Summer of 2020 is something of a golden age — and the Wild West — for e-scooter in Scandinavia. Rental companies that have flooded into cities in the region — among them Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen — believe it will be easier for them to transition to e-bikes thanks to their ingrained cycling culture and relationships their strong focus on sustainability. As city officials floundered over how to impose order on this new and yet-to-be-established industry, thousands of e-scooters reached thousands, finding people ride ready everywhere.
The free-floating model — where e-scooters can be left or picked up anywhere — has led to complaints about the mayhem they create and the dangers they pose. they cause. The video of the e-scooter accident caused outrage on social media. There were reports of casualty wards filled with drunken people. For the visually impaired, their city is becoming a difficult obstacle. “There have been a lot of accidents,” said Terje André Olsen, head of the Norwegian Association of the Blind, an advocacy group with more than 8,000 members, from Oslo. “Many elderly people do not dare to go out and people often use taxis to go to work because walking is too complicated to pay.” He added, that summer, he counted about 40 e-scooters lying on the sidewalk during the 35-minute walk to work.
However, e-scooter companies are focused on high demand. “The first thing we noticed [after arriving in the region in 2018] Alan Clarke, UK and Nordic Policy Director at the US-based e-scooter startup, said Green lemon, adding that the company’s e-scooters in the region have an average of five to six rides per day. In response to those numbers, companies began to scale their services. “We usually hit the market with a few hundred scooters, and I think at the peak in Copenhagen [in 2020], we had several thousand,” Clarke said. The pandemic has reinvigorated the industry, with companies selling their services to both riders and investors as a clean, green way to travel around cities without splitting up. share the same stuffy atmosphere as other passengers on buses and trains. By the summer of 2021, the Oslo Urban Environment Authority, the government agency responsible for the city’s public spaces, report there are 30,000 e-scooters in Norway’s capital, or 200 scooters per 10,000 residents, meaning it has more e-scooters per capita than any other city in the world. The number isn’t too high in other parts of Scandinavia, but the agency estimates that in Stockholm there are 125 e-scooters per 10,000 residents — still much higher than elsewhere in Europe: Berlin, Paris and Rome are both under 50.
As Scandinavia’s e-scooter population continues to grow, the mood for the companies has taken their toll. “It was a forest. It’s a mess,” said Daniel Helldén, deputy mayor of transport in Stockholm, where the number of e-scooters almost tripled between 2019 and 2021, from 8,500 to 23,000. “The biggest problem is parking. They parked on the sidewalk making it impossible for people to pass. If you’re disabled in some way, that’s a huge deal.”
A strict regulatory crackdown was quickly followed by growing irritation. Over the past year, the Nordic nations have been trying to wrest their capital from this new industry and mercilessly throw e-scooter companies out of their cities. David Motander, Bolt’s head of public policy in Northern Europe, said the marginal costs and economics of operating large fleets of e-scooters meant rental companies had lost their relationship. their long-standing relationship with the cities in which they operate. “Companies can be tempted to be short-sighted and try to flood the streets and take advantage. But certainly, cities will react as we have seen in Oslo, Stockholm or Copenhagen. In a way, we have to blame ourselves for this.”
