Montréal’s soon-to-be-short-lived experiment with scooters?
Anyone currently living in a large city or an American college town has had some experiences with scooters – would that be the mere annoyance of having them zip around on sidewalks. Or, as a friend of mine did, attempt to use one without checking first where the throttle is…
Montréal, the economic and cultural capital of Québec province in Canada, has recently given temporary “test” licenses to micromobility scooters and bikes operators Bird, Lime and Jump, the latter two being owned by Google and Uber, respectively.
Operations started late spring, among some skepticism from Montrealers. Not only in face of the strict regulations imposed by the city’s bylaw, but also the steep price of the services. As one article from the leading French language daily La Presse compares, a ride that takes slightly more than 20 minutes by foot would cost more than 4 Canadian dollars (about $3) with either Lime (scooters) or Jump (bikes), for a total ride time of 12 minutes. The subway and the existing dock-based bike-share service (BIXI) are cheaper, if not both cheaper and quicker.
While Montréal’s young and active population segment can be understood as the perfect customer base for micromobility, its local government, like many others across the world who face a similar scooter invasion, really mean it with tough regulation. Closer to home, Ann Arbor banned Bird, Lyft and Lime earlier this spring for failure to cooperate; Nashville mayor attempted a blanket ban; Boulder is considering lifting its ban; several Californian cities are enforcing a strict geofencing policy; further away from the US, Amsterdam is also going to put cameras in place in order to better enforce its bikes-first regulation after having already handed out 3500 (!) individual fines over the course of a few months. As NPR reports, the trend is toward further tightening of scooter regulations across the board.
So is Montréal’s story any different? Not really. It faces the same chaotic parking situation as everywhere else, with misplaced scooters, found outside of their geofence or simply where they should not be. In its bylaw providing for the current test licenses, the city council came up with a new acronym: the unpronounceable VNILSSA, or DSUV in English. The English version stands for “dockless self-serve unimmatriculated vehicles”. The bylaw sets a high standard for operators: they are responsible for the proper parking of their scooters at all times. Not only can scooters only be parked in designated (and physically marked) parking areas, but the operator has two hours to deal with a misplaced scooter after receiving a complaint from the municipal government, with up to ten hours when such a complaint is made by a customer outside of business hours. In addition, customers must be 18 to ride and must wear a helmet.
Tough regulations are nice, but are they even enforced? The wear-a-helmet part of the bylaw is the police’s task to enforce and there has not been much going on that front so far. As for the other parts, the city had been playing it cool, so far, giving a chance to the operators to adjust themselves. But that did not suffice: the mayor’s team recently announced the start of fining season, targeting both customers who misplace their scooter or bike if caught red-handed and the operators in other situations. The mayor’s thinly veiled expression of dissatisfaction earlier prompted Lime to send an email to all its customers, asking them in turn to email the mayor’s office with a pre-formatted letter praising the micromobility service. The test run was meant to last until mid-November, but it looks like may end early… The mobility director of the mayor’s team pledged that most of the data regarding complaints and their handling – data which operators must keep – would be published on the city’s open data portal at the end of the test run.
If Chris Schafer, an executive at Lime Canada, believes that customers still need to be “educated” to innovative micro-mobility, Montréal’s story may prove once more that micromobility operators also need to be educated, when it comes to respecting the rules and consumers’ taste for responsible corporate behavior.