Mobility company Bolt’s management has expressed frustration at the transport minister’s reluctance to seek a solution to problems caused by rental e-scooters and was instead forging ahead with a blanket ban.
Reports show that e-scooters remain one of the safest modes of transport, Bolt said, insisting they had a plan in place to retain a service that thousands were using daily.
“But they need to talk to us. We have tried to contact the transport minister since the ban was announced, but we still haven’t received any answer,” Bolt’s South Europe policy chief Andrea Vota said.
Aaron Farrugia announced a surprise ban of rental e-scooters last month, citing safety concerns as the main reason.
Explaining the decision, which will see rental e-scooters pulled off the streets on March 1, 2024, Farrugia said that riding abuse was rampant.
But Vota said the ban would mean people are going to be “deprived” of a convenient means of transport.
Kristian Kobescak, Bolt’s micro-mobility manager for Malta, said the ban means that people would be using more privately owned cars or cabs because they will still need to get from point A to B.
Vota said there are multiple studies that show that scooters are among the safest means of transport. A report conducted by Micro Mobility for Europe, a lobby group for the industry, shows the fatality risk for e-scooter users is at 0.013 per one million kilometres ridden.
Another 2020 study by the International Transport Forum (ITF), a body connected to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, examined the safety of bicycles, e-bikes and e-scooters.
A trip by a car or a motorcycle in an urban area is far more likely to result in the death of a road user when compared to an e-scooter trip.
Since e-scooter rentals started operating in Malta, no deaths involving e-scooters have been reported, although one woman suffered serious head injuries in an accident in the summer of 2022. So far this year, all 14 road deaths in Malta have involved a motor vehicle.
The vast majority of fines that authorities gave to Bolt scooters (95 per cent) were for bad parking, not dangerous driving.
“This either means that the public authorities are not doing enough to tackle the issue, or there’s not much urgency in terms of safety to ban scooters,” Vota said.
As an example, the minister had cited speeding on promenades, negligent riding, riding on arterial roads and on the wrong side of the road, and scooters parked carelessly.
Local councils and residents have long been irked with parked e-scooters causing obstructions.
But Kobescak said councillors and mayors had always emphasised with him the need for mandatory parking bays – they had never said they wanted a ban.
The government last year announced that it planned to introduce mandatory parking bays, and in April said it would introduce them in seven localities by summer.
Kobescak said Bolt was even willing to invest in infrastructure, such as charging docks in parking bays, before the ban was announced. It was also analysing streets in the seven localities across central Malta and identified where parking bays could be set up. The company is still willing to implement measures such as mandatory parking bays.
They had even sent recommendations to local councils, which in turn had presented their revised list to Transport Malta, he said. Nothing ever came of this exercise.
Asked about fines handed out for parking contraventions, Kobescak said Bolt is contesting most of the fines handed out as legislation on parking an e-scooter is unclear and only states that it should not cause obstruction.
“Nothing says what is the minimum size of the pavement where an e-scooter can be parked or the distance from corners it can be left at, so there is no clear indication from the authorities about where you can park,” he said.
Despite this, Bolt has a team that moves badly parked scooters into areas that are out of the way and had even reduced its e-scooter fleet despite high customer demand.
The ITF study mentioned in this report may be read at https:// www.itf-oecd.org/safe-micromobility