eastern trail that can potentially get cyclists all the way from the city to Ringwood on an uninterrupted pathway if we just link up a couple more parts of the chain. There is one blockage at Elgar Road in Box Hill in my electorate, where we are very keen to get a crossing that would take people through to Surrey Park and onwards. I think there are numerous other bike path projects across the state, and they should be encouraged. Other countries do embrace bike lifestyles, if I can put it that way, but they do not just do it because they like biking. They do it because they accommodate it as well in their culture, in their habits, in their expectations – in the norms of how they share spaces between cars, pedestrians and cycles as well. We have got a little bit to learn in that area, and with good regulation and good process we can probably weed out the worst habits of all three of those so that there is a bit more acceptance and tolerance between the different kinds of road users.

It was disappointing, though, to see Melbourne council discontinue e-bike sharing. There were complaints about the dumping of bikes, there were complaints about the safety and the bad habits of users et cetera. But I think this should be understood as a failure of the management of the concept, not a failure of the concept itself. After all, the concept has worked extremely well elsewhere, whether it is in London or in Adelaide or in Argentina or in most of Europe. Riding an e-bike is much safer than riding a Vespa through Rome, for example. And we have some natural advantages in Melbourne that mean it lends itself to e-bike and shared bike concepts, because we are relatively flat as a city. But what we did not do in our implementation is remove some of the limitations on the program’s potential that arise in practice when you consider human nature in these things.

The programs in Adelaide, Darwin and London – in those programs the scooters, for example, do not have to be returned to a specific docking station at the end of use. They can be left anywhere, but this does not result in dumping, so to speak, because they are fitted with GPS, the users take a photograph of the location where they have left them and the vendors or the operators have active trailers going around all day to gather them up in real time. So in London all bikes, no matter where they are, are gathered within the day, and the next morning they are all back at their stations charged up. There are no bikes left lying about anywhere. In fact, there are penalties if there are.

Apart from preventing the inconvenience of bikes piled up outside people’s buildings or cluttering up footpaths and things of that nature – or worse, being thrown in the river – the really important aspect of that is that it creates predictability for the users. And that is essential to adoption, because if you do not know two days out of three whether there will be a bike at the place you are regularly commuting through or using, then you will never get in the habit of relying on it. So the predictability element is really essential. And if you do not have a policy and rigour around the offering of that that means there will always be a bike here, then no-one is going to adopt it at the rates we would like to see it adopted. So predictability is essential, and it must be woven into it.

There are also within the bill some additions in that rigour to PSO powers. PSOs are a terrific initiative from the Liberal Party and the coalition. No-one could imagine going back to the precoalition times without PSOs. They are a lasting benefit. And of course the additions to the PSO powers are to provide some safety provisions initially – safety around helmets, safety around speed and safety around dismounting sensibly. I think it is important that we have consistency in the regulations for all users of bikes, whether they are conventional or e-bikes or scooters, and diminish risks. I attend a market in Blackburn once a month. We set up that market along and overlapping a bike path. The cyclists are fantastic because they dismount, they walk their way through the market once a month and get back on. That rule has to be universal for scooter riders and for e-bike users as well. Consistency through the regulations for all users is a very sound and good thing, and PSOs would have a sensible role to play in maintaining that.

But there is one counterproductive element here. I am still seeking a little bit more clarity, but it is mooted that we will be banning e-bikes and e-scooters on public transport. It certainly came up in the minister’s second-reading speech in the other place. I think the thinking around it is a little bit confused on a couple of levels. First of all, we were talking about PSOs being able to enforce rules around e-bikes on public transport; now we are saying we are not going to have them on public transport at all, so there has been some fluidity in the thinking around that. It seems to imply that the thinking is not settled in that regard, which implies that it has not been clearly thought through in the first place.

Ryan Batchelor: There was a fire on a train.

Richard WELCH: Yes, but that is actually the issue. Correct – there was a fire on a train, but if there is a genuine risk of fire from e-bikes and e-scooters, why would it be only public transport that they are banned on? Do we then ban them in apartment buildings, car parks? Do we ban them in workplaces where people bring their bikes through the doors? Do we ban people putting their e-scooters in cars? There is certainly a safety consideration to be made. My point is not that there is no safety consideration, but why would you single out public transport alone for that? Why wouldn’t you give broader thought to this actually being an issue for EVs, scooters and bikes?

Ryan Batchelor: Because it is being done by Metro Trains. Metro Trains do not run buildings. They are doing a review.

Richard WELCH: Yes, but the government does pass legislation, doesn’t it, over all of this –

Ryan Batchelor: So you want to ban all e-scooters now.

Richard WELCH: Well, that is what you are proposing, in a very selective manner, on public transport.

Ryan Batchelor interjected.

Richard WELCH: I think it is a very sensible, reasonable consideration to say if you are going to ban it in that setting, then in the same breath you should be considering what the ramifications are in other settings. To simply single out one setting alone is a piecemeal way to look at an issue, and when you look at things in a piecemeal way, you miss the broader context.

Lee Tarlamis interjected.

Richard WELCH: Who is saying that?

Lee Tarlamis interjected.

Richard WELCH: No, I’m not.

Lee Tarlamis interjected.

Richard WELCH: No. Please – try a little bit harder. I understand broad thinking is not your forte. I mean, this is this is the government that started a $34 billion project without funding for it, so thinking ahead I know is something you need encouragement in. I am happy to reinforce it and give you some guidance in that area, because clearly if you are going to ban e-bikes on public transport, there are other settings in which it could also be a safety issue, so why consider it in isolation? It is exactly that kind of lack of rigour that means that e-bikes have not flourished in Victoria, because you do not think ahead. You never think ahead, so it is counterproductive.

That does actually lead me reasonably to what the bill does not address, where it could be improved and other considerations. It does go a small way to explaining why rideshares are not flourishing in Melbourne and in Victoria like they are in other jurisdictions. Here is my diagnosis of why they are not flourishing: I think the initial implementation was a little bit through rose-coloured glasses – that if we just put these bikes out we will be in some sort of active transport utopia and everyone will be riding off to have picnics in the park and everyone will look after the bikes properly. Unfortunately, as much as we would love humans to live that way, they do not.

We have seen problems with the poor regulation. That means service standards around where bikes get dumped and how they are maintained et cetera have been less than the community expected, which has been has led to resistance. We have had a bit of the law of the commons in that when something appears undervalued, then people consume it without care. There is perhaps an argument to say that even though we would encourage rideshare opportunities, there is a lot to be said for encouraging people to own their own personal e-bikes and e-scooters, because when it comes to care and respect for their use and others, that may be better served in partnership – not one or the other but certainly both.

Another thing the bill does not really go quite far enough into, I think – well, it could do and probably will need to – is safety overall. It only goes very lightly into the emergent safety risks around helmets. We know there have been people injured. One gentleman was seriously injured by an e-bike that had been hacked. You can hack into the software to remove the speed-limiting elements in the software. These bikes can actually go a lot faster than they are programmed to do if you hack them. They can go up to speeds of 40 or more kilometres per hour. Being hit by a bike at 40 kilometres an hour on a footpath when you are not expecting it can have very, very tragic outcomes, and there was a gentleman who was severely injured by just such a situation. We also have a lot of people home engineering bikes by augmenting conventional bikes at home, and they have a number of other risks associated around them; the braking is not calibrated to the power of the engine, and there are all sorts of other risks around it. If we were being a little bit more holistic about this, we would be looking into those.

It does not really go into the other part of the active transport puzzle in that it is not just about bike lanes in the CBD, where everyone puts a lot of focus; it is about dedicated trails and connections. I would like to see dedicated commuter trails that actually do not have to be directly connected to train stations or other forms but that actually give people an opportunity to come through suburbs and have a more direct, efficient route to the city that does not have to ape the roads or the railways to do so, because that is actually often a very inefficient route for cyclists.

Another consideration is cross-municipality. The bill is helpful in that it gives councils some certainty about the implementation of the ability of operators to establish their businesses within municipalities. But of course users do not respect a line on a map. They are going to travel far and wide, in and out. What we do not want to have are inconsistent billing systems or card systems or hiring systems simply between municipalities. We should have commonality; we should have standardisation. What we would want is technological interoperability between those. In some senses, particularly in urban areas, a council jurisdiction is a – (Time expired)

Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:59): I appreciate the opportunity to rise and speak on this bill, which is a very important bill, indeed for many of the reasons that Mr Welch went through, in that we are seeing new active transport technologies being used and being embraced by many people, and it is very good to see that. Whether it is major rail transport projects, whether it is upgrades to bus services or whether it is facilitating active transport measures, such as through this bill, there are many, many ways in which we can be making that sustainable transport transformation, and active transport is one of the most sustainable forms of transport. Things such as e-scooters and e-‍bikes play a very big and emerging role in that. Indeed for people that do have perhaps an inability or a disability that prevents them from riding a conventional bike or using other means of active transport, these can be very exciting.

We have seen a lot of innovations and a lot of different ideas. We had at some point Segways possibly taking hold, but those never really took off. It was a bit of a flash in the pan. We have seen e-bikes, though, and e-scooters come into their own much, much more. Indeed Mr Welch gave his recount of London from about 10 years ago. Just a few years ago in a former job, as I have said many times in this place, I was proud to be a union organiser covering retail worksites across many different parts of Melbourne and at one time looking after central Melbourne. In that time it was much more efficient as well as sustainable for me to be going from site to site by tram or train or even bus in some cases. On the rare occasions where that was not feasible, I actually made use of hire bikes, and it was a great experience. It was probably less a suave, sophisticated hipster cycling through Soho than it was a bit of a bad Mr Bean impression with me trying to work out how to ride a bike, but it was a great way to get around Melbourne, and these sorts of schemes are very good for the opportunities that they provide.

I will actually start this by going directly to the point of that work across councils. We do currently have a system where different local councils themselves are responsible for the regulation and management of these systems, and it will continue to be the case that they will have the choice of what sorts of systems they engage with or if they do not at all. However, one of the main features of this bill is that it is going to provide that centralised regulation process through the Department of Transport and Planning, requiring operators to be, amongst other things, a fit and proper person and those various other regulatory requirements too. I will touch on some of them shortly, but having those systems in place at DTP, rather than relying on each council to do that work, firstly, for both the cyclists themselves and the e-scooter users themselves, addresses that issue of inter-council transport. We have many councils across inner Melbourne, and it is not appropriate to expect people to be complying with those boundaries that are determined by long historical precedent. It is also beneficial to the councils because it means that they do not have to then go and reinvent the wheel effectively or develop those regulations themselves. We hear often when discussing the vertical fiscal imbalances in this country that councils are arguing for the state to take more financial control of things, and in this case we actually see what the state government is doing via the provisions that will be facilitated by this bill. We are actually seeing that regulation function taken up by DTP. As a result, councils will not have to then reinvent the wheel and do that work themselves. So it is very, very important that we are supporting local government with these provisions too.

Road safety is of course a very important part of this, and there will be another bill, I believe, today that goes into closer detail with some other road safety and indeed marine safety matters. But the standards that this bill introduces will require operators to implement various systems, technologies and safety measures, and these measures actually go directly to some of the points that Mr Welch was making in terms of, yes, some of the less ideal parts of human behaviour that can lead to some of these issues. Many of them will be able to be addressed by the provisions in these bills within those existing schemes, such as requiring the mandatory provision of helmets and verification of that; measures to ensure that a helmet is made available to a hirer of an e-scooter and verification that they are being worn; zone management, including capabilities to detect the location of sharing scheme vehicles; ability to slow or stop devices based on location; parking management, including measures to ensure that vehicles are parked appropriately at the end of a hire; footpath detection, including requirements for sharing scheme vehicles to be fitted with technology to detect footpaths and to take appropriate action, such as playing an audio warning or slowing or even stopping the vehicle when the vehicle is being detected as being ridden on a footpath; as well as measures such as detection of intoxicated riders, vehicle identification and other measures such as topple detection and the like too.

These are all very important things that this bill will enable regulation to apply to, to ensure that as this does continue to grow and become a more popular mode of transport it can be done in a way that keeps it safe for the users and for other road users, including vulnerable road users such as pedestrians, children, other cyclists or whatever the case may be. Indeed these do play an important role, and as Mr Welch touched upon, that last-mile operability of them and that integration with the transport network are very important.

Safety too is very important, and it is perfectly appropriate that a review is underway. There are certainly not many things that you want to see less if you are on a very crowded train carriage than a sudden and large fire taking place, especially if you are not at a station where you can get off. So it is perfectly proper and appropriate that that review is taking place at the moment so that we can get that balance right between support and encouragement of these new technologies and ensuring that we are not endangering public safety by doing so. This is a straightforward, sensible bill, and I do commend it to the house.

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:06): Back in February 2021 I brought a constituency question to this place about someone who had contacted my office. He was an older gentleman, and many older guys often have trouble walking. But this man in particular did not want to get one of those mobility scooters that you sometimes see. He had an electric scooter, an e-scooter, with a seat on it, which he thought was better because he could take it on the train more easily; it was much better than one of those great big mobility scooters. He thought that was really cool, but he was not allowed to use it. So I asked on his behalf about legalising these so that he could get around and use it on public transport. Then in 2021, in September, the government talked about the e-bike trials – this also included e-scooters – and for some reason probably only known to the government they only allowed rental companies to rent these out; they would not allow private ownership. Of course the scenario where literally everyone using these e-scooters was using them for the first time from a rental led to consequences which were entirely predictable and accidents left, right and centre. Then, back in 2023, the government finally allowed personal e-scooters to be used, which was wonderful – and I am sure that the older man who contacted my office in 2021 would be very happy about that – and now many, many people use e-scooters.

In fact one of my children recently bought an e-scooter, and he bought it for the purpose of getting to and from the train, as did many people. Now we are in a situation where the government is contemplating banning them from trains. Now, I note that it is just in a consultation phase, but I would urge anyone that happens to come across this speech to put in their view on this consultation and whether they think it is a good idea to ban these things from trains, because there are many people throughout the community that use them to access public transport because they live a bit far away from the train station and the buses might not be very convenient to get to the train station. So I would urge people to let the government know that they are not happy about the possibility of their e-scooter being unable to be taken on the train.

As for the bill itself, actually the Libertarian Party will not be opposing this bill. Most of the things in this bill are more sensible changes to the current regulations. They are not really taking away anything. My main concern is what has been foreshadowed through this government consultation process, the idea of banning e-scooters from public transport. It would cause problems for many Victorians, including older Victorians like the man who was a constituent of mine but also younger people who do not own a car. They find it a very convenient form of transport. I acknowledge that there are safety issues with batteries, but of all machines that use batteries, you would think that e-scooters are one of the least likely to be damaged because they are designed to be hard. Much more dangerous you would think would be laptops being dropped and things like this; they worry about that on planes quite often. For those reasons I will not be opposing this bill, but I would encourage everyone to take part in the consultation process that the government has put out and make their voices heard if they care about e-scooters.

Sheena WATT (Northern Metropolitan) (16:10): Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak today on the Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards) Bill 2025, which is really a timely and important piece of legislation that deals with a rapidly growing part of our transport system, e-scooters. In just a few short years e-scooters have gone from being a novelty to being very much a familiar sight in cities across Victoria, especially here in Melbourne. Just a few years ago within my own electorate the City of Melbourne and the City of Yarra joined our state’s e-scooter trial, and we have seen how popular these vehicles have become.

E-scooters do fill a gap. They offer a low-cost solution to first and last kilometre access and reduce congestion by giving people another alternative to private vehicle use. You see them near train stations, scattered across universities and parked on street corners, and for many people, especially young people, students and shift workers, e-scooters offer a convenient, affordable and sustainable way to get from A to B. For someone who does not own a car, an e-scooter can be the difference between making a job interview and missing it, between showing up for the late shift and getting a safe ride home. It is so true to say that these are small vehicles and they carry enormous potential when done right.

But with their rise in popularity has come a rise in concerns around safety, and this is what this bill before us seeks to address, because while e-scooters can offer real benefits, they can also pose some real threats. We have all seen people zipping around town on these scooters on footpaths, and we have seen them dumped in places where they block access or create tripping hazards. We have heard the stories about injuries both to riders and to pedestrians. For people with mobility issues, for older residents or for those navigating this city with a cane, a pram or a wheelchair, these issues are not just annoying, they are exclusionary. They affect safety and accessibility in a very, very real way. So it is our job to ensure that this form of transport, while welcomed, is also safe, well managed and respectful of the shared nature of our public spaces.

This bill is about putting in place a smarter, safer and more enforceable regulatory framework for sharing vehicle schemes, with a focus on e-scooters. It builds on the lessons of the past three years of the state’s e-scooter trial – one of the most comprehensive in the country, might I add – and it fulfils the Allan Labor government’s commitment to strengthening regulation in this space. At the heart of this legislation is the preapproval process for vehicle sharing scheme operators, and this means that operators will now have to provide e-scooters for hire in Victoria and they will have to comply by applying to the Secretary of the Department of Transport and Planning and showing that they are a fit and proper person to operate a scheme. This is a significant improvement on the current scheme, which relies on local council agreements alone. Instead of municipalities reinventing the wheel, councils are going to be supported by a clearer statewide framework. It means greater consistency, clearer expectations and better outcomes for everyone involved. This bill also paves the way for enforceable minimum safety and technology standards to be prescribed in regulation for all sharing scheme operators.

These standards respond directly to the kinds of issues that members of the public and local government have raised throughout the trial. These include helmet use and verification, ensuring that helmets are not just provided but actually worn by the rider, and footpath detection technology so that devices can recognise when they are being ridden somewhere they should not be and respond accordingly, such as issuing audio warnings or slowing down automatically. Parking management is also an issue that has been raised, with systems to ensure that scooters are parked upright, securely and without blocking pedestrian access. There is zone management so that these devices can be slowed or stopped if ridden into sensitive areas or indeed outside of permitted zones, and there are measures to detect intoxicated or impaired riders such as cognitive response testing and other vehicle safety requirements such as speaker systems for alerts, topple detection and unique identifiers for every one of these vehicles.

These issues are not just hypothetical; they are significant, and I have heard about them in my community. Scooters have been left lying across footpaths. There have been near misses at intersections or riders doubling up without helmets. These kinds of behaviours erode public trust and undermine the credibility of the entire sharing scheme model. This bill sends a clear message that putting e-scooters on our streets will not come before proper oversight. Operators will need to demonstrate that they can meet safety standards before their devices hit the road. I am quite pleased to see this legislation before us and just say that this bill is not anti scooter, it is in fact pro safety, it is pro accountability, it is pro community and it is pro access. It recognises that these vehicles are here to stay but insists that they be managed properly. It reflects that technology is moving fast and government has a role to play in ensuring that community safety is not left behind. It puts people, especially pedestrians, children, older Victorians and people with disability, at the very centre of this conversation. Public space must remain public, it must remain safe and it must remain accessible to all.

I want to acknowledge that this legislation is only part of the answer; cultural change is just as important. With that in mind, can I take a moment to say to everyone out there who does indeed ride an e-scooter: please stay safe, please wear a helmet, follow the rules and be aware of those around you. E-scooters are a great way to get around, but they are not toys. Nobody deserves to be injured, and no-one deserves to lose their life just getting from one place to another. I have heard very loud and clear from medical professionals that there is more work to be done to address the safety concerns, and I am hoping this bill before us today does just that. I commend this bill to the house.

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (16:16): I rise to speak on behalf of the Greens on the Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards) Bill 2025. This bill comes to us following several years of trial e-scooter share hire schemes in a handful of councils around the inner city area of Melbourne, and I am pleased to see the government demonstrating through this legislation that they appreciate the role of e-scooters and other similar vehicles, which is important, in Victoria’s transport landscape. The Greens and I agree with the government that shared e-scooters are on the whole a great thing. They can provide really important last-mile links between a train station or tram stop and someone’s house or provide connections in directions that public transport is lacking – travelling east–west in parts of Melbourne, where the tram network runs north–south, for example.

We should not gloss over the fact that public transport is lacking in a lot of these places, and it is frankly ridiculous that our bus network does not provide good cross-town connections that link together our tramlines. Labor does urgently need to reform the bus network across Melbourne and indeed across the state to provide fast, frequent and direct routes. That need is not going to go away, and this bill to regulate e-scooters and other shared mobility will not solve it. In the meantime e-scooters perform an important role in our transport system, and in some situations and locations they probably always will. So it is important that they be properly regulated.

As with any popular new technology, there have been some teething problems relating to the widespread adoption of e-scooter share schemes, including safety and accessibility issues. To some extent throughout this e-scooters have been unfairly demonised in the media, presented as a scourge on our streets and endangering riders, pedestrians and car drivers. I think a lot of this is due to the novelty of e-scooters as a widespread mode of transport and is decreasing as more and more people adopt this technology. We are so accustomed to this car-dominant culture that all the deaths and injuries caused by cars, SUVs and truckzillas hardly register in the public consciousness anymore, and it seems to be a fact of life that the general public now simply accepts, which it should not.

Many of the issues with e-scooters do often arise from the fact that space in our cities has not been made for them. When most of the space dedicated to transport in our inner city roads is built for cars, it is up to scooter riders, cyclists and pedestrians to squabble over what is left. There is no doubt that scooters reaching up to 20 kilometres an hour should not be competing for space with people walking, and frankly truckzillas reaching 60 kilometres an hour or more should not be competing for space with people on bikes either. In some cases, on quieter residential streets, the solution can be slowing down and calming traffic, and I am pleased to see that Merri-bek council has recently been approved to trial 30-kilometre-an-hour areas in Brunswick and Coburg. In other cases on busier roads with more and faster car traffic we do need more separated lanes and paths to make cycling and scooting a safe and comfortable option for people of all ages and abilities. I am hopeful that as more people embrace these modes of transport, the more likely it is that the government will pursue both of these options, keeping people walking safe from people on bikes and scooters, who are in turn safe from cars – not to mention decreasing congestion and carbon emissions by encouraging people to leave those cars at home.

This bill introduces certain elements of a framework under which councils can enter into individual agreements with private e-scooter share hire companies. Overall, it is good that the Department of Transport and Planning will take some of the burden off councils by pre-approving the vehicle share hire operators that councils can choose from and by prescribing safety standards like footpath detection and helmet detection.

This bill is a good start in signalling to councils that e-scooter share hire schemes are here to stay and encouraging councils to participate by entering into their own agreements. But I do worry that in its current form the bill is a half-measure that ignores many of the problems we have seen since scooter trials began in a select number of councils. As it stands, the City of Melbourne has banned share hire scooters altogether, while Yarra has effectively done so by raising fees by 400 per cent. I understand the government’s hope is that in introducing this bill, councils will have the confidence to enter into contracts with e-scooter and other micromobility companies. That is far from a guarantee.

Let us imagine a scenario where I need to get from my electorate office out in Brighton to Parliament House but a tree has fallen on the tracks and the Sandy line is out of action. Now, the trip by bike is not actually much slower than that by train, but I have left my bike at home on this day. In this imagined scenario I am lucky that Bayside council has entered into a contract with an e-scooter company, so I can grab a nearby scooter and head off into Parliament. Unfortunately, though, in this hypothetical scenario my luck runs out when I get to Elwood, because hypothetically the City of Port Phillip has not entered into an agreement, and the scooter just grinds to a halt the moment I cross the border. I have actually had this happen to me when I was trying to get from Port Phillip through Stonnington. Perhaps in this scenario Port Phillip has entered into an agreement, but it is with a different scooter company. When I reach St Kilda Road a little later in my journey, I will have to roll the dice again as I enter the City of Melbourne. In fact, I would like to ride on the protected bike lanes on St Kilda Road, but the road itself is a boundary between local government areas. Will I find myself able to scoot along northbound lanes in one city but not southbound lanes in another?

This sort of scenario brings to mind colonial governments who built railway networks of different gauges before federation. For 81 years the cry would ring out – ‘Albury, all change’ – and grumpy passengers would need to swap from a broad-gauge Victorian train to a standard-gauge New South Wales train, sometimes in the middle of the night. Thankfully, this line was fully standardised in the 1960s, but to this day Albury station’s massively long platform stands as a testament to that folly. Will racks of scooters from competing firms, lined up on the borders of Melbourne’s local government areas, become the modern-day equivalent?

The Greens have raised the problem of council-by-council scooter patchworks with the government, and the government have told us that it is being done this way because scooters are mostly used on council-controlled roads. But so are buses mostly operational on council-controlled roads, and the last time I took a bus I did not have to hop off at the council boundary. But the government does seem determined to leave this matter up to councils for now. It is true that councils absolutely should be involved in running these share hire schemes, and fortunately there is plenty that the state government could do to help councils out and make it feasible for them to run these schemes in a responsible and user-friendly way.

In addition to protected bike lanes for bikes and scooters to keep them separate from cars, and working with councils to implement lower speed zones, I urge the government to support councils in providing dedicated parking for scooters. One of the biggest complaints we hear about e-scooters is the tendency for inconsiderate riders to leave them blocking footpaths. Yarra City Council has had a disability discrimination case lodged against it because scooters were blocking wheelchair users from freely moving along the footpaths. If it were clear that scooters needed to be parked in ways that do not block footpaths at all and if the state provided support for councils to set aside scooter and bike parking bays, much of this problem would be alleviated.

The transport advocacy organisation Streets Alive Yarra points out that in cities like Washington, DC, it is common for local governments to set aside a single kerbside parking space, which can hold a number of parked scooters and bikes, keeping them off footpaths altogether. The proposed regulations like helmet detection, footpath detection and parking management sound like good ways to increase the safety of riders and the public in conjunction with proper infrastructure like dedicated parking bays and separate protected lanes, which I would like to see the government commit to. But even then we cannot just leave it to private companies to self-regulate. I note that the bill includes penalties for companies not adhering to the standards that will be set by these regulations, and enforcement will be key. Otherwise enforcement will be limited to infringements that can now be issued by protective services officers, per this bill, to individual riders, who may be set up to fail in the absence of adequate infrastructure like a place to ride or to park safely.

Overall, the Greens and I welcome this legislation, and we will be supporting it. We see e-scooters and micromobility vehicles as an important part of Victoria’s transport network, and we welcome these steps to making them safer for riders and the public. We encourage the government to go further than this by improving safe infrastructure like separated bike and scooter lanes, supporting councils to put parking bays on the street rather than on the footpath and ultimately working on developing a less fragmented governance model. In the meantime I hope that users will not have to change scooters every time they reach a council boundary.

John BERGER (Southern Metropolitan) (16:26): I rise to make a contribution on the Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards) Bill 2025. I would like to first thank my colleague in the other place Minister Williams, who has served as the Minister for Public and Active Transport for the past two years and worked hard to overhaul our regulatory framework over the years, particularly as vehicle sharing has become more common. Vehicle-sharing services are a central consideration to this legislation, which ensures that there is more oversight and approval for rideshare services in Victoria and helps to protect passengers along the way.

E-scooters being made available via sharing schemes are a useful and popular mode of transport for people wanting to travel short distances. They have proven to be popular in Victoria, with Melburnians in particular taking up the devices in high numbers. Not only do they help ease congestion, they are an affordable mode of transport and provide first- and last-mile access to public transport. As such it is vital to ensure the safety of e-scooter riders, pedestrians and other road users.

The Victorian government undertook a trial of the use of e-scooters throughout Victoria in 2021–22. E-scooter riders using these devices as part of the trial were required to follow road rules, which included the requirement of wearing helmets, restrictions on speed and requirements on where e-scooters were able to be lawfully ridden. The trial concluded in October 2024, permanently allowing sharing schemes to provide private e-scooters to operate across Victoria. The government also announced that new legislation would be introduced in 2025, setting out new requirements for e-scooter share hire operators to apply to councils to operate them in their municipalities, with minimum standards to be enforced through a preapproval scheme. The bill upholds that commitment. The trial program showed us that e-scooters provide the community with a low-cost and emission-reducing form of alternative transport. Many Victorians have used them successfully to make millions of trips over the past three years.

But while e-scooters have become a stable form of transport, both for personal use and for delivery through rideshare services, they are still new devices to many in the community. As it stands, the regulatory framework in this place for transportation in Victoria is not up to scratch with community expectations and standards when it comes to e-scooters. We need to ensure there is proper oversight and regulation of e-scooters in the community, and that is why this bill seeks to improve compliance and safety for all. Ultimately the bill makes important changes to deliver on the government’s commitment to providing greater certainty to councils and sharing scheme operators, all of which will make e-scooter use much safer and enable the better management of parking and amenity issues.

Safety on our roads is imperative and something I am very passionate about, as I served the Transport Workers’ Union as its national president prior to coming to this place and serving in this chamber. There are many rideshare workers who use e-scooters and similar vehicles to deliver to customers, particularly in western portions of my constituency in Southern Metro closer to the CBD, where e-scooters were commonplace until the ban enacted by the City of Melbourne. Safety is of great importance to me and the Allan Labor government, and that is why we are pushing ahead with this legislation to establish a clear regulatory framework for e-scooters and related matters. This bill inserts a definition for what constitutes an electric scooter offence into the Road Safety Act 1986. As it currently stands, there is no set definition pertaining to the amenity of electric scooters in transport legislation in Victoria, and as such you can often find them lying around in the city, usually for the use of e-scooter hiring services. Some local government areas, like the City of Melbourne, eventually moved to ban electric scooters altogether from the roads and sidewalks. This amendment now inserts further provisions into the principal act to make it so that electric scooters are regulated and users can be held accountable for their actions.

It is simple, common sense that people that use electric scooters should be held accountable for any incidents and disruptions caused by their behaviour. For example, one way this is enabled is by the empowerment of the protective services officers, otherwise known as PSOs, to prosecute an electric vehicle offence. This means PSOs can help uphold public safety when electric scooter users get out of control and break the law. That is not to say that all electric scooter users are breaking the law, but we need to ensure we have proper mechanisms in place to deal with the few that are doing the wrong thing, and that is what this amendment will do here. It will empower PSOs to continue upholding public safety and order on this new mode of transport and will make sure users of electric scooters are held accountable for their actions, where the existing legislation does not provide for any repercussions. The existing legislation provisions relating to the regulation of vehicle sharing scheme operators set out in the Road Safety Act 1986 will be repealed and re-enacted in the Transport (Compliance and Miscellaneous) Act 1983 to form a comprehensive approach to regulating vehicle sharing operations.

Overall the bill represents the government’s continued commitment to improving transport options, accessibility and amenity for the community. With that, I commend the bill to the house.

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (16:32): Very briefly from me today on the Transport Legislation Amendment (Vehicle Sharing Scheme Safety and Standards Bill) 2025, an important piece of legislation that will improve the regulation of e-scooters here in Victoria: the Allan Labor government has an absolute commitment to making sure that our public transport system is improved. We have got the Metro Tunnel coming on line. We have got our massive improvements across the metropolitan rail network through things like the level crossing program. One level crossing removal at Glen Huntly is two years old this week. It is a fantastic addition to the local community in and around Glen Huntly and Neerim roads in Caulfield East.

Alongside improvements we are making to our public transport network, we are making improvements in safety standards to our active transport network, and through this piece of legislation, improving the safety standards that apply to electric forms of active transport, such as e-scooters and e-bikes. We are making sure that the systems that are in place, the regulations that are in place and the safety standards that are in place for this incredibly important part of the active transport network here in Victoria and particularly here in metropolitan Melbourne meet the needs of the community and meet the safety needs of those who are not users but who are participants, pedestrians and the like in our communities but also make it easier and safer for those who do want to use this new method of active transport, to make sure that they have got the transport that meets their needs as commuters, whether that be to and from work or whether that be recreationally in our community.

There are a range of measures in this bill, which my colleagues have covered off. I just very briefly wanted to lend my voice and lend my support to this legislation – to the safety standards that go with it and the improvements in the management, operation and regulation of the use particularly of e-scooters and e-bike – and to support those methods and those means of active transport in our community. I commend the bill to the house.

Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop, Minister for Housing and Building, Minister for Development Victoria and Precincts) (16:34): Today we have had some pretty wideranging contributions, in particular about the utility and about the sophistication of e-scooter technology around Melbourne and also overseas. It has been a really important set of contributions because it reminds us as much as anything that the roads that we use and the way in which we enforce and create and sustain safety standards must be done in a way that reflects the changing nature of road use.

The popularity of e-scooters in Victoria, and particularly in our built-up and metropolitan areas, is really testament to their convenience. They do enable people to travel, as was pointed out in a number of contributions, relatively short distances, in particular where intermodal connections are not perhaps as available as they might otherwise be, and this is something which, again, is able to be deployed when and as people need it where e-scooters are used.

Provided through sharing schemes, e-scooters have become a really practical and affordable transport option for people, and they do help to reduce congestion, which we know is one of the things that often causes people to spend hours in traffic getting from home to work or from home to the kids being dropped off at school or to sport or even for shopping and community purposes. So reducing that congestion, particularly in our growing suburbs, and also making sure that we can help to better connect people with those first- and last-kilometre connections is of essential importance.

But safety is of paramount importance, and this is where, again, the trial of e-scooter use under specific conditions back in December 2021 was something which in Ballarat we were able to expand and to selected Melbourne council areas, as has been pointed out by other speakers. Riders were required to follow the road rules, including in wearing helmets, adhering to speed limits and riding only in permitted areas. As I recall, Minister for Public and Active Transport Gabrielle Williams alongside the member for Wendouree Juliana Addison in the other place were spotted using e-scooters in Ballarat, resplendent in helmets, at the time that that trial began. This was really about making sure that we can establish through trials an appropriate framework for the way in which e-scooters can be shared and operate across Victoria.

We also committed to introducing legislation in 2025 to establish those minimum standards for e-scooter share hire operators seeking to operate within council areas, and this bill is a really important demonstration of that commitment. It also underscores the importance of the value of e-scooters, with ever present cost-of-living challenges, frankly, for communities and for households. They are a low-cost and also low-emission transport option, and they should not be ignored as part of the range of ways in which people can get around in their own ways and on their own terms.

Over the last three years Victorians have made millions of trips using e-scooters, and we have got some of the strictest regulations of e-scooters. But they are still a relatively new mode of transport, and this is where we do have room to improve compliance with safety rules and to support better enforcement. The bill empowers PSOs to issue infringement notices for specific e-scooter offences, enhancing enforcement capacity and encouraging safer rider behaviour. There are preapproval processes which have been discussed in the course of the debate, and there are standards that will be prescribed in regulation following the bill’s passage. They might include helmet use and verification, zone management, parking management, footpath detection, the detection of intoxicated riders, verification that riders are not otherwise impaired, and vehicle requirements, including vehicle identification. We will also be making sure that existing provisions under the Road Safety Act 1986 requiring operators to enter agreements with councils are repealed and re-enacted under the Transport (Compliance and Miscellaneous) Act 1983, creating a unified regulatory approach.

Extending enforcement powers for PSOs is also important, enabling them to issue traffic infringement notices for e-scooter offences. This is something which only police officers can do at the moment, but the change aligns with PSOs’ existing powers and reflects the role that e-scooters play in connecting people to public transport. As I said, that multimodal connection is so important for people to move well and effectively and efficiently around the city. It will also improve enforcement using existing resources and support, and it reflects our ongoing commitment to expanding safe, accessible and well-managed transport options for Victorians.

There have been some questions in the course of this particular debate and some areas where clarification has been sought, so I do just want to provide with the time I have available some context on, firstly, councils having the power to decide and implement their own minimum standard regulation – division 7, proposed section 207O – or whether they would be standardised statewide. Proposed section 207O of the bill enables the Governor in Council on the recommendation of the Minister for Public and Active Transport to prescribe regulations that set the minimum standards that all approved category A sharing scheme operators must comply with. The bill does not give local councils an equivalent power to make regulations or set standards that would apply to all operators or operators permitted to operate in their local area, but councils are able to enter into agreement with preapproved sharing scheme operators. As a term or condition of such an agreement, local councils are able to set requirements in addition to minimum standards that apply to all operators that are bespoke or unique to that particular council area.

There was also a question as to whether councils would be able to individually set the fees charged to approved category A scheme operators and in particular whether these fees could be used to fund parking bays for vehicles under the scheme. To provide a context and an answer to that, it is important to note that the bill enables the minister to prescribe in regulations a fee for assessing applications for the approval of sharing scheme operators, and while a fee is not intended to be prescribed when the scheme commences, if a fee were to be prescribed then this fee would not be provided to local councils. Instead the revenue would be paid into the government’s consolidated revenue fund. The bill does not directly provide for fees to be prescribed that would fund local councils. However, as a term or condition of an agreement with a sharing scheme operator, local councils are free to set a fee to recover their costs associated with the agreement. The bill does not restrict a local council from establishing such a fee or the amount of the fee.

A further question that came to government in the course of the discussions around this bill relates to adherence to the regulations enforced following approval for a sharing scheme and whether the Department of Transport and Planning would have an ongoing role in ensuring that operators are doing what they say. There are a number of mechanisms to ensure that sharing scheme operators continue to comply with the prescribed minimum standards, and the bill provides that the term of approval for a sharing scheme operator is five years. After this time the approval lapses and operators will need to apply to the Secretary of the Department of Transport and Planning for new approval and to provide evidence that they are able to meet those minimum standards. Additionally, DTP has the power to monitor compliance during the term of approval. This would occur based on its own investigation of the operator or via intelligence and information from local councils. The Secretary of the Department of Transport and Planning has the power to undertake a show cause process if it is satisfied that the operator does not meet the minimum standards, and under this process operators have an opportunity to submit evidence to show that they are complying with standards. Having regard to the submission from the operator, the secretary of DTP may also then choose to revoke or not revoke an operator’s approval.

We had a further question in relation to the user experience and what it would be like if different councils had contracts with different companies, and in this regard the bill establishes a legislative framework for local governments to manage issues specific to vehicle-sharing schemes and their impact on amenity and accessibility. It enables local councils to opt in to these sharing schemes operating in their municipality and also set the conditions on how such schemes operate. However, the agreements only have effect in that local council area and not outside the boundary. This means that an e-scooter from a particular sharing scheme operator can only operate within the boundary of the local council the operator has an agreement with. Adjoining councils may decide to enter into agreements with different operators, so if that occurs then the hirer of an e-scooter would not be able to use that scooter across multiple councils. To address this, local councils may choose to enter into agreements with one or more sharing scheme operators, including those that have agreements with neighbouring councils. Entering into agreements with operators that have agreements with other councils would increase the area that a hirer could use the e- scooter in from a particular operator.

I hope that does provide some of the context in response to questions that were raised in the course of discussions around this bill. I want to thank people who have participated in the debate today, and I also just want to place on the record gratitude for the level of care taken to debate something which fundamentally comes down to road safety. It fundamentally comes down to the safety of road users, of e-scooter users and of the people around them. We know that common sense is always something that we should take with us when using a vehicle and in and around roads but also for the care and safety of others. On that basis I thank everybody for their contributions. I trust that the information that I have provided in summing up this bill will be of assistance to those who had sought it, and I commend the bill to the house.

Motion agreed to.

Read second time.

Third reading

Harriet SHING (Eastern Victoria – Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop, Minister for Housing and Building, Minister for Development Victoria and Precincts) (16:45): I move, by leave:

That the bill be now read a third time.

Motion agreed to.

Read third time.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Michael Galea): Pursuant to standing order 14.28, the bill will be returned to the Assembly with a message informing them that the Council have agreed to the bill without amendment.