Mr. Hal Stevenson:

I thank the Senator for his question. I completely agree with Mr. O'Brien's remarks in terms of how we can legislate for this, so that this maintains a functional purpose and can deliver the modal shift and get people out of cars and onto e-scooters. Of the three, speed is probably the most important.

Lime independently designs and develops all of its vehicles. They are built for roads and have had the level of investment to ensure that they are safe for use on roads. If we start limiting vehicles to speeds of around 12 km/h, they will not be safe for use on roads because of the speed at which other vehicles travel. We are looking at a speed of approximately 20 km/h to 25 km/h. We want that speed and we designed our vehicles or scooters for use on roads, so we would really push for legislation around the use of electric scooters on pavements. That is not an appropriate place for them to be used and we completely understand and sympathise with the views of groups like the National Council for the Blind of Ireland. That should be in place.

The only additional point is that when we consider national legislation versus local authority regulation, there are interesting points around issues such as mandatory parking zones, which we absolutely support and should be in regulation. They probably do not need to sit at this first stage of national legislation and they can probably be done on a city by city or town by town basis based on the layout and format of the service.