The electric scooter craze has gone global.
Starting Friday, California-based startup Lime will make its first significant leap into the European market when it introduces its electric scooter sharing service in Paris. The move comes as part of a wider plan to expand the service to several other European cities.
Nearly 1 million people already use Lime across the 60 U.S. cities and university campuses where the company already operates. Last week, it started to inch toward the European continent by debuting its service in the German cities of Berlin and Frankfurt, along with Zurich, Switzerland.
“Paris is our first big-scale deployment in Europe, we have big ambitions in Europe,” Lime’s France director Arthur-Louis Jacquier told Reuters on Thursday.
Lime intends to add 26 more as yet unidentified European cities by the end of year, according to Reuters.
People can expect prices to be comparable to those in the US. Through the Lime app, users can unlock the scooters for one euro ($1.15) plus an additional .15 euros ($.17) for every minute of riding. The scooters travel at a maximum speed of 24 kilometers (15 miles) per hour and have a range of 50 kilometers.
Although many people are excited to test drive the scooters, some worry about the mess the dockless scooters can potentially wreck on cities. Lime and other dockless scooter rental services are criticized for cluttering streets and blocking traffic when people haphazardly dump the scooters after their trips. In an effort to curb this problem, cities like San Francisco and Austin have capped the number of scooters that are allowed.
Speaking to CNN, Matthieu Lammara, a spokesperson for the mayor of Paris, said that the government approves of any service that would “allow Parisians to move about easily” so long as regulations are in place to prevent chaos.
“It must be organized, there will be a charter to regulate this service, and they must be kept off the pavements and not interrupt pedestrian movements,” he said.
All scooters will be picked at 9 p.m. on a nightly basis for repairs and recharging.
