The Associated Students of New Mexico State University have partnered with the company Spin to provide a new form of transportation for students on campus during the spring semester.

Electric scooters will soon be available for students to rent to ride between classes. A 60 day pilot period will begin at the start of the semester for students, faculty and staff to try out the scooters and provide feedback to ASNMSU.

“They’re simple, they’re easy to use and folks are using them in, you know, cities and on campuses all over the country,” ASNMSU president Emerson Morrow said. “So I thought that it would be really, really cool to bring here to NMSU.”

Morrow explained that 100 scooters will be used to start out with, and will be located near residence halls, the Corbett Center Student Union and major parking lots. He said they will be taken in around 7 p.m. for recharging overnight and redistributed at 7 a.m. Rental will be facilitated through a free app and will cost $1 to unlock the scooter and 15 cents per minute of use.

“On most campuses, the average ride time is less than 10 minutes, so it’s really cheap,” Morrow said. “And ASNMSU is planning on giving out a number of free unlocks, so like basically then you’re just paying the 15 cents per minute, because we really do want to get a sense of how students feel about it and how the community feels about it.”

Morrow said after the pilot period is completed, it will be determined whether or not the scooters will remain in use on campus. He said if the feedback is positive and the scooters stay, the company has discussed offering scholarships to students as well.

Stephen Lopez, chief of police at NMSU, said his department will be monitoring the scooters for any safety issues they may present during the pilot period.

“Obviously right now, somebody can go ahead, buy their own scooter and bring it to campus, so this’ll actually be an opportunity for us to see if it was managed by a company, if there are ways that we can communicate with riders that might help us ensure safety a little bit better than if it’s just haphazard free-for-all,” Lopez said.

Morrow said people on campus are often concerned with safety due to the amount of bikers and skateboarders, but Lopez said there are very few incidents reported.

“People have voiced their concerns. They talk about how somebody came really close to them, but we’re not getting anybody calling in actually being hit,” Lopez said. “We do track bicycles and pedestrians and have been doing that for decades, and on average, we see about four bicyclists involved in crashes or pedestrians involved in crashes, and very rarely is it a pedestrian hit by a bicyclist.”

The electric scooters will be making their debut on campus soon. If you wish to give feedback on the scooters, their distribution or their safety, you can send your comments to [email protected]