Drive around southeast Queens and you can’t miss them: e-scooters.

Three companies — Veo, Bird and Lime — are part of a pilot program that launched last June, and a more permanent program in the east Bronx that started in 2021.

“I use the scooters a lot. [They’re] better than a car or a motorcycle because I can get through a couple blocks a lot easier,” Lime user Omar Ejaz said. “It gets to work a lot faster.”

“I just use it to get to the railroad, and then like, go to school,” Joshua Henry, who uses Veo, said. “It’s been pretty good.”

The number of rides for all the companies has doubled over last year with the eastern Queens expansion. There have been 900,000 rides in the borough since June.

While some residents and community groups say they understand the need for another transportation option in a transit desert, they also say the rollout hasn’t been smooth and their concerns have not been heard.

“Scooters are everywhere,” Aracelia Cook, president of the 149th Street South Ozone Park Civic Association, said. “I have actually been taking pictures of the scooters to show the nuisance of the scooters being all sprawled on the ground, the park, on people’s property, in front of their yards, in a crosswalk.”

The scooters don’t require a dock to park like Citi Bike. They lock where you leave them. Lime says it’s policing its customers.

“We invested about $1.5 million in actual foot patrol,” Nicole Yearwood, Lime’s senior manager of government relations, said. “So that’s teams on the ground, you know, in real time. If they see a vehicle that’s tipped over, mis-parked, they’re making those adjustments.”

The companies also say they have guardrails in place to prevent mis-parking.

“If you go to park on the corner, you will get a message in the app that tells you: you can’t park here, but here’s your nearest corral, and it will direct that individual to park in corral,” Yearwood said. “And then we have some free-floating parking, but we always instruct them to leave the vehicles close to the curb.”

Lime requires photos at the end of a ride and later issues fines and even bans. Bird does the same and uses augmented reality to show where to park. Bird is also developing AI that will not allow the ride to end until the parking is corrected. Veo already has that technology.

Aracelia Cook, however, says the onus is falling on residents.

“And I think that’s an insult to the community. I shouldn’t have to stop my day to have to call these companies to come pick up these scooters,” she said.

In a statement, the city Department of Transportation reiterated that residents should report mis-parked scooters, and said it is “working with stakeholders to identify areas where more e-scooter shared parking corrals can be installed.”

As for when the e-scooters are in motion, there is technology to prevent them from being driven on sidewalks, and they cannot go any faster than 15 mph.