Wind Mobility is running the UK’s most popular e-scooter trial in a single city, with its trial in Nottingham recording the highest number of total journeys among operators.
Since launching in October 2020 Wind has seen a high demand for its e-scooters, with residents of Nottingham taking more than 240,000 rides at an average distance of 1.9 miles per trip. In total, users have covered more than 435,000 miles and spent over 75,000 hours on e-scooters.
Wind is working with Nottingham City Council to address issues that have come up over the last six months, including parking in the wrong place and pavement riding. To address these it is implementing a number of measures, including the distribution of educational videos, introduction of penalty fees, suspension of user accounts, and marking parking bays.
Penalty fees for wrongly parked scooters have recently trebled and number plates across the fleet have been rolled out to make it easier to identify users who have behaved irresponsibly and enable the council’s Community Protection team to take action. Patrollers have been employed by Wind to roam around the city to try to stop anyone pavement riding or parking their e-scooter irresponsibly.
Lukasz Rybak, Wind’s City Manager in Nottingham, said: “The first six months of the trial have proven to be very successful and indicate a high popularity of our e-scooters among people living, working and studying in Nottingham.
“More than 100 users in Nottingham download the Wind app every day and we see a high rate of 5-6 daily rides on each scooter. Considering Wind has achieved these high numbers during the fall and winter months with lockdown restrictions in place for most of the time, we expect a significant growth and even higher usage of our scooters for the second half of the trial.”
As part of the trial Wind has also offered key workers living and working in Nottingham subscription e-scooters, and recently introduced free ride coupons that count towards the pay-per-minute service. The coupons are part of Wind’s Helping Hands initiative to support key workers and hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.
