We organize workshops in Polish cities on adapting electric scooters to public realm, their impact on local communities and cooperation principles between municipalities and operators.
Electric kick scooters are a relatively new way of moving around in cities, which appeared in Poland for the first time in the form of shared mobility systems at the turn of 2018 and 2019. Since then, this market has been developing dynamically, and in the peak of the 2021 season, it offered in approx. 60 locations nationwide a total of over 46,000 vehicles, which is more than twice as much as the supply of all entire bike sharing fleet in Poland (for up-to-date statistics on the Polish shared micromobility market, we refer you to the Data Zone – the information hub of the SmartRide.pl micromobility portal, still, available only in Polish).
Along with e-scooters emerging as a new form of urban mobility, regulated at the national level in May 2021, there were also challenges that arise. They have to be faced, among others, by the following stakeholders, both individuals and institutions, in particular on the local level:
- users of e-scooters, in terms of the local availability of infrastructure for riding and parking e-scooters, as well as the applicable regulations – both on national level and those established by the local authorities;
- so called “non-users” of e-scooters, e.g., pedestrians, cyclists, people with visual disabilities or other public realm and road users, the functioning of which is impacted by e-scooters;
- municipal and supervisory institutions being responsible, among others, for road and transport management, for public safety, for providing adequate infrastructure or for spatial planning for (in the context of the last two issues, we also encourage you to learn of our activities in the field of mobility hubs);
- and, last but not least, the very operators of shared e-scooter systems, who need to take into account the regulatory, social and environmental aspects in their business activities, most often in the local dimension.
All the above mentioned stakeholders deserve to be heard, present their needs and try to develop solutions that will maximize the positive effects of the presence of e-scooters in the urban space, while minimizing the negative ones.
Following the above principles, in September 2019 we organized the first workshop on e-scooters in public realm. It was held in Warsaw, as part of the public consultations on national e-scooters and PLEV regulations that were taking place at that time, and were attended by almost 30 representatives of all the groups indicated above. The partners of the workshop were our supporting members hive (a shared e-scooter system belonging to FREE NOW) and CityBee, and its media patron – the first micromobility portal in Poland, SmartRide.pl.
One of the results of the workshop was, among others, the report “Be the change! How to make e-scooters a benefit for all”, which we also presented during the legislative process that was underway at that time. You can access the report by clicking on the link below:
At the same time, we encourage your city to organize similar workshops with us. This can be all the more fruitful because national regulations for e-scooters are already in force (the impact of which we are currently assessing – an amendment to the national law in this field is possible) and more and more local agreements between cities and operators are being concluded in Poland. Therefore, it is worth looking at all these issues at the local (municipal) level under the supervision of a professional facilitation team.
