Law firm will write the document for the Lisbon City Council. This year there will be a survey to collect input and in early 2023 a first draft of the regulations will be up for public consultation.
That Lisbon City Council has been preparing a regulation for shared soft mobility it's not new. Already after the summer, in the political and municipal reentry, Carlos Moedas' executive reconvened with the city's soft mobility operators to move forward with the drafting of these regulations. And this week, at a private town hall meeting, all the councillors received an update on the project; a proposal from the Councillor for Mobility, Ângelo Pereira, was also approved, so that progress can be made on drafting the regulation.
In other words, there is nothing concrete yet: the Lisbon City Council knows what it wants to regulate and how, but the document itself has yet to be written. To do this, the municipality hired, by direct agreement in the amount of 70 thousand eurosa law firm - "Júdice Glória, Taborda da Gama - Sociedade de Advogados, SP, RL" - which will work on "close proximity to services" municipalities.
According to the document of the proposal brought before the City Council this week, a first version of the regulation should be ready "by the end of this year" so that a public consultation can be held by January 2023 at the latestopen to the whole population and with "minimum duration of 30 working days". But before that, later this year, we intend to make available "a questionnaire to be filled in by interested parties (be they residents, economic operators or associations)". These contributions will already be included in the first version of the regulation, which will be published together with a "fundamental justification note"in the aforementioned public consultation.
It is hoped that final version of the regulation to be ready by April 2023 and that it can, in that month, be considered and approved by the City Council and the Municipal Assembly, in order to could come into force as early as 2023.
In short, the process will be this:
- public survey to collect contributions - by the end of the year;
- first version of the regulation in public consultation - January 2023;
- final version of the regulation - April 2023;
- entry into force of the regulation - by the end of 2023.
Parking and pedestrians are concerns
According to the municipality, the main motivation behind the creation of this regulation are the dockless shared mobility vehicles (scooters and bicycles)The following stand out concerns: "improper parking", "undue circulation on sidewalks and in contravention (people in pairs)", "movement of minors", "poor distribution of the supply of vehicles in the city" and yet "user safety"such as "speeding", "contra-direction traffic" e "wearing a helmet".
The regulation will therefore seek to, "organizing the parking of scooters, concentrating them in authorized points, both at the beginning of the day and during the day, combating illegal parking". The Lisbon City Council identifies that "this phenomenon is not uniform in the city, and there are critical areas where parking should not be allowed or should be specially controlled". The document also aims to "prevent scooters from running on sidewalks, protecting pedestrians, especially the most vulnerable".
At the same time, the aim is to expand the permitted parking areas for scooters and bicycles without a dock, increase the prohibited areas for parking and circulation, improving operators' applications "so that there is no possibility of completing journeys in undue places" e applying municipal taxes to "encourage and discourage behavior in the use of public space, penalizing operators who do not have effective solutions to prevent illegal parking or illegal circulation".
At the moment, seven shared soft mobility companies are operating in Lisbon:
- EMEL with bicycles GIRAwhich have a dock;
- a Bolt, a Bird and the Lime with scooters and dockless bicycles;
- a Whoosh, a LINK and the Frog with dockless scooters.
Lisbon City Council says it is "favorable to the existence of private shared mobility services, having welcomed several operators since October 2018, under Memorandums of Understanding, a practice followed by many other Portuguese and foreign cities". He adds that he is "now in a position to codify in a formal legal instrument the best practices that have resulted from this initial phase, seeking to reconcile the presence of these services more satisfactorily with the protection of pedestrians and the most vulnerable citizens, as well as better management of the public space".
