Electric scooters are allowed on national park roads by default today, and thirty days after publication they are prohibited there unless a superintendent has written the location into the park compendium
Eighty-four point nine million trips. That is the North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association's estimate of e-scooter rides taken across North America in 2024, and the National Park Service quotes it in a final rule filed on Tuesday morning to explain why it is writing new rules about where those devices may go.
The answer, thirty days after the rule publishes, is almost nowhere by default.
What changes, in the agency's own accounting
Until now the Park Service has treated an e-scooter as a motor vehicle. That put it under 36 CFR 4.10, which generally confines motor vehicles to public roads and parking areas, and it meant park roads and parking areas were open to scooters automatically. The agency states the position plainly in its environmental analysis: under the existing regulations that apply to motor vehicles, powered micromobility devices are allowed on park roads and parking areas by default.
The new section 4.32 inverts that. Operating a powered micromobility device is prohibited except in designated locations, and a superintendent has to do something affirmative before any location becomes one. For terrain that is or once was improved with artificial or processed materials, and the rule lists gravel, asphalt, concrete, steel rail lines, wood boards, soil cement and resin-based material, the superintendent may designate by notice, typically by listing the location in the park compendium. For ground that has never been improved that way, it takes a rulemaking in the Federal Register.
There is a second half to the trade. The old framework gave superintendents no route at all to allow these devices off roads and parking areas outside national recreation areas, seashores, lakeshores and preserves. The new one does.
The definition, and the number inside it
A powered micromobility device is a human-operated, self-propelled device with a curb weight under 150 pounds and no internal combustion engine. Electric bicycles, motorised wheelchairs, snowmobiles, vessels, motor vehicles and human-powered coasting devices are all carved out, and the definition of motor vehicle in 36 CFR 1.4 is amended to push these devices out of it.
The weight figure is deliberately generous. Most such devices weigh under 50 pounds, and the Park Service set the ceiling at 150 to take in heavier ones including Segways and adaptive devices designed for people with disabilities. There is no size limit in the definition and no cap on how fast a device may be capable of going. Superintendents may set a lower weight limit, and may set speed limits off roads as a condition of use.
Wilderness is the hard line
Possessing a powered micromobility device in a wilderness area established by Federal statute is prohibited, unless some other Federal law allows it. Not riding it. Possessing it.
The rule grounds that in the Wilderness Act's bar on mechanical transport at 16 U.S.C. 1133(c), notes that the identical prohibition already applies to bicycles and electric bicycles under 36 CFR 4.30, and states that superintendents have no authority to designate around it.
The comment file
Sixty-three comments arrived in the window that closed on 17 March 2025. Some asked for a categorical national answer, and the suggestions ran from banning all use to allowing it only for people with disabilities to limiting it to paved paths wide enough to share. The agency declined all of them, writing that the range of the proposals is itself evidence of how hard a single national rule would be, and that superintendents are better placed to judge each park.
Fleet rental companies and accessibility advocates argued the other way, that the devices cut car traffic and emissions and widen access in urban parks. No substantive change was made to the proposed rule.
