By Cara Waters
Melburnians have taken to electric scooters for hire at a faster rate than most other cities around the world, riding more than 1.6 million kilometres on the rental vehicles within three months.
The city’s electric scooter operators say they can’t keep up with demand and that Melbourne could eventually be home to tens of thousands of the rental vehicles.
Over 1.6 million kilometres have been ridden on e-scooters in Melbourne since their introduction in February. Credit: Jason South
The e-scooters’ speed is restricted to 20 km/h, and they can be ridden on bike lanes, shared paths and low-speed roads. Footpaths are supposed to be off limits.
The e-scooters for hire launched in Melbourne in February as part of a one-year trial scheme operated by Neuron and Lime.
Neuron’s users have logged an average trip length of 2.3 kilometres. Rival e-scooter operator Lime’s riders have logged more than 600,000 kilometres in Melbourne.
Neuron co-founder and chief executive Zachary Wang said the take-up of e-scooters in Melbourne had been faster than in any other city the company operated in around the world.
The company was founded in Singapore and also operates in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Canada.
“At the moment, I think we see greater potential that Melbourne probably can hold a lot more e-scooters if they are managed in the right way,” Wang said. “We have seen across the world ... where cities run with tens of thousands of e-scooters and I think for a population like Melbourne, I think to go into tens of thousands at some point, I’m not sure whether that’s even enough to service our needs.”
Lime’s director of government relations and public affairs Will Peters said the company had scaled up its operations to meet higher-than-expected demand.
“It has been continued, incredible demand that has far exceeded the summer period,” he said. “When we launched in Melbourne, we could not have imagined the demand that we have seen.”
Peters said Lime would expect to see continued high use of e-scooters, with Melbourne able to accommodate more than 5000 of the vehicles.
Head of Australia and New Zealand at Neuron Mobility Richard Hannah (left) and chief executive and co-founder Zachary Wang. Credit: Scott McNaughton
The number of e-scooters used in the trial, which operates across the cities of Melbourne, Port Phillip and Yarra, has been limited to 1500 but they have been joined by a growing number of privately owned electric scooters.
An e-scooter trial is also under way in Ballarat.
The e-scooters are a lucrative business for the private operators, with Neuron announcing this week it had raised a further $59.1 million, led by Melbourne venture capital firm Square Peg, to further expand across Australia and New Zealand.
Lime is partly owned by transport giant Uber, which is backing the rise of what it calls “micro-mobility” in Australia’s cities, but opponents of the e-scooters say they are dangerous and litter the city’s footpaths.
A person died in February when the e-scooter they were riding and a car collided in Narre Warren, and there have been several other accidents involving the scooters.
The most-recent data from Victoria Police records 356 e-scooter infringements in the cities of Melbourne and Yarra between February 1 and March 18, including 188 for privately owned e-scooters and 168 for trial e-scooters.
South Yarra’s John Helmer leads a group of residents who petitioned for cameras and traffic-measuring devices to record the number of scooters being ridden illegally on the footpath on Anderson Street, alongside the Royal Botanic Gardens.
“They ride these powerful scooters on the footpath, and they threaten people,” Mr Helmer said. “If you were hit by one of those things, if you’re elderly, you’re going to be in serious trouble.”
A commuter rides a private e-scooter on a footpath in Melbourne’s CBD. Credit: Eddie Jim
Mr Helmer said the council and Victoria Police were reluctant to enforce the law against offending e-scooter users.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp said the City of Melbourne had received “very good” feedback on the scheme, which was helping to reduce congestion in the CBD by replacing cars.
“We’ve also seen quite a drastic drop in issues and complaints,” she said. “We definitely get feedback from users that they love them and that it makes their trips more efficient.”
Capp said the private and unregulated use of e-scooters was still something that needed to be addressed and she hoped the share-scheme trial would assist with rules that applied broadly to e-scooter usage.
“I’m not proposing we become a nanny state either, but I certainly think this is a new form of transport and the public and private systems, we’d like them to work well together,” she said. “The shared scheme is effectively a new form of public transport.”
Capp said it was a matter for the government whether the trial would become a permanent e-scooter share scheme.
“The trial goes for 52 weeks and I think we’re 11 weeks in,” she said. “So we’ve still got quite a time to go, but I would say that what we’re seeing with day-to-day usage is fantastic.”
A spokeswoman for the government said it was too early to say whether the share scheme would become permanent, and she could not comment on the number of scooters Melbourne could expect to see.
“Four local councils are leading a 12 month e-scooter trial to better understand how these vehicles may safely fit within our transport network, and results of the trial will be assessed following this period,” she said.
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