The ban on electric scooters on public transport was going to last six months, but it will end up being nine, at least. At the Autoritat del Transport Metropolità (ATM) they have assumed that it is unfeasible to have a solution agreed with all the operators and administrations before August 1, which was the deadline set.
The heads of the working group created for the occasion have asked the members of the board of directors for an extension to save some time and thus ensure that the final agreement has sufficient legal and technical solidity, in addition to having the approval of all the sector and the new political representatives in the ATM after the change of municipal government of Barcelona and the replacement in the department of Territories.
The new time limit has been established at the end of October, when it is expected to put an end to the veto in force since February with conditions yet to be defined that must be specified in the corresponding adaptations of the regulations of the different Catalan public transport operators. The general lines of the solution that is on the table are those that La Vanguardia already published on June 7: a return with various restrictions, but a return after all.
Among the limitations that will be imposed is the obligation to fold it when accessing the interior of public transport and the prohibition of plugging in scooters to charge them on trains and buses as well as at stations. In this way, they want to avoid overloads that can lead to a fire such as the one that occurred in a Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC) train last November and which was the trigger for the ban.
The fringes that remain pending on the new regulation revolve around time and space limitations, an issue that has little to do with the safety of scooters and much to do with the debate opened by the growing number of personal mobility vehicles in some wagons that are already sufficiently full of passengers at rush hour.
Those responsible for drafting the rules of the game are committed to prohibiting access in certain time slots, as is the case with bicycles on the subway at rush hour. If they replicated the same treatment given to bikes, they would be prohibited from boarding the carriages on weekdays between 7:00 and 9:30 in the morning and from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the afternoon.
Along the same lines, they want to delimit a specific space in the wagons for scooters, in the image and likeness of the one that is also for bikes in the subway. Another of the fringes to be resolved is the limitation of a maximum number of personal mobility vehicles per wagon.
The working group that seeks a consensus solution is also defining differences depending on the mode of transport and proposes a differentiated treatment between the road and rail modes, since it is not the same to evacuate a Rodalies wagon as an urban bus. The bus sector, with companies that mainly provide intercity services, asks to give the same treatment to scooters as to bikes in order to facilitate compliance with the regulations and understanding by users. If it ends up being like this, it would be forced to put the scooter in the bus hold –when there is one, when traveling outside the metropolitan area–, just as it is done with bicycles, preventing the passenger from taking a seat with the scooter between their legs.
