3 Comments

I must admit I find it odd that since Beryl took over running the e-scooters, I don't actually see any people using them. I certainly don't see them dumped everywhere either!

On the other hand, I used to see loads of people riding around on the Voi scooters, including kids who were clearly under-18, and most of the time they were whizzing by me along the pavement rather than in the road. And then of course you'd just find them randomly dumped everywhere on pavements.

I suspected at the time that maybe someone had found a way to 'hack' these scooters, thus giving many people with a 'cracked' version of the app the opportunity to enjoy as many free rides as they liked.

(It would have been interesting to compare the vehicle location tracking and mileage records against the collected revenue, I'm pretty sure that would be something that Voi would like to keep quiet about too)

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Losing Voi was a massive failure of our City. They were excellent to get around parts of the city not well served by traditional public transport.

The new Beryl scooters are fundamentally useless as they must be picked up and dropped off in a particular place, massively reducing their usefulness especially outside the city centre.

Fundamentally though, the fact that it's illegal to use a scooter unless it's been blessed by the local council is crazy and just allows one company to behave like a monopoly. Voi was never reasonably priced because they never needed to be.

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Thanks, that probably explains my observation of why I don't see as many people using these, as well as why they aren't just being dumped everywhere when they are finished with.

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