A pile of rescued e-scooters after their recovery from the seawater along Marseille’s coast.
For the past year, the French city of Marseille has had eight different shared e-scooter schemes operating in the city. But following a new law that took effect on Thursday, only three scooter companies will be allowed to operate their shared schemes: Bird, Circ and Voï.
Lime, which was the first to enter the city with 1,500 electric scooters that have travelled 2.5 million kilometers since then, will be banned. Paris and other cities are starting their own tenders. Companies are realizing that this market is about to come under the heavy hammer of regulation after a year of few rules.
The e-scooters, which can be checked out for short periods of time with a smart phone, have rapidly become ubiquitous on the streets of Europe and North America over the past year.
Proponents say they offer a mobility alternative that saves CO2 by keeping people out of cars. But opponents say the companies’ carbon-saving claims are dubious and the scooters are being used more often as toys than a real mode of transport, resulting in serious injuries. European media has been full of anecdotal accounts of emergency rooms filling up with patients who have injured themselves on the shared scooters.
In Marseille, there have been 283 accidents involving scooters requiring the intervention of emergency personnel since January. In Brussels, a scooter rider died after falling off his scooter. In Barcelona and Paris, elderly people have been killed after being hit by one. In the United States there have been at least 11 electric scooter rider deaths since the beginning of 2018, according to the Associated Press. Many of the accidents involve alcohol.
These numbers are obviously low compared to car accident fatalities, but the fear is that as scooters become more common, they will grow. Forcing riders to wear helmets might help reduce injuries, but according to French research by 6t, scooter use would go down 71% if riders had to wear helmets.
There has also been anger at the preponderance of different brands of scooters on the streets, blocking sidewalks. There are currently few rules about where a person can park the scooters, and they often end up parked outside someone’s door or in front of a parked car. Even worse, many are being dumped into canals, rivers and the ocean – particularly in Marseille.
So far cities have been slow to establish regulatory regimes for the scooters. But as public frustration has grown, several are cracking down. Marseille held a tender to limit its eight existing schemes to just three, and out of 11 applications it selected Bird, Circ and Voï to be the only companies that can operate. The city asked for guarantees on security and sharing of public space as part of the application process. These applications were then ranked, with the three highest-scoring winning the bid.
Since Marseille is one of the early cities to have a tender, the award is considered a big win for the three selected companies and bad news for American scooter company Lime, which has so far been the leader in the market. As is the case in many cities, Lime was the first company operating in Marseille and represented half the market. But Lime did not get the tender.
As of today, Lime has ceased its operations in the city. “Lime has invested several million euros in its warehouse and in the local economy” the company said in a press statement to 20 Minutes. “Aside from the time, energy and money invested, Lime set a goal: to serve the Marseillais and fit into the local landscape. Our disappointment is commensurate with this commitment and the efforts made.”
Swedish scooter company Voï says a key to winning the tender was its parking technology – because it early on set up non-parking areas and bonuses for parking the scooters in more out-of-the-way spots.
Some have said that such heavy intervention by municipal authorities isn’t necessary, because market forces will separate the winners from the losers and eventually lead to only a few remaining in each city. But Kristina Hunter Nilsson, vice president for communications at Voï, says the company views these tenders as the right way forward.
“It’s a dangerous game to let market players just fight it out – in the mean time you’ve got citizens on the streets,” she says. “We think three players is appropriate in each city.”
She says that the data actually collected on scooter safety does not match the picture painted in many media accounts of the accidents being caused by the scooters. But the proliferation of market participants has led to confusion about the statistics.
There are several studies now being carried out, including one by a hospital in Helsinki, Finland using data from the companies themselves. Another study is being conducted in Oslo, Norway is looking at the user-generated data. The scooter companies report that the number of accidents is decreasing over time as people get more used to a mode of transport they’ve probably never used before.
There are several safety innovations coming into play as well. Some Nordic cities now have ‘slow speed zones’ where the speed of the scooter is automatically limited when a person enters this area.
So far Europe has seen a hodgepodge of different rules. Germany has been an outlier by initially banning the scooters and then allowing them but requiring them to have little license plates.
Other cities have questioned how the license plates solve any of the problems, and have looked more toward the tendering approach being pioneered in France. Brussels and the neighboring Flemish city of Antwerp are looking into creating a single common framework between them. Up till now Antwerp has had its own licensing system. Stockholm is also preparing for tendering.
Critics say even tendering isn’t going to solve the fundamental safety and clutter problems, because the three tender winners will eventually produce as many scooters as existed when there were 10 companies. They have also questioned the cost-benefit of scooters, pointing out that they mostly replace walking rather than getting people out of cars.
According to the French research, out of 4,000 scooter users who were asked how they would have travelled if scooters weren’t available, 44% said they would have walked. 30% would have used public transport and 12% would have used a bicycle. Only 3% of respondents would have used a private car.
But the scooter companies are confident that a combination of new technology, better regulation and having both riders and drivers get used to the presence of scooters on the streets will mean less accidents, less clutter, and allow scooters to be a beneficial additional choice for how to move around a city.
This is an asset that could be particularly useful as cities across Europe plant to ban conventional cars from city centers over the next 15 years.
