SAN MARCOS, Texas — Scooters from Austin-based company, Unicorn showed up in San Marcos the night before Texas State students headed back to campus.

  • Dockless scooters dropped off in San Marcos
  • Never got official approval from city
  • Pulled from the streets for now

Officials with the city of San Marcos say they were surprised at the Unicorn scooters appearance. They say the company's CEO reached out on January 21.

"By email, notifying us that they intended to start operations. Until that point, we had never heard of them before," Economic Development Administrator Kevin Burke said. "This is a new company that was apparently intending to do a limited release of scooters in San Marcos."

Unicorn never got official approval from the city to release its scooters. The company has since pulled them from the streets.

"You are not allowed to operate your private business in the public right of way without having some form of license agreement with the city," Burke said.

The temporary ban was to be in place for 90 days. It was enforced in response to Unicor placing the scooters within city limits without a permit. The company also initally placed its scooters in San Marcos, until the city requested they be removed. 

Burke cited a bike-share program called VeoRide as a company that recently launched with a license agreement. The program started in September and currently has an agreement with the city and Texas State to operate legally.

"We've not gone through that process with scooters," Burke said.

There's been talks of bringing dockless scooters to San Marcos, but as of right now, nothing is in the works.

"We're not quite ready. We don't know exactly how we want to address this," Burke said. "We're not sure both where the university administration is at or where the city council is at. So please be patient with us. Don't go and just drop off a bunch of scooters in the street and start operating without permission."

Spectrum News reached out to "Unicorn" for comment. The company's CEO, Nick Evans, says: "Unicorn was overwhelmed by the interest in our scooters today in San Marcos! We intended to do some testing under-the-radar today, but the secret got out quickly! We have decided to pull the scooters off the streets this evening in order to work with the city of San Marcos to make sure the roll out is as safe as possible and welcomed by all of San Marcos's residents."

Burke said he can’t say for certain whether scooters will officially be allowed in the future, but he noted the city’s Transportation Master Plan includes future planning for better bicycle infrastructure, which could likely also support dockless scooters.​

"Absent that infrastructure, people are going to be riding on the sidewalks and that's where you have a greater potential for interactions and collisions between pedestrians and scooter riders," Burke said. "So, that's something that we're really going to have to think through as we approach the idea of scooters."

If or when dockless scooters do arrive to San Marcos, Burke said the city will likely look to San Antonio or Austin for direction. Those cities rolled out pilot programs initially.

"We'll propose something along those lines where we'll have a time limited program with a certain set of requirements that these companies need to meet and then we'll end up selecting a limited number or maybe even just one company that we want to allow to proceed and not have 5 or 6 companies operating at once," Burke said.

According to Burke, several of the scooter companies that are already operating nationwide have already been reaching out, eager to serve the San Marcos area.

"Believe me, I get emails several times every week from one or another of the companies," Burke said. "We've really only had some very initial conversations at the administrative and at the council level about scooters. We're certainly not to a point where we're ready to enter into a license or grant any company to use the right of way for that purpose."