Dockless electric scooters won’t return to Montreal following a pilot project in the city last summer.
The decision was announced at an executive committee meeting on Wednesday morning after a report on the situation found non-compliance with the city’s rules.
Éric Alan Caldwell, the city’s executive committee member in charge of transit and urban planning, said the city doesn’t want to have to police e-scooters.
“We weren’t ready for this,” he said, adding only 20 per cent of the vehicles were parked in their designated spaces.
Ride-sharing electric scooter services first landed in Montreal last June in a bid to add more environmentally friendly modes of transportation for residents.
Companies including Lime and Bird rolled out e-scooters on city streets throughout the summer before the pilot project came to an end in November.
The report tabled at the executive committee on Wednesday found that Montreal police issued more than 300 tickets to e-scooter users last year over non-compliance.
The findings also point to a lack of social equity, pointing to the fact that there is a high cost to using the electric-scooter-sharing services.
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Caldwell went on to say that e-scooters led to safety issues and created mobility problems for other roads users, including cyclists and pedestrians.
“That’s why in 2020 there will be no e-scooters in the streets of Montreal,” he said.
While the pilot project was deemed a “failure” by Caldwell, he said the situation for electric bicycles was much better and those will still be allowed to operate.
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