Need to get around downtown Warsaw or Winona Lake?
As of Friday, with the help of an app, instead of driving or walking you can rent a motorized scooter from Morrell’s Scooters.
Friday afternoon, the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the business owned by Ronald Morrell, of Marion. He also has locations in Gas City, Wabash, Marion and Upland.
“You download the app called GOAT Scooter Rental on either the app store or the Play store. And then, once you get on there, you make an account and you follow all the prompts. And then what you did is, you pull up your map and it shows you where every scooter is located,” Morrell explained.
In Warsaw, the parking zone will be on the Mad Anthony’s side of East Center Street and at the entrance of Central Park. In Winona Lake, he said he has a partnership with Grace College and the scooters will be throughout the college campus; and down to The Village at Winona, but not crossing over the canal into the more residential area.
It’s $1 to start and 40 cents per minute when riding.
In explaining why he came to Warsaw, Morrell said, “When I started this company, I had a vision to serve every small town in Indiana. A lot of times, innovations like this skip over smaller towns so I really have a passion for bringing some of the big-city ideas to small-town Indiana. So that’s where my passion is. I started in Marion and I’ve kind of branched out from there. Now I’m in six cities of all smaller towns.”
He said he tries to make the scooters available for about six months out of the year. He estimated they’d be available in Warsaw and Winona Lake now until the weather gets bad, which is usually around November.
The bottom neck of the scooter has instructions on how to ride them, but there is a customer service line on the back of the scooter, as well as the QR Code.
The speed of the scooters depends on the size of the person riding them.
“Somebody like me, I’m a bigger guy, you can get up to about 12 to 14 miles per hour. You get someone who is younger, thinner, they can go pretty fast,” Morrell said.
Off of one person’s account, the maximum number of scooters that can be rented is three at one time. “What we’re looking into doing is partnering with local organizations, or anybody who’ll ride who is interested maybe sponsoring group rides, and we can do discount rates like that,” he said.
Each scooter is GPS tracked so Morrell knows where they’re at all the time. Once they’re locked, the brakes lock the wheels up, for security reasons.
Morrell has a faith ministry that’s linked to his business.
“One of my biggest things I try to teach is faith and entrepreneurship. I work for an organization right now called Youth For Christ and I spend a lot of time working with children from poorer backgrounds. So I wanted to be able to give them ways and teach them how you can have faith but also give them tangible ways to live in this current life and make money. So one of my biggest things that I push everywhere I go is faith and entrepreneurship, how we can grow as Christians but also make ways we can live and make money and do other things on this earth right now,” he said.
Morrell said his business is “for us and by us. It’s for small-town Indiana by a guy from small-town Indiana. So this is what this is: A small business that is really catering to serving small towns like Warsaw all across Indiana.”
For more information, visit https://ronaldmorrelljr.org/morrells-scooters
