Is there a cap on the amount of people we think will forego drive-alone car trips for bicycles and bikesharing? If there is, perhaps the next great markets are carsharing, electric bikes and skateboards, and scooters. Paris is starting to provide some data on what the possibilities might be with its moped-sharing system, which is quickly gaining users.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hildago, is fighting for a cleaner, healthier city. Her latest effort to tempt motorists away from their cars is CityScoot, an electric moped sharing scheme. The service has grown by more than 500 per cent in the last year, now maintaining a network of 1,000 scooters across Paris, and is accessible to anyone with a driver’s license via a smartphone app. The service is paid for by the minute, with no contract required.
The CityScoot pitch is an attractive one: collect your electric moped from anywhere in inner Paris, ride it to your destination – for slightly more than a bus or metro ticket but less than a taxi – and then park it wherever is convenient and legal, no charging point required.
The 1000-scooter network is maintained by a fleet of electric vans that continually substitute drained batteries with full ones, bringing power to the vehicles rather than vice versa. In doing so, CityScoot reduces infrastructure overheads, maximizes the network’s coverage by freeing it from fixed points, and increases its availability by eliminating the requirement for charge time.
Electric scooter sharing services provide a cheap, clean alternative for inner-city car drivers forced off the road by ever increasing charges – and, during air pollution crises like that which struck Paris last year, driving bans. As competition leads to price wars, scooter sharing might even tempt some commuters away from ever more crowded buses and trains, while the prospect of zero emissions transport without investment in charging infrastructure and parking space is sure to appeal to local authorities. In increasingly post-car cities, electric scooter sharing is sure to be a fixture of diverse transport mixes.