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Calgary recorded 750,000 e-scooter trips in 2019

Users love e-scooters more than e-bikes

Calgary has shared a mid-pilot status update on how electric scooters and bikes are integrating into the city’s transportation framework.

The City of Calgary began a 16-month e-scooter pilot program in July of 2019 and since then, both Lime and Bird have set up shop in the city. The report states that Lime deployed 1,000 scooters and Bird sent out 500.

Including both e-bikes and e-scooters, there have been 915,000 trips taken since October 2018 when the electric bike began appearing in the city. 750,000 of these are from scooters, which hit the streets in July, and the remaining 165,000 are from the bikes.

Therefore it seems the scooters are wildly more popular then e-bikes. To further break down these numbers, the city says, 166,000 people used the scooters and travelled roughly 1.3 million kilometres. 

There’s even a heat map that shows off what times are popular among scooter drivers. For most people, between 4pm and 7pm is the preferred time to ride.

Another interesting statistic the city discovered is that one-third “of e-Scooter trips were replacing a car trip.”

Rules

In Calgary, users are allowed to drive the scooters on sidewalks, but the bikes are locked to bike lanes and the street.

The scooters’ speed is governed at a maximum of 20km/h regularly, but specific high pedestrian zones are geofenced with a lower speed of 15km/h. The bikes are allowed to go 23km/h.

During the pilot, there have been 33 e-scooter injuries that have required an ambulance.

One of the main concerns that Calgarians had was that there isn’t good parking infrastructure for e-scooters. The city is hoping to remedy this with more dedicated scooter parking zones in high-traffic areas that it hopes to install before the spring 2020 rollout.

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