Scooters And One Wheels

The pilot undertaking for sharing e-scooters is predicted to begin this 12 months

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Brian Cross

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March 24, 2021 • • 38 minutes ago • • Read for 3 minutes • • Join the conversation People ride bird-shared dockless electric scooters along Venice Beach on August 13, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. Joint e-scooter startups Bird and Lime have grown rapidly in the city. Windsor has reached an agreement with Bird. Photo by Mario Tama /.Getty Images

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Get ready for a summer full of e-scooters in the heart of the city.

On Monday, the city council will vote to commission Bird Canada to deploy an e-scooter and e-bike share program as a one-year pilot that is free to city taxpayers.

Bird is one of three companies that responded to a city request for suggestions in January after several years of thinking about City Hall on how best to deploy a stock system. During that time, the concept has moved from a sharing system with regular bikes and fixed docking stations, which could cost the city hundreds of thousands in startup costs, to a dockless system that companies would deploy themselves. Payments for renting a bike can be made through a phone app. The landscape changed again last year when the Ontario government put e-scooters on the road in a five-year pilot project.

It takes a lot of education around something like this, or it could potentially be messy

Bird proposes to provide 500 e-scooters and 100 e-bikes for the one-year-old pilot in an area bounded by the Riverfront Trail to the north, Tecumseh Road to the south, Prince Road to the west and Drouillard Road to the east becomes.

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A picture taken in Paris on July 31, 2018 shows electric scooters from the US start-up Bird. Bird will launch its sharing service in Windsor this year. Photo by ERIC PIERMONT /.AFP via Getty Images

Jeff Hagan, the city’s transportation planning engineer, said it was “certainly the hope” that the pilot program will go live this year, though when it will depend on all the necessary agreements being signed.

“The pilot program for the shared use of bicycles and e-scooters is being carried out without capital or resources from the city,” says an administrative report that will be sent to the city council on Monday. In fact, after one year, Bird Canada has to pay a license fee of $ 10,000 and an administration fee of $ 1 per device per day of operation, which is paid at the end of each month. That’s the equivalent of $ 110,400 if the program runs 184 days from May through October, the report says, where the money will be used to help meet city costs, such as living expenses. B. to mark sidewalks and to erect signs as well as to answer complaints about e-scooters in the wrong places.

Hagan said the $ 110,400 should more than cover the city’s costs until the numbers are fixed. “It provides a bit of a buffer in case it comes at an additional cost,” he said.

Bird Canada declined an interview request on Tuesday. In a statement sent via email, as soon as the council decides on the award of the contract on Monday, Vice President Chris Schafer said, “Bird Canada will have more to say.”

Electric scooters from the US transport company Bird are parked in a maintenance hall in Marseille, southern France, on November 18, 2019. Photo by GERARD JULIEN /.AFP via Getty Images

Last year before the outbreak of the pandemic, the council voted to advance a pilot project for sharing e-scooters and bicycles. It also relaxed some of the rules proposed by the administration that recommended and banned helmets for all users E-scooter on Transit Windsor buses and on park paths such as the Riverfront Trail. The majority of city councils didn’t want any restrictions that would prevent people from using the e-scooters.

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Provincial rules now apply, meaning you must be 16 years old to drive an e-scooter and only wear a helmet until you are 18 years old. The maximum speed is 24 km / h. When it comes to taking e-scooters on the bus, the council decided that a collapsible e-scooter should be approved that fits practically under your arm.

An e-scooter sharing program was one of the initiatives called for in Windsor Works, a recent report by UK-based consultancy Public First diversify and strengthen the local economy. But Lori Newton, managing director of Bike Windsor Essex, said e-scooters should be introduced with some caution. They should be large enough in number to be discoverable and available, but not so numerous that problems arise. In the RFP issued by the city, the devices were set at a total of 450 to 600 devices, with the possibility of increasing the number after a verification process.

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Lime Technology, one of the companies that submitted bids, suggested 600 e-scooters and 50 e-bikes, while Roll Technologies suggested 500 e-scooters. Evaluations of the three proposals gave Bird Canada the highest score.

“It takes a lot of education around something like this, or it could potentially be messy,” said Newton, who agrees that it should be tried out as a pilot first. She said her organization is only about advocating the use of bicycles, so she strongly believes that an exchange program should include bicycles. Another problem is the lack of infrastructure, she said, explaining that Detroit’s popular e-scooter sharing program began after the city added active transportation infrastructure like bike lanes and started a bike sharing program.

“People really want to get outside and I think that could be successful if we put the infrastructure in place,” Newton said.

She expects these e-scooters to be “everywhere on the Waterfront Trail”.

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