Lime: $ 3 million to teach respect to its customers

Distribution of helmets, restricted parking areas and education, these are the axes chosen by Lime for his campaign "Respect the Ride". The goal? Empower users to better accept the electric scooter in our cities.

A Lime scooter not very well parked in the streets of San Francisco. © iStock – EddieHernandezPhotography.

Self-service electric scooters have been swarming for a few months in the big cities, raising the anger of some inhabitants who are tired of seeing these machines spinning at full speed and in all directions, their users not always respecting the rules of good yet driven by the companies that make them available. It must be said that most of the time, their use still escapes any legislation, nothing being planned for them in the Traffic Laws (which should change in France with the next mobility law).

Too often used without a helmet, outside the bike lanes and parked in the sidewalk, these scooters attract the wrath of citizens. Lime, one of the startups in question, thinks it's high time to educate its customers, starting in the United States. To achieve this goal, the company has decided to launch a communication campaign called "Respect the Ride", in which she decided to invest the sum of 3 million dollars.

The first 25,000 signatories of a "contract" in which they are morally committed to better respect the equipment and other road users will receive a free Lime-stamped helmet across the Atlantic, while the company plans to distribute a free 250 000 copies of these helmets in the world during the next semester. This implies that such a campaign will be conducted wherever Lime offers its services, which is the case in France.

An educational approach, but also practical solutions

In the big cities, Lime will also organize gatherings around his electric scooters, supervised by police officers who will be present to provide good advice to users. A good way to interest pbadersby in the existence of this mode of transport, while conveying a positive message that would settle with the grumbling more and more often heard about it.

Finally, Lime announces that it intends to collaborate with the cities to help them put in place clean traffic measures (or at least adapted) to urban micro-mobility devices, which will include the use of geolocation to to restrict authorized parking areas or to issue alerts to users when they drive on sidewalks.