San Francisco's rental scooters rack up between 1,000 and 2,000 rule violations a month — but the vehicles causing the loudest complaints along the waterfront are the ones the city has no permit power to touch.

A decade after e-scooters first collided with San Francisco's sidewalks, the SFMTA has built a permit regime that lets it cite exactly two companies — Lime and Spin — for how their devices are parked and ridden. New agency data reported by the San Francisco Chronicle shows those permitted vehicles generate 1,000 to 2,000 violations monthly, with e-scooters the majority and roughly half drawing a citation. But officials concede the bigger menace is the privately owned scooters that fall entirely outside the permit system — a regulatory blind spot concentrated in the tourist-heavy corridors around the Ferry Building and Embarcadero, where nearly 80% of this year's sidewalk citations were written.

Stand outside the Ferry Building on any given morning and the two-wheeled devices are everywhere — threading between bike lanes and farmers'-market stalls, veering onto sidewalks, dodging strollers. Depending on who you ask, they are either convenient transit or a nuisance that keeps getting worse. What the numbers now show is that the city's ability to do anything about it depends almost entirely on who owns the scooter.

Under the SFMTA's Powered Scooter Share Permit Program, only Lime and Spin are authorized to operate rental scooters in San Francisco, each capped at 3,250 devices and 10,000 across the program, according to the agency's own permit page. When one of those scooters is dumped across a sidewalk or ridden where it shouldn't be, SFMTA investigators — responding to 311 complaints — can issue an administrative citation to the company, not the rider, of up to $500. The agency even runs a "Safe Micromobility Parking Incentive Policy" that waives fines for operators who clean up violations quickly.

That machinery, per data the San Francisco Chronicle analyzed, produces between 1,000 and 2,000 violations a month across the permitted fleet, with e-scooters responsible for most and about half resulting in a citation. It is a real enforcement record. It is also the part of the problem the city can actually see.

The Chronicle reported that the data does not capture privately owned scooters, which the SFMTA cannot regulate and which officials say pose a much larger challenge — the reckless riding that has drawn intensified scrutiny from San Francisco police. In other words, the permit program disciplines the companies that agreed to be disciplined, while the fastest, loudest devices weaving through pedestrians answer to no permit at all.

Geography sharpens the point. From January through July of this year, nearly 80% of all sidewalk citations were written in the tourist-dense corridors along the eastern waterfront, the Chronicle found — the Ferry Building, the Embarcadero, the stretches where pedestrians with canes and walkers share space with sightseers who aren't watching. "There are people with canes, people with walkers, people sightseeing and not paying attention, and the scooters go right between them," one resident told the Chronicle.

The SFMTA is not blind to the corridor. The agency says it partners with the Port of San Francisco specifically to prevent sidewalk riding along the Embarcadero, and it feeds sidewalk-riding data into its Biking and Rolling Plan to decide where new bike lanes should go — on the theory that riders behave when a lane exists. "We make sure that the scooter companies provide safe devices," Kate Toran, director of the SFMTA's Taxis, Access and Mobility Services Division, said in an agency post on its safety campaign. "We have on-street enforcement. And we also track scooter sidewalk riding."

But tracking and citing the permitted operators does nothing about the device a private rider bought online and rides down the sidewalk. Sidewalk riding is already illegal. Double-riding is illegal. The SFMTA's 15-mph cap is the rule for its permitted scooters. None of it reaches the unregulated scooter unless a police officer happens to be standing there — which, along Market Street this spring, is increasingly what enforcement has looked like.

An SFMTA spokesperson, quoted by the Chronicle, framed the permit program as the city's foothold: "Our programs give us the ability to bring some oversight to these types of devices that are seeing a surge in demand." The unstated corollary is that everything outside those programs remains a policing problem, not a permitting one — and the current permits for Lime and Spin run only through June 30, 2026, when the city will get another chance to decide how much oversight it actually wants.