Prague demands tougher rules and liability insurance for Lime scooters

Shared electric scooters face another blow, as Prague City Hall plans to tighten the rules for their use. This following a ruling by the Transport Ministry that scooters must stay off of sidewalks.

City Hall plans to
terminate the memorandum of cooperation with shared scooter operator
Lime. Prague Deputy Mayor Adam Scheinherr (Praha sobě),
responsible for transit issues, said the company has not complied
with the conditions set out in the memorandum signed last fall. He
added that the rules for the company need to be tightened.

Scheinherr will
negotiate new conditions with Lime for operating shared scooters. The
city wants to ensure safety on the sidewalks, and is responding to
complaints from Prague residents and an appeal from the Prague 1 Town
Hall.

“We have had a lot
of talks with Lime, where we made it clear that the company had to
take responsibility for what their scooter customers were doing.
Despite this, we still have to think that people on the sidewalks
must jump from in front of the scooters, and parked scooters again
block their passage,” Scheinherr said.

“If these situations continue to happen, we have no choice other than to introduce new rules. The first condition I will require is compulsory liability insurance so that the injured person is immediately compensated. I will also insist that scooters are certified to be roadworthy, and I also want to make clear the scooter parking conditions,” he added.

He has already informed Lime that he wants to terminate the memorandum concluded under the previous city administration. The company has not adhered to the conditions it contains, such as the negotiating of scooter storage areas withitn city districts or the removal of poorly parked scooters, and the rules were too lenient, according to Scheinherr.

During the first half of this year, City Hall and Lime agreed on introducing zones where scooters would slow down or be banned, among other rules, but this did not bring greater safety on sidewalks and failed to prevent the blocking of trams and buses, and other driving violations.

“With Lime, I was
looking for ways in which Praguers could use scooters, as this could
be a great tool in the future to complement public transport for
door-to-door driving. Unfortunately, such a model is yet to come. I
see the biggest problem in Prague 1, where the streets are already
overloaded and scooters are used mainly by tourists as an attraction.
The sidewalks in Prague are supposed to remain safe, and people or
parents with baby carriages should not have to jump out of the way,”
Scheinherr said.

Prague Mayor Zdeněk
Hřib said he fully supports the Deputy Mayor. “We are not in favor
of any repression, but the safety factor of Prague citizens and other
visitors to the capital is absolutely crucial for us. At the time
when the memorandum was concluded by the previous council, the
problem was not as great as it is now,” he said.

The announcement
that the city will be tightening rules for Lime scooters coincides
with the Metropolitan Police releasing a video of drunken scooter
user driving into a crowd of people on Wenceslas Square and knocking
a woman to the ground. The victim sustained minor injuries.

“Officers rushed
to help and provided the 38-year-old woman with the necessary initial
treatment. Then they called the ambulance and the traffic police. The
24-year-old who caused the accident was apparently under the
influence of alcohol, so they conducted an orientation test. The
foreigner registered over 2 per mille. The case is now being handled
by the Czech Police,” Municipal Police spokeswoman Irena Seifertová
said.

The law sees the
scooter driver the same way as the cyclist, and the same rules apply.
Scooter offenses are counted together with cycling violations. “Since
the beginning of this year, police officers in Prague have detected
4,219 offenses related to cyclists. In 2018 they detected 758
offenses and in 2017 there were 2,083 offenses,” Seifertová
said.