Madrid City Council To Ban E-Scooters Over Safety Concerns
Madrid City Council has announced that all rental e-scooters will be banned from next month due to the high risk they pose to pedestrians.
In a statement released on Thursday 5th September Madrid´s mayor, Jose Luis Martínez-Almeida, said, “we are withdrawing authorisation for companies hiring out scooters on the city’s streets” as the “ priority is the… safety of the people of Madrid.”
The three companies affected are Lime, Dott and Tier Mobility and they will now have to remove their remaining scooters from the streets.
The mayor said that the firms “did not comply with the conditions we imposed to guarantee the safety of pedestrians, particularly the elderly.”
In particular the companies for “not using technology to prevent e-scooters from driving or parking in prohibited areas and lacking the appropriate accident insurance”.
Last year Madrid banned e-scooters from all public transport over similar safety concerns.
For fans, e-scooters are a transport revolution — allowing commuters to zip around crowded cities with ease and at minimal cost.
For detractors, they are injury-inducing street litter and a hipsters’ plague on peaceful pedestrians.
In just two decades, electric scooters have grown into a worldwide market worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
The Madrid move follows similar ones in other cities such as Paris, Montreal and Melbourne which have banned rented electric scooters after allowing them for a time.
The companies will have 20 days to lodge an appeal against the decision.
In May 2023, the Spanish capital introduced a new model to regulate the rental e-scooter market, authorising the three firms to operate 2,000 e-scooters each.
Prior to this, there were approximately 18 companies operating scooters across the city.
As part of the contract the three operators were required to give the council access to their data and were ordered to implement technology that obliged customers to leave e-scooters in authorised areas and prevented them from hiring scooters in pedestrian-only streets or near historic parks.
“Municipal technicians have no evidence that this technology has been implemented [by the companies] and, as they have been able to verify, [the e-scooters] circulate or park in prohibited places,” a statement from the city council said.
They added that while the overall number of problems had reduced since the introduction of the tender, “accidents were still happening”.
E-scooter operator, Lime said it was “surprised” at the decision, adding it only became aware of the ban through the media, saying that they deeply regrets that the city council has not taken into account the vision of the operating companies at any time in this process, nor of the citizens who use these scooters.
In statement issued in response to the ban, Lime said “The council’s unilateral decision has been made without any prior notice [and] this decision represents an unexpected and harmful change not only for the company’s users, but for the city of Madrid as a whole, which will no longer have an accessible and sustainable micromobility service to move around the city.”
The firm said it had “urgently requested” a meeting with the council and the mayor “to obtain clarity on this decision”.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE MADRID NEWS
