Scooters owned by the dockless scooter-sharing company Bird. (Courtesy Image / Bird)

The communal rental scooters that began to pop up in cities around Boston over the last year as a new means of shared transportation would be treated as bicycles under the road safety bill Gov. Charlie Baker filed Tuesday, and riders would have to follow the same rules as bicyclists when they scoot around Massachusetts roads.

Last year, Cambridge and Somerville ordered a dockless electric scooter company, Bird, to cease operations in their cities because of a state law that requires all motorized scooters to have brake lights and turn signals.

The comprehensive road safety bill Baker filed Tuesday is “designed to treat these more or less as bicycles and the rules that apply to bicycles apply to scooters,” Baker said Wednesday. That means operators under the age of 16 would be required to wear a helmet while on a rental scooter, must yield to pedestrians and give an audible warning when passing another scooter or a bike, and could not block car or pedestrian traffic when parked.

“The scooters need to be scooters that don’t go more than 20 miles an hour and they need to abide by and live by the same rules that everybody who’s got a bicycle has to abide by,” Baker said.

Baker’s bill would also require the Department of Transportation to establish a “micro-mobility advisory working group” to continue to study emerging low-speed mobility options and to make recommendations for future changes. In his filing letter, Baker wrote to lawmakers that “properly integrating [bike share programs and electric scooters] into our transportation system will be a critical step in addressing future mobility.”