E-bikes and e-scooter companies have for years operated in the District’s bustling corridors. But recently, reports of teenagers using the rental vehicles to commit crimes have drawn attention in the media and online.
One of the latest incidents happened Wednesday evening, when D.C. police issued a lookout for a group of six teens seen fleeing on Lime bikes and scooters after an alleged robbery near the National Archives downtown.
D.C. police don’t formally track how many crimes involve electric bikes and scooters, and the incidents represent a small proportion of publicly available crime reports.
Still, a flurry of incidents in recent months involving micromobility devices has garnered significant attention, especially at a time when the San Francisco-based Lime and other companies are seeking to renew their permits to operate in D.C.
“Unfortunately, e-bikes and scooters are increasingly being used to commit crimes in our city,” Lindsey Appiah, D.C.’s deputy mayor for public safety, said in a statement. “While we have a common interest in increasing micromobility options for residents, we cannot compromise our efforts to decrease crime in D.C.”
In D.C., riders must be at least 18 years old to rent an e-bike or e-scooter, according to the District Department of Transportation. Lime, one of the most popular vendors, recently began asking users in D.C. for a photo to verify their age.
Concerns about rental vehicles enabling teen crime and misbehavior aren’t new. Last fall, Lime and fellow e-bike rental company Veo responded by agreeing to lower the maximum speed boost on their e-bikes across the city.
Erika Duthely, Lime’s regional head of government relations, said the company has a law enforcement response team that works with D.C. police when crimes occur.
“Alleged crimes involving a Lime vehicle are a tiny fraction of Lime rides but any level of crime is unacceptable,” Duthely said in a statement. If someone is using a GPS-tracked Lime vehicle to break the law, D.C. police can subpoena that information, Duthely added.
Ridership of rentable electric scooters and electric bicycles has grown across the United States and locally over the past decade. As of June, 76 U.S. cities had an e-scooter system but no dockless bikeshare system, and 56 had both a dockless bikeshare and an e-scooter system, according to the federal Department of Transportation.
In the District, there were more than 3.8 million e-scooter trips and more than 3 million e-bike trips during the first half of 2026, according to city data. By comparison, there were about 140,000 e-scooter trips during the same period in 2019 and about 287,000 e-bike trips during the same period in 2021.
To help prevent underage use in D.C., Lime users are now asked either to upload a selfie or a photo of their I.D. before each ride to verify their age, said company spokesperson Jacob Tugendrajch. But he said a problem with selfies is that some teenagers are altering their photos to make themselves appear older than they really are or scanning an adult’s face.
Tugendrajch said Lime banned more than 100 accounts this week and planned to continue banning accounts at that rate until the problem subsides.
“What’s happening is unfortunate timing. Right as we announced that we were stepping up our efforts, there was a recent spate of alleged incidents, but that is only going to make us work even harder on this issue,” Tugendrajch said.
In a statement, DDOT spokesperson German Vigil said “there are rules and there are regulations that the companies follow” regarding age verification, “but no, the technology is not quite there yet.”
Still, Vigil said some incidents have involved privately owned e-bikes and scooters.
Interim D.C. police Chief Jeffery Carroll addressed the increasing usage of e-bikes and e-scooters by crime suspects after a news conference Tuesday about a series of burglaries in Northeast Washington.
Carroll said police have closed criminal cases by working with the companies that provide the vehicles to identify the people who were riding them. He also emphasized that people who use the rental vehicles are also the victims of crimes, not just the perpetrators.
“It’s not one side or the other,” Carroll said
As micromobility devices have grown more omnipresent, academics have grown divided on the relationship — if one even exists — between the vehicles and crime.
When it comes to crime, people tend to have vastly different reactions to electric bikes and scooters compared to cars, according to Asha Weinstein Agrawal, a researcher at San José State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute.
When people commit crimes with motor vehicles, that doesn’t lead to people calling for cars to be restricted, she said. But with micromobility devices, people tend to assume that the device is the problem, Agrawal said. She likened the phenomenon to a “moral panic” surrounding the devices.
“Someone who wants to commit a crime is probably going to do it,” she said, “regardless of whether they can use an e-bike.”
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