Electric scooters to appear on the streets of Kazan in early April

At least 2,5 thousand electric scooters are going to be delivered to Kazan

In many Russian cities, the rental has already begun — including Kaliningrad, Volgograd, Saratov, Veliky Novgorod and so on. But in St. Petersburg, the kicksharing season was interrupted the day before — because of the snow. As the press service of Yrent sharing service told Realnoe Vremya, preparations for the opening of the new season in Kazan are now in full swing:

“Yrent scooters should appear on the streets of the city in early April. First, they will begin to appear in places where the greatest demand was recorded for them among users of the Yrent service last year, and then throughout the city.

This year, the service will bring more than 2,500 new electric scooters to the streets of the capital of Tatarstan — 400 more than two years ago. We are talking about Ninebot Max Plus scooters, the retail price of which starts from 75 thousand rubles.

As for the Whoosh service, the opening of the rental from their side is expected in the near future, but there are no specifics yet. In February, kicksharing press secretary Denis Balakirev said that the signal to return to the streets of the city would be the onset of a real spring — the absence of snow and temperatures above zero. It is expected that the number of yellow electric scooters to increase by 40%, to 2,8 thousand. Whoosh also plans to increase the area for electric scooter rides. They want to extend it to new and remote districts of Kazan, as well as microdistricts with mass construction, especially in need of public transport.

“Kazan has a speed limit of 20 km/h”

Yurent also commented on the new amendments to the traffic regulations, which came into force in March. In addition to the speed limit of up to 25 kilometres per hour, the weight of vehicles that can be driven on sidewalks, bike and pedestrian paths is also prescribed — no more than 35 kilogrammes. Priority is given to pedestrians, and the movement of personal transporters should be regulated by their own road signs. By the way, they have already begun to appear on Russian roads.

“From the point of view of amendments to the traffic regulations regarding personal transporters for users of our service, nothing will change significantly: the speed of all Yrent scooters is limited to 25 km/h in the factory assembly format, that is, the scooter does not initially accelerate above this speed. Kazan has a speed limit of 20 km/h. Besides, with the help of software, we reduce the speed even more in some zones — up to 5-15 km/h. The speed reduction in such “slow” zones is due to that all sharing scooters are equipped with an IoT module, inside which, in turn, there is a GSM module with a SIM card (this allows the scooter to “communicate” with the server) and a GPS module, thanks to which we know the coordinates of the scooter. When the scooter enters the “slow” zone, it receives a command from the server that it needs to go at a certain speed here (for example, 15 km/h)," thte kicksharing service reported.

Last year, the season started at the end of April

Let us remind that last year the electric scooter rental season started on April 23. Initially, Yrent reported that it would begin work on April 10. In 2022, at the request of the Executive Committee of Kazan, speed limit zones of up to 10-15 km/h were established in places of heavy pedestrian traffic — on the Kremlin Embankment, Bauman Street, Kaban Lake embankment, Rodina Market, near the Kazan Kremlin, as well as at intersections where traffic is high, in parks and on busy streets. There are 73 such zones in total.

In the summer of 2022, two kicksharing services worked in Kazan — Urent and Whoosh. In different years, the federal player Yandex.Taxi and Bashkir Matur.city. And in 2020, GreenBee kicksharing operated, however, it did not last long and soon left the market.