Scooter sharing in Milan
In the city of Milan, the scooter sharing service has been active since 2015 with 100% electric vehicles.
Indeed, the municipality of Milan carried out a “Safety2Share” awareness campaign. This project aims to raise awareness and increase the safety of motorcycle sharing. It is made up several rules that regulates the usage of these vehicles to plummet risks.
Actually, the scooter sharing service offers plenty of advantages to commuters. The five main advantages are:
- There are no purchase and maintenance costs
- There are no stamp duty costs and insurance policies
- Solves the parking problems since takes less space and no garages are needed
- The scooters are electric and can enter freely in Area B and C
- You pay fees for actual usage
Therefore, for this type of user, it would consist in a substantial decrease in expenses.
Cityscoot in Milan
However since end of November 2023, it was decided by the company to remove the scooters in Milan and Torino. The french company was operational in Italy since 2018, note that it had previously removed their vehicles in Rome three years ago. From now on the company will continue to operate but only in Paris.
After Cityscoot’s farewell, only Cooltra remained in Milan, while the scooter sharing market had up to six operators in 2021.
They communicated the end of their activities in the country via mail to their user. In which they explained that their choice was due to financial difficulties. Cityscoot Italia has managed a total of 150’000 users for an approximate 2’000 scooters in the country.
The financial difficulties are probably linked to the repeated thefts of electric batteries, since from 2019 to 2022, they experienced approximately 650 thefts of lithium “EP” batteries, which are worth thousand euros each. The robbers, once stolen the batteries, would sell them 1/10 of their market price. These components, bought as soon as they were put back in trade, created a cycle which cost the corporation huge amounts.
Millions of euros of damage caused the company’s finances to fall into crisis. To contrast these losses the decision to raise tariffs came into play but unfortunately it was of no use.
Cityscoot financial difficulties
Less than 10 years after its creation, Cityscoot declared itself insolvent on November 8 2023, with the Paris commercial court, pending new investors.
In 2022, Cityscoot had already placed itself under the protection of the commercial court to restructure its debts. The valuation was revised downwards after an injection of capital from its investors
As a reminder, insolvency constitutes the first step towards judicial recovery or liquidation, when a company is short of money. In particular, it makes it possible to protect employees, guaranteed to receive their salaries, and to freeze the company’s debts.
Author: Maelyne Frydman