The City of Miami recently announced it will allow the company Helbiz to place 100 shareable e-scooters in District 2. Both city officials and Helbiz executives hope this pilot program will help safely integrate these novel devices onto Miami’s streets.
Electric scooters have been hitting streets all over Florida. They’re now allowed on streets in Tampa and arriving in Orlando. They’ve also been leaving as well as they were just banned in Fort Myers.
For more information on Miami’s e-scooter program, be sure to visit the city’s official pag
Throughout the pilot program, Helbiz will use the latest in GPS tracking technology to collect valuable data on e-scooter safety. This information could potentially be used in the future to update Miami’s car-centric infrastructure.
All Helbiz e-scooters will also have advanced geofencing capabilities, which means they will automatically brake if they cross outside the designated zones. The full list of areas where e-scooters will be allowed is as follows:
- Coconut Grove
- Edgewater
- Downtown
- Morningside
- Brickell
Residents who want to try a Helbiz e-scooter must download the company’s app onto their mobile phone to unlock a vehicle. Once unlocked, it will cost riders 15 cents per minute to operate.
In the summer of 2018, Miami got its first taste of e-scooters when the companies Lime and Bird sent in fleets of their devices without prior warning. Within a few weeks, however, the City of Miami forced Bird and Lime to remove their devices.
City leaders spent all of that summer and autumn devising official rules for their e-scooter pilot program. In April of 2019, Miami allowed six companies to bring in 50 e-scooters each for an official trial phase, including Bird, Lime, Bolt, Jump, Lyft and Spin.
Just like with Helbiz, all six of these companies were only approved for use in District 2. There’s no word when e-scooters will be allowed in other Miami districts.e on this link.
