One reason scooters and other electric/motorized vehicles are currently banned from state and many city beaches in Florida is because the beaches are also required, by federal law, to protect sea turtle eggs. (I don’t know how other states approach this issue. I only know Florida.) The actual BEST way to do this is to send teams out to find and mark the sea turtle nests with nice big signs so that everyone can avoid them. (Able bodied people are perfectly capable of stepping on sea turtle eggs by mistake.) Unfortunately, many counties lack the money and human resources to mark and/or move sea turtle nests effectively. (It involves getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning to watch for incoming sea turtles and look for nests, and determine if the nests are in a “safe” area (based on lighting, not human traffic – all nests on Fort Lauderdale beach have to be moved, but not all nests on Pompano Beach, just a few miles up, do) and need to be marked or moved.) Equally unfortunately, Florida as a state is absolutely terrible at dealing with beaches and parks on an individual basis; the rules implemented at one park for what may (or may not) be perfectly valid environmental or other reasons get implemented at other parks regardless of whether or not those rules SHOULD apply at the other parks.

This is particularly annoying when dealing with beaches where, quite frankly, there’s no particular environment/habitat left to defend – Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Panama City. You can see from the picture that no sea turtle nests should be on that beach at all, and the habitat in general is not even remotely pristine; there’s no particular environmental reasons for not allowing wheelchairs/scooters of any kind on that beach. (I can see keeping noisy sand buggies off that beach but that’s just me.) I haven’t been to St. Andrews Park, so I have no idea what’s involved there, and the article doesn’t say or give any context.

Some parks in Florida are doing what they can to allow humans to interact with fragile environments with minimized impacts – in Everglades National Park, for instance, with elevated wooden trails and restricted canoe access to specific waterways. This could certainly be done on Panhandle coasts as well, which could have the added benefit of increasing wheelchair access.

With all this said I’ve been fairly impressed by the wheelchair accessibility of some of Florida’s state parks – Blue Spring State Park, for instance, has a boardwalk accessible to wheelchairs that manages to protect manatees while allowing people to view them. Homosassa Springs is also very accessible. But of course these are in areas that would be difficult for any human to navigate without boardwalks and/or boats.