Over recent months, alongside traditional car and bike rental services, new offerings have been emerging that focus on zero-emission two-wheeled mobility: electric scooter sharing.
Some are still in an embryonic stage, while others are already well established, particularly abroad. The fact remains that in Italy's two largest cities, Milan and Rome, new services dedicated to sustainable mobility are gradually emerging. While car sharing and bike sharing are already well-known services with ever-growing numbers, today the offering is also expanding into electric scooter sharing with zero emissions.
Such as the service that is set to launch in Rome by the end of April this year, with eCooltra. By summer, at least 250 free-floating electric scooters will be available to users in the capital. This means the service will work in the same way as car sharing: you sign up, find the nearest available vehicle, book it and get on. This is perhaps the most emblematic case, as it has already been operational for years both in Barcelona, where it was founded, and in Lisbon. The scooters, the company explains, never need to be recharged by users because there is a dedicated staff service for swapping the batteries when the vehicle is not in use and is parked.
"Rome will shortly have a new free-floating electric scooter-sharing service," declared Linda Meleo, Rome Capital's councillor for Mobility, in a statement. "We want to encourage sustainable and shared mobility" and "for more and more sharing mobility operators to be able to offer their services in our city: from today, a 'pilot' phase will begin in Rome with eCooltra, and it will be a zero-impact service, since the staff responsible for swapping the scooters' batteries will travel around the city in electric vans." eCooltra thus symbolically handed over the first two electric scooters to the city.
There are also services still in the incubation phase, such as the startup 2Hire, currently operational for students and staff at Luiss with 3 scooters at the Luiss Guido Carli university. "The service is very simple and intuitive: everything is done through an app," says Filippo Agostino, 23, managing director and co-founder of 2Hire, reached via Facebook. "From booking the scooter to starting the engine. You find the scooter on the map, book it, and once you're nearby you can open the storage compartment through the app, take the helmet and start the engine." What sets them apart is the scooters themselves, which are 100 per cent electric. The innovation lies in the fact that there is no key to start the vehicle — everything is done through the app. 2Hire is indeed working on a hardware and software system to make any type of car or scooter connected. "An ordinary customer will be able to purchase our solution and have real-time statistics on their vehicle and interact with it — that is, open the doors or the boot" — no more keys, then; everything is done with a smartphone.
In Milan there is MiMoto, though this service also appears to be in an embryonic stage: the official website states that the electric scooter sharing system "will make available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, an entire fleet of electric scooters that you can hire with complete independence for urban journeys via an app on your smartphone," yet at the same time it is apparent that the service has not yet launched, even though there seemed to have been an official launch back at the time of Expo 2015. For now, one can sign up and wait for further information.
Despite delays and difficulties, mobility in major cities is changing — decisively embracing shared services and eco-friendly vehicles, capable of reducing both traffic and pollution at the same time. What is certain, however, is that for now we are still at the beginning.