Singapore’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) will begin accepting license applications from companies hoping to operate regulated electric scooter-sharing services in the city-state from tomorrow.
Prospective applicants can make their submissions via the agency’s website from January 4 until February 19.
LTA will be only be accepting applications for sandbox licenses from personal mobility device (PMD or e-scooter) operators at this stage. The small fleet sizes mandated by sandbox licenses will allow LTA to assess service providers’ “operations and ability to comply with regulatory requirements, before being considered for full licenses for large-scale operations,” the agency said in a statement.
Photo credit: Neuron Mobility
Also from tomorrow, LTA will be accepting new applications from bike-sharing operators, as well as requests from existing bike-sharing sandbox licensees to graduate to a full license that would enable them to operate a larger fleet.
The agency said that it will evaluate submissions for licenses according to applicants’ “plans to manage indiscriminate parking, compliance with active mobility device criteria and motorized PMD fire safety requirements, ability to maintain a healthy fleet utilization rate including […] availability of parking spaces, and applicants’ track record, including any past records of regulatory contraventions, such as illegal deployment of shared PMDs in public places without a license.”
LTA also said today that it will impose new safety requirements for scooter-sharing licensees, requiring them to ensure that charging of the vehicles’ batteries “is carried out by suitable personnel in proper environments.”
See: These Singaporeans built a scooter startup and sold it to Ford for $100m in 20 months
Shared e-scooters “must also be certified to the UL2272 standard to reduce risk of fires [and] licensees will also be required to procure and maintain insurance to cover any third-party liability for death or injuries arising from the use of their motorized PMDs.”
Local scooter-sharing startups including Beam, Neuron, and Telepod have each been operating a limited pilot service – not without controversy – in Singapore’s One North business district since last year, while Uber-backed US unicorn Lime has similarly been running trials in the nearby Singapore Science Parks.
Chinese bike-sharing operators Mobike and Ofo were granted full licenses to operate fleets of 25,000 cycles by LTA last October, though Ofo later requested a reduction.
SG Bike also obtained a full license allowing it to operate 3,000 dockless bikes, while Anywheel, Qiqi Zhixiang got sandbox licenses for fleets of 1,000 and 500 bikes, respectively.
Grab’s GrabCycle was also granted a sandbox license for 1,000 bikes, but the ride-hailing firm subsequently shut down its bike-sharing platform to replace it with its scooter-sharing service GrabWheels, which is being piloted on the National University of Singapore’s Kent Ridge campus.
Editing by Eileen C. Ang
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