Mr. Will O'Brien:

I dtús báire, gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach agus le baill an choiste ar son Zipp Mobility as cuireadh a thabhairt dom teacht anseo inniu agus ár dtuairimí ar an mBille um Thrácht ar Bhóithre agus um Bóithre, 2021 a roinnt leo go háirithe maidir le cúrsaí e-scútair.

Our company, Zipp Mobility, is Ireland’s leading shared micromobility provider and we strongly support the efforts being made to legislate for the use of e-scooters in Ireland. We currently provide shared e-scooter and e-bike services to cities and towns across Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe. We are an Enterprise Ireland client company and have been awarded high potential start-up status. Since our founding in 2019, we have grown to a team of 25 people and we hope to create 50 more high-paying and skilled jobs in Ireland over the next 18 months. At Zipp, we believe in mobility done right. This means it is our mission to do everything we can to help decarbonise transport, but it must be done in a principled way that respects the needs of our entire communities.

Before we discuss electric scooters, it would be worth contextualising this conversation by reviewing Ireland’s transport-related greenhouse gas, GHG, emissions. Transport is the second largest contributor to Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the transport sector has been Ireland’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, with the sector's emissions having doubled in that time. When this is broken down further, it is clear that private car usage is the leading cause of transport emissions, contributing to nearly 50% of total transport emissions in some years and consistently being over twice the size of the next largest emissions category.

Ireland has set the ambitious goal of reducing its emissions by 51% by 2030 and getting to net zero by 2050, which means we need a 7% reduction in emissions annually for the next eight years to achieve these goals. In 2020, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and an economic slowdown, we only achieved a reduction in emissions of 3.6%. This illuminates how great a task we have at hand. It is vital that we consider every solution possible when seeking to decarbonise transport. We can start by looking at our cities, where more than 60% of our population lives. We can provide those people with safe and sustainable transport options, like e-scooters. E-scooters could be transformational for reducing our reliance on private cars. For a young person who cannot afford a car, an e-scooter could be a safe and sustainable alternative. For people who live too far away to walk to a public transport link, providing shared e-scooters could help people to get those links and improve public transit usage.

I thank the Chair and members of the committee once again for inviting me to speak. I hope to give the committee my views as a representative from the shared micromobility industry and also as a young Irish person. I hope to communicate how passionate we are about ensuring Ireland becomes a world leader in climate action. Legislating for e-scooters may seem like a small step, but with a task this big ahead of us, it is not about silver bullet solutions but about the myriad of small steps we take together as a nation in our quest to conquer the greatest problem of our age: climate change.