Yes, Calgary is the first Canadian City to rack up 1 million rides on rental e-scooters! Using the city’s shared cycling and pathway infrastructure, the popular electric scooters have ridden more per-vehicle, per-day than another other city in the world for one of the providers, Lime.
This year has seen Lime, Bird and now Roll join the popular e-scooter rental market here in Calgary, demonstrating that mobility rental is a popular choice for Calgarians.
Lime has estimated that these rental rides have eliminated over 250,000 car rides since the program started last year.
Such popularity underlines the need for a significant review of the infrastructure provided to the City’s pathway users, shared by cyclists, skaters, e-scooters, runners, walkers and of course our ever present geese! In some instances all of this occurs over an 8ft wide section of tarmac allocation.
With the huge increase in cyclists this year, this also clearly demonstrates that it’s time for a re-think and review, putting our infrastructure upgrade priorities in improving and expanding these pathwaysas opposed to the normal spending on more roads.
Going back to a pre-Covid normality is easy, the challenge is to make a change!