Photo: Sparrow Scooters
The Town of Oliver is turning into a pilot metropolis for an electrical scooter company after Sparrow Scooters pitched to carry in their merchandise to city council on Monday.
Josh Boileau, the regional basic supervisor for Sparrow Scooters, lives in Oliver and defined that the partnership contains getting the native companies to have scooters on-website, with designated parking areas.
“Customers that rent their scooters are only able to park in certain locations. So we partner up with hotels or other local businesses that say yes, we’d like to have a parking partnership here. It will drive customers into those local businesses or somebody like the host hotel where there’s already customers there,” he mentioned.
One of Sparrow’s trial packages ran in the autumn of 2021 at Spirit Ridge Resort in Osoyoos, which Boileau mentioned was obtained with nice curiosity. The company appears at introducing the scooters into smaller communities, reasonably than massive cities.
The company supplies and maintains parking racks for scooters at enterprise companion areas. Along with built-in GPS, Bluetooth, telephone chargers, and swappable batteries, Sparrow can replace their geofencing (GPS know-how) at any time to set gradual driving zones and no-experience zones.
“Overall, personally, I like the idea. I think Oliver is the appropriate size of community for a project like that,” Coun. Aimee Grace mentioned.
Boileau added that scooter tasks in different cities have proved promising in serving to cut back emissions. The City of Kelowna discovered the next throughout their e-scooter pilot program:
- 33 per cent of scooter journeys changed vehicles
- 148,500 km of driving was accomplished, eliminating 29 metric tonnes of CO2 as in contrast to driving vehicles
- 0.025 per cent damage price (51 accidents, 203,000 rides taken)
“I think with something like this being that it’s new and obviously just being piloted and not in many small communities, there will most likely be some kinks to be worked out. So things that perhaps we are not thinking of right at this moment that we might think of four weeks or six weeks down the road or a month into the beginning stages of the project. But I think in general, it sounds very interesting and pretty accepting,” Oliver Coun. Petra Veintimilla mentioned.
“I liked the sounds of this company without really knowing anything about any of the others specifically for what was mentioned about pickup and drop-off locations. So if they’re at the hotel or the tourism centre, maybe beside Town Hall, wherever those places are, that keeps the streets cleaned and you don’t see the bikes on every corner.”
“I’m here to work with the community, I’m not just here to drop off scooters and say thank you very much and make a dollar,” Boileau mentioned.
Council directed employees to submit a letter of intent to the province to develop into a part of one of many pilot cities.