After electric cars, electric buses and electric bikes, green cities are now investing in scooters! Bike sharing was a tremendous success around Europe and now these green scooters are likely to become the next ‘must-have’ for sustainable cities. Description of an on-going success.
In August, German industrial conglomerate Robert Bosch Group announced that it partnered with Gogoro, a Taiwanese electric scooter startup, to bring scooter-sharing to Berlin. The scooter is flashy, trendy and connected through a software and smartphone applications. Initially, 200 of Gogoro’s scooters will hit the street of Berlin but they are likely to multiply as the demand is growing.
The reaction has been nothing but positive with the scooter. Anyone over the age of 21 will be able to use the purple (green) vehicle. The software allows you to locate them easily and to rent them for a flat rate of 3 euros (3,34 U$D) for 30 minutes or 20 euros (22.29U$D) for the whole day. The smartphone app to get you scooter is called Coup and it’s revolutionizing the self-service public transportation in Berlin. It makes the ride from a Point A to a Point B easier than it ever was for the average Berliner. “Coup wants to help overcome the urban mobility challenge,” said Dr. Markus Heyn, the member of the Bosch board of management responsible for the project. “Mobility requirements and demands are changing. Bosch wants to shape this change with their own mobility and service solutions.” he added. Now Bosch wants to take the scooter-sharing app further and merge it with new services such as connected parking management, cloud-based fleet management, and app-based mobility assistant that would support different kinds of transportation.
In Barcelona, scooter-sharing is already a thing and Barcelona’s scooter addicts are already asking for more. The city originally offered 50 of these electric motorbikes for residents and tourists to start with (1). Now, new ones are on the way, equipped with a navigation system to help make the ride safer and easier. The whole idea came after San Francisco launched a fleet of 60 scooters; as many city bikes’ users couldn’t make it up the many hills in San Francisco. Barcelona followed the trend hoping to give a new life to the up hills neighborhoods around the city.
Now Paris is the next city to be equipped with such technology. The news came from Cityscoot and the Vinci company which runs most of the parking garages in the French capital. The firms partnered to offer the Parisians their first scooter-sharing system ‘libre-service’ (self-service). The first scooters arrived in the La Defense business area but are now spreading throughout the French capital. In Paris, the Autolib system (French form of Zip Car) was already a major success but the battery integration remained an issue. Now, with the Cityscoot, the wait is over. The new battery system has been designed by the French based company Forsee Power, one of the leading battery systems provider. Over the years, Forsee Power has specialized in bringing durable and sustainable solutions for green public transportation around the world. “In the previous years, batteries used for electric scooters weren’t meeting all quality requirements, especially as far as autonomy. But since Asia, and especially China has tremendously developed electric scooters in big cities, we are now able to offer battery systems that are truly performant. We are aiming for an autonomy between 60 and 100 kilometers with very affordable prices and that’s the future of public transportation” said Forsee Power CEO, Christophe Gurtner (2).
The Parisian scooters are made by GOVECS, they are an equivalent 50cm3. No need for keys, when making your reservation on your smartphone, a code is sent; it will allow you to retrieve your scooter. One helmet awaits for you in the scooter’s trunk. You can get a two-days pass for 9€ (10.06 U$D) or have a year membership for 80€ (89.40 U$D) plus 2€ every 15min, which makes this scooter one of the most affordable and hassle-free.
Cityscoot is now hoping to launch a “scootlib” service where, as long as your scooter is over 50%, you can leave it anywhere in the streets of Paris so that the next user can find it and use it as well. That alone represents a major improvement in the first systems were the batteries only allowed you to take a small tour and rapidly come back to the station to charge. With the new designs, new apps, new battery systems, scooter-sharing now became affordable and efficient for cities that want to keep transitioning towards a greener future.
(1) Barcelona launches first public electric scooter sharing scheme, Helen Morgan, Inhabitat, February 9th 2013
(2) Christophe Gurtner, PDG de Forsee Power: “Les raisons de notre entrée en bourse”, Le Journal de l’Economie, November 13th 2015