Goodbye to scooters in Madrid. This Friday is the deadline for the 6,000 rental electrical devices present in the capital to stop circulating. The City Council has withdrawn the administrative authorization it granted to three companies to operate this business on the streets of the capital and threatens that, if they do not disconnect their devices, it will impose sanctions of up to 1,500 euros for violating the Sustainable Mobility Ordinance.
The situation has taken a radical turn since Almeida arrived in Cibeles in 2019, when shared mobility was flourishing in the city and the sidewalks – important note – were overflowing with different devices from private companies, ready to be rented via mobile application. There were a thousand bicycles without a fixed base, more than 5,600 electric motorcycles and 8,160 scooters deployed by up to 18 companies in Madrid. Added to all of them were 2,600 electric or plug-in cars, also for rent on the streets. Everything came in a context in which the council limited the access of many polluting vehicles to Madrid Central and cleaner alternatives had to be sought.
The situation was so buoyant that the companies even asked the City Council for permission to place up to 108,094 shared scooters throughout its 21 districts, but the council, then in the hands of Manuela Carmena, set the maximum ceiling for the exploitation of 10,000. this business in the city. Many small companies then invested in a business that promised to be prosperous in the following years. The operators multiplied.
But the abundance of shared vehicles also generated tensions due to their use of public space to operate a private business. The devices broke into areas with little space for pedestrians, especially in the Centro district, where there was more business thanks to visitors from other parts of Madrid and tourists. They were so annoying that a league of apartinetes even emerged, made up of citizens who dedicated themselves to getting these vehicles out of the way. Others were subjected to vandalism, in imitation of what they were doing in other cities taken over by them. It was also soon found that the business was generating precarious jobs around it, such as those who looked for scooters at night to charge them for five euros.
José Luis Martínez-Almeida then became mayor with the promise of “ordering” this situation, but the arrival of the pandemic put other priorities ahead. When the health crisis was over, the Mobility area reduced the number of authorizations to circulate from 10,000 to 6,000 and in 2023 it granted only three companies the necessary permits, Tier, Dott and Lime. They all had to abide by a series of rules established by the City Council, which the council denounces have been regularly breached: parking in places set by Mobility or implementing a series of technological improvements and giving access to municipal officials are some of them. . It is also common for two travelers to get on a single scooter, something prohibited by law.
But last September the mayor said enough: in a press conference and by surprise he announced that he would withdraw the permits for the three concessionaires to continue doing business in Madrid. He explained that these devices continued to be a danger “especially for older people,” he said while explaining that throughout the month of October they would have to disappear.
The companies involved learned of the announcement from the press and launched several desperate attempts to redirect the situation, ensuring that the municipal decision “was not justified.” They even threatened with legal action if the Madrid City Council went ahead with the veto. But there was no turning back: on October 10, the Mobility area sent a request to companies to cease their activity in 15 days, an ultimatum that will be fulfilled this Friday the 25th.
In parallel, rental electric bicycles have also disappeared in the capital. In this case, Almeida’s team chose not to renew the concession, which had previously been extended in periods of six months and only benefited Lime, a company that had 521 bicycles deployed throughout the center. On October 8, they deactivated all of them in their application amid complaints because they considered that the mayor was “imposing, in practice, a single sustainable mobility service: the Bicimad public service.”
The truth is that with the disappearance of rental electric bikes at the beginning of the month and now of scooters, only shared mobility options remain on the streets of Madrid through motorcycles – Cabify deployed hundreds of devices in the summer – and electric cars . Perhaps the system that will most notice the disappearance of scooter competition is Bicimad, which has just expanded its service to reach El Cañaveral, San Cristóbal and expand through Entrevías. It already has 7,735 bicycles and has accumulated 7.8 million trips so far this year.
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