Montreal now permits e-scooter use, with heavy restrictions
The City of Montreal has officially begun to allow e-scooter use as part of a pilot project.
Now, Montrealers will be able to rent an e-scooter from vehicle-sharing company Lime.
Altogether, Lime is offering 430 electric scooters for rental in Ville-Marie, Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension and the City of Westmount.
The pilot is expected to expand into Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie in the coming weeks.
Each scooter costs $1 to unlock using the Lime smartphone app and 30 cents a minute to rent ($10 for every half-hour).
E-scooters must be returned to one of 239 designated parking areas across the city and photographed to prove they’ve been placed at the appropriate spot.
Speaking to The Ottawa Citizen, Éric Alan Caldwell, Montreal’s executive committee member responsible for urban planning and transport, noted that the city’s laws on e-scooters are among the strictest in the world. To start, riders will have to take a short online training course in the Lime app before they’re permitted to rent an e-scooter.
From there, all riders must wear helmets — a requirement that most other cities with scooter rentals don’t have.
Once rented, scooters will only be permitted to hit a top speed of 20 km/h and will be prohibited on sidewalks and on roads where the speed limit exceeds 50 km/h. The pilot project runs until November 15th.
