Denver resident Mike Miller was on a downtown sidewalk recently when a Veo scooter rider traveling at full speed passed him as the scooter blasted a “do not ride on sidewalks” warning.

In a letter to Veo Policy and Partnerships Manager Rebekah Hernandez obtained by The Denver Gazette, Miller said that the rider was wearing headphones, never acknowledged him and missed striking him on the sidewalk by “a narrow margin.”

Veo, a Santa Monica-based company, is just 90 days into its three-year license agreement with the City and County of Denver but downtown residents who gathered at a City Council District 10 town hall on Thursday said their concerns over illegally parked scooters and pedestrian safety are growing.

Miller, in an email to The Denver Gazette, said, “As advocates for our LoDo neighborhood, our goal is to help effect positive change with Veo, not just to complain about issues.”

Miller is a co-chair of the Lower Downtown Denver Neighborhood Association’s pedestrian safety committee.

He said his group has reached out to Veo with specific concerns and “they have been responsive and collaborative to date.” 

But that has not been the case with everyone who has complained, according to Denver City Councilmember Chris Hinds.

Hinds, who has received more than 100 complaints to his office regarding Veo, addressed questions about the company’s lack of response to complaints, adding that he reached out to Veo for clarification.

He said he has even forwarded complaints directly to Veo.

Requests to remove illegally parked scooters and other complaints submitted online are “acknowledged” with an auto-response message and a ticket number.

In an email obtained by The Denver Gazette, Hernandez said that “it’s not customary to respond to customer complaints or tickets due to the volume of complaints we receive across nationwide markets.”

Hernandez accepted and then declined an invitation to attend the town hall at the Denver Central Library to provide Veo’s “perspective” on the matter. She emailed Hinds late Tuesday afternoon that an “internal meeting (came) up” and she would not be able to attend.

Hinds told The Denver Gazette on Thursday that his office asked Veo to reconsider sending a representative.

Hinds, who reserved a seat in anticipation of a representative’s arrival, joked, “We invited them. The scooter showed up instead.”

More than an hour into the meeting, a Veo representative had yet to show up.

“This isn’t comfortable for me to publicly shame a vendor, a city vendor,” Hinds said. “Obviously, they don’t care because they’re not here exactly.”

Hinds, who sponsored city legislation requiring “micromobility” vendors to include sidewalk detection technology, said he believes Veo may be in violation of its agreement with the city and has asked the city attorney to review the contract.

The legislation shifts responsibility for preventing sidewalk riding from the city to the vendor and requires the use of technology to do so, Hinds said.

“Veo is currently working to identify which sidewalks we can safely label as ‘no ride zones’ around the city,” Hernandez wrote in a July 20 email. “Right now, riders on sidewalks hear a loud warning notification and can eventually be fined for chronic sidewalk violations. While I know it’s frustrating to see scooters zooming down sidewalks, Veo allows this behavior in the scenario that a scooter needs to jump on a sidewalk to avoid being hit by a car.”

Veo officials said that most of its Denver fleet already has GPS technology on board to prevent sidewalk riding.

“It’s still early, but the law took effect July 1, and certainly in the town hall, we heard from lots of constituents that they see the current vendor and their devices on the sidewalk just as often as the previous vendor had their devices or vendors,” Hinds said.

Jeff Hoover, Veo’s director of government partnerships, told The Denver Gazette that the company is actively collecting data to ensure the accuracy of its geofencing and rider safety.

“In the shadow of, say, like tall downtown buildings, the GPS can drift a handful of feet and that handful of feet can make all the difference whether the GPS perceives you to be in a bike lane or on the sidewalk and/or on the street and on the sidewalk,” Hoover told The Denver Gazette.

Veo’s agreement with the city is not exclusive, Hinds said.

Denver resident Rob Farol, 60, whose main mode of transportation is Veo, said one of his biggest complaints with the company is that many functions on the Veo app are not working.

Farol said issues with micromobility could be greatly improved if the city supported more protected infrastructure, bike lanes and designated areas for the vehicles to operate, such as in many European cities.

“I feel like Denver can move in the right direction, but they need to do it faster by providing us the funding to make our streets safe,” Farol said. “And if they’re really concerned about youngsters on all these different types of mobility things — 16 years old, you need to have a license before you get on these. You’re riding in the street just like everybody else. You should have a license, in my opinion.”

The issue of instituting protected lanes for bikes and similar modes of transportation and moving people away from cars — part of a concept some have called “road dieting” — has been the focal point of debate in the city.

Broadly speaking, supporters said road dieting would improve safety, in particular curb fatal pedestrian-motorist crashes, while critics said the concept is copied from a European experiment that doesn’t work on American streets and has increased the danger for motorists and pedestrians alike, not lessened it.