Electric bikes and scooters are great. They provide a fun, easy, and practical mode of transportation that slots nicely between walking and driving. Because of this, there are a decent number of students here at Cibola who use them to get to and fro school. Still, they aren’t perfect. Aside from issues with range, quality, and battery degradation, the main roadblock to e-scooter or ebike ownership is cost. While being significantly cheaper than purchasing and maintaining a car, they still require a decent chunk of change to purchase. The cheapest new electric scooter will cost you about $250, but if you want something with half decent range and quality, you are easily looking at $400-600 for an entry level model. Same goes with ebikes, where an entry level model from an established brand will run you near to $1000. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Some e-scooters take it as far as $2700 (!) and 50 mph (!!), while various ebikes can easily match those numbers. So, comes the question, would you feel comfortable parking one of those bad boys out front of Cibola with nothing but a $5 bike lock from Walmart preventing it from walking off?

I mean no disrespect to our security staff, who work hard to keep this campus safe, but you can’t deny the fact that e-scooters and ebikes make great targets. A decent sized pair of bolt cutters will cut through that little lock like a hot knife through butter, and then all it takes is half a second to mount the thing and ride off. And considering what these things go for, well, you can see the problem.

So, what does our security staff do to prevent your ebike or e-scooter from walking off (or, rather, riding off)? I talked to Curtis Green, of APS Police, about this. “We have a ton of cameras,” he said. He also says that CSA makes rounds patrolling the campus. I asked if there had been any reports of anything being stolen from the bike rack. “No, there hasn’t been any,” he said, adding, “Not in the 6 years I’ve been here.”

I also talked to a couple of students who ride ebikes or e-scooters to school, to see how comfortable they are with parking them outside, on campus. Esai Luera, a freshmen here at Cibola, rides an electric scooter to school daily. When asked whether he felt safe leaving his scooter at school, he said, “It depends.” However, after he claims to have found someone tinkering with his scooter out front, he says that he now parks his scooter in his teachers’ classrooms instead of the bike rack out front. He also claimed that, “Sometimes seniors cut the locks,” later adding that he believes that they are cut with intention to steal, not just as a joke in poor taste.

I talked also to Reagan Parker, a junior at Cibola who rides an electric scooter to school. Like Esai, she does not park her scooter out front. “Everything else gets stolen,” she says. “I’ve got a $300 scooter, and I don’t want to risk it.” When asked if she knew anything about seniors cutting bike locks, she replied, “I’ve heard rumors, but I can’t say anything firsthand.”

So, is it safe to park your e-scooter or ebike out front? I’ll leave that up to you to decide. But, considering what I’ve learned writing this article, I doubt I’d feel comfortable parking a $400 piece of kit out front, no matter the number of security cameras we’ve got.