Growing rejection of bikes and scooters without anchors in Mexico City

Conflicts over the irruption of bicycles and scooters without anchors, which can be used with just open a mobile app, they arrived in Mexico in the last days after some companies have reported damaged vehicles from neighbors in some neighborhoods of the capital.

These attacks against these electric vehicles looking to create cleaner mobility alternatives in the towns arise from the annoyance of seeing them parked on a sidewalk and they add to those already occurring in other cities of Europe or the United States.

Downtown Mexico's Roma neighborhoodin some parks or squares You can see bikes from the Chinese Mobike company or American Lime scooters lying on the grbad or in the middle of the street, with the part where they have the QR code, which allows access to the service, damaged.

In an interview with Efe, Julia Ortiz, director of government relations at Lime in Mexico, said that up to now, they only represented "between 20 and 25 damaged, unusable vehicles", although the number could have increased in the last days.

"We saw discarded skateboards in the street covered with tape so that our collectors have a hard time picking them up, "he said.

Lime scooters work on electricity and are collected every night by company employees., which brings them to the loading centers so that they are operational the next day.

Ortiz considers that The rejection of their platform is due to the fact that "technology is always disruptive and often unknownAusa sometimes hesitates, sometimes afraid or sometimes angry. "

At this point, the company will choose to establish a dialogue with the public so that stop thinking that this type of transportation disrupts the daily life of the capital.

"We do not want people to see us as a person who invades them, quite the opposite: we want to find communication channels so that we can all win. The city is for everyone and we can all build together, "he says.

In recent days, the local media they reported acts of vandalism against these vehicles and ensured that the companies exercised legal reprisals against their neighborswhich, according to the media, emerged as a resistance to this latest incursion of neoliberalism into the street.

The two big differences between these skates or bikes driven by private companies and bicycles put by the public sector for the use of the citizens is that they have a much lower price and accessible, and have petrol stations, leaving the pavement free.

With the idea of ​​taking legal measures, Ortiz is cautious and uses dialogue as the first option.

However, this indicates that if, after speaking, they can not reach common agreements, they will consider "other means".

The war against this type of vehicle began after the death on February 4, in the Mexican capital, of a man who was driving a skateboard..

The company describes the accident as an isolated incident and has already stated: his condolences to the family members for the fact that they "deeply regret".

Beyond this event, The fight between citizens and businesses that are betting on new mobility options seems to be continuing, whether on the street or on social networks.

Detractors seem to have found a way to divulge the misdeeds they commit: the Instagram account "birdgraveyard".

The account gets its name from the American skateboard company Bird, whose vehicles often appear on the photos and videos that appear there, which adds the word cemetery.

In this story, you can see how they are destroyed in different ways – fires, throw them from a bridge or even hit them against a shop window – do not just skate from Bird, also from Lime.

"If a Bird or Lime skate is dead, send us photos or videos so that we can honor his death," the account quipped on Instagram. The war against new forms of mobility continues.

With information from EFEUSA