Ms Jessica Hall:

An example of where it went wrong in other markets would be Paris a few years ago. The floodgates opened with nine different operators and scooters everywhere, and there was no regulation. Paris then retracted, had a tender process, so we already are ahead of the game in terms of listening, learning and adapting in the Irish market.

One of the other kind of approaches that can lead to a lack of order in a city is when scooters can park anywhere. We promote mandatory parking bays and this could be combined with free-floating scooters in the rural areas, where there is less of a trip hazard issue. Getting that parking right means that the cities are then orderly. Another flag here is that GPS is not that accurate, especially when there are very tall buildings. Here we deploy a camera-positioning system which uses a scan of one’s surroundings to anchor one in the exact spot on which one is standing, as we have been out to that parking spot beforehand and have mapped the area and have made a 3-D model of it. If one deploys clever technologies like that in those really dense areas, one knows exactly where the scooters are parked at all times rather than the GPS signal bouncing between the tall buildings.