Lime. Jump. Bird. Beam. Mobike. Obike. HelloRide. Bolt.
Sydneysiders have experienced years of share-bike brands arriving on streets and plazas out of the blue – before most of the companies merged, left the market, or found too many of their vehicles ending up in trees or at the bottom of the harbour.
So, is Sydney ready for the e-scooter wave?
Adam Rossetto, the Australia and New Zealand general manager of Ario, expects e-scooters to arrive in Sydney soon.Credit: Janie Barrett
Executives at Ario, the newest e-bike brand to launch in Sydney, think the answer is yes.
The Singapore-based company dropped hundreds of e-bikes on the city’s streets in late December, starting in the Waverley Council area – but, like every other micromobility provider, it is holding out for the real cash cow: e-scooters.
Their gamble could soon pay off: a NSW parliamentary report on e-scooters and e-bikes, to be released today, is widely expected to recommend statewide approval of shared e-scooters – if they are regulated appropriately.
Electric scooters are banned in NSW, apart from in a small pocket of streets in Sydney’s south taking part in a trial to help ease commuter pain as the Bankstown train line is closed for its conversion into a metro.
But Ario, which recently began running vehicles in Auckland and Christchurch, has been at the forefront of a sustained lobbying effort to advance state and council legislation dealing with the use of e-scooters.
“Past operators and current operators have got this technology … but there are these stubborn challenges that we haven’t been able to solve as a sector,” said the company’s Australia and New Zealand general manager, Adam Rossetto. “It’s the bad parking, it’s the tandem riding, people not wearing helmets, it’s speeding, pedestrian safety.
“Promises have been made over the years, and there’s been no real solution to these problems.”
The company sells its three-wheeled e-scooter models (one of which has a seat) as “e-bike killers”, betting that commuters will be more willing to take up a scooter on which they can sit and feel safe.
The scooter, which this reporter rode on private land, has four cameras that allow an operator in the company’s Botany headquarters to operate remotely. The company says this functionality, as well as having a staff member review the parking location at the end of every trip, will dramatically reduce clutter along the streets. (The company says all its data is stored in Australia and faces on the cameras are blurred.)
Users took more than 2.7 million e-bike and e-scooter trips in Sydney in 2024, according to open-source industry data – but they still have a sketchy reputation. In Melbourne’s CBD last year, e-scooters were briefly approved before Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said he had “lost patience” with risky riders and moved to ban them. The vehicles were also banned in Paris.
In Sydney, Lord Mayor Clover Moore said e-micromobility had become an “important part” of transport systems in leading global cities, but Sydney needed “carefully developed regulation that ensures share mobility options are safe and well-regulated”.
“This regulation needs to enable schemes that operate across larger areas of metropolitan Sydney, and only the state government can achieve this. It would make as little sense to regulate share bikes on a council-by-council basis as it would to regulate taxis or buses in that way.
“E-scooters should not be allowed on footpaths in our area, given how tight and congested these spaces already are for pedestrians.”
Rossetto said the state had been a “late adopter” of e-micromobility but, “in many ways, I don’t think that’s a bad thing”.
“They’ve been able to learn from cities around the world … A premier city like Sydney deserves the best solution, which I think we have.”
NSW had first announced a trial of e-scooters in 2021, but it was quickly abandoned because then-transport minister Andrew Constance said he was “not in the mood” for the vehicles to arrive on Sydney’s streets.
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