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Two people on the e-scooter in Cologne - actually that's forbidden
Photo: Jochen Tack / imago images
On Monday, the drama about the e-scooter in the Rhine should finally come to an end: At the Rheinauhafen, special divers are supposed to start collecting the scooters that have been found on the banks of the Rhine in recent months with the help of a dinghy and a truck crane. The clean-up is intended to end a farce that has made all sides look bad in the past few months: the city administration, which had apparently overslept the problem, the operators who were seen as polluters and the mostly young users who used some scooters for vandalism. The recovery will take some time; In the Rheinauhafen alone, 60 sites were marked by sonar.
With the rescue operation, the city administration and the operators of the more than 14,000 e-scooters on Cologne's streets are opening a new chapter. Both sides negotiated an agreement at the beginning of September through which the e-scooters should lose their wild west image. The compromise envisages that the operators thin out their fleet in the city center: Instead of 7000 scooters, there will in future only be 4500 at the roadsides. At the same time, they are feeding new prohibited zones into their apps so that the borrowers can no longer park the scooters.
The pressure on both sides had increased in the past few months. "In many cities like Cologne we have so far untenable conditions: On the one hand, the public street space is littered, on the other hand road users are endangered," explains Christian Joisten, chairman of the SPD council group in Cologne in an interview with SPIEGEL. In fact, every visitor to the city can see that the few rules that apply thanks to the ordinance of Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) are being ignored on a large scale. Footpaths are blocked by scooters standing back and forth, young people are out and about on their companions in pairs, and there are always spectacular drunk driving trips. Just a few days ago, the police picked up an e-scooter driver who was driving in serpentine lines on the A57 motorway.And that wasn't the first case of its kind.
Virtual parking ban on the party mile
The advancing opening of the catering trade is noticeable in the traffic statistics: Last year the police recorded 152 traffic accidents with 143 injured e-scooter drivers, this year there were 179 injuries.
33 of them even ended up in the hospital.
In the first half of 2021, police officers distributed fines over 500 times.
Driving in pairs on the scooters is one of the most common violations, but also driving under the influence of alcohol.
What many users of the vehicles forget: Although they do not need a driver's license or helmet, they are still considered motorized traffic.
"After two years now, everyone must know that the same alcohol limits apply to e-scooters as to cars," explains a spokeswoman for the Cologne police.
That means: From 0.3 per mille, the driver's license is in danger.
In order to avoid excessive alcoholism, the city had actually wanted to impose a driving ban from 10 p.m. in the city's party strongholds: the Belgian Quarter, the party mile around Zülpicher Platz and the historic old town. These must now be integrated with their geospatial data into the apps of the six operators. They take advantage of the sharing economy. Instead of putting the scooters out of operation or paying their own workers to remove the e-scooters from the neighborhood, they are changing the way the apps work. Anyone who drives into the virtual prohibited zones specified by the city can no longer officially end the journey, but must first leave the zone again.
This is possible because every scooter is equipped with GPS sensors and an internet connection. The result: If you want to meet your friends in front of a pub or cocktail bar, you have to walk the last few meters. However, borrowing is still possible. Since the target groups of those willing to party overlap with those of the scooter drivers, the operators are counting on the quarters being cleared by the users themselves.
In addition, the six operators send out a joint foot patrol. Although they cannot intervene if they see drunk people on e-scooters, they should at least free the footpaths of disturbing companions. They should also show their colors: "With the patrol, the providers are also showing their presence on site, which should also have a positive effect on the behavior of the users of e-scooters," says Sebastian Schlebusch, spokesman for the Micromobility working group on the Shared Mobility platform. by joining together many sharing providers.
The agreement between the city administration and the providers is in the interests of both. On the one hand, the providers have to fear radical measures in view of the bad reputation in parts of the population. Paris has already threatened the complete abolition of e-scooters. On the other hand, it is an expensive undertaking for the operators when frustrated residents damage e-scooters. To date, the Cologne-based operators have not caught a single perpetrator who sank the scooter, which cost several hundred euros, in the Rhine, even though videos were even shared on social media.
For the cities, on the other hand, the scooters are an interesting addition to the traffic concept. Studies have shown that in the early days e-scooters hardly replaced car journeys; But this is also due to the concentration on city centers. City councilor Joisten wants to change that: "Especially in the outskirts, e-scooters could play an important role - for example on the way from the S-Bahn station home." normal rush hour traffic. Instead of parking the e-scooters all over the sidewalks, drivers should only park the vehicles in designated parking spaces. The operators could enforce this with their GPS sensors. However, the operators cannot determine from the TV whether a scooter is in the middle of the footpath or on the edge.The e-scooter providers should use the collected driving data to determine where the new parking spaces make the most sense.
In order to steer e-scooter traffic in an orderly manner, Joisten can even imagine tackling one of the most controversial issues that currently exist in Cologne's local politics: the conversion of car parking spaces into e-scooter parking areas. In the outskirts there is enough space for such parking spaces, but cuts have to be made in the city center to accommodate all road users. "If we want a traffic turnaround, we also need the space for it," says Joisten.