You’ve probably seen a scooter or two in Greater Moncton over the past couple of weeks.
The sudden sighting isn’t due to a surplus sale.
A new business called MoVe Scooter Rental is now calling Moncton home.
Owner Steven McArthur says business is booming, “It’s great. We’ve been getting 500 rides a day. It literally blew up overnight. It’s absolutely crazy. It’s almost doing as good as in Halifax, and I was there for three summers.”
McArthur was previously based in Halifax, but when new rules and regulations went into effect, he had to find another place to run his business. “Moncton seemed to be the next best option, and here we are.”
He currently has 140 electric scooters in use and plans to add around 100 more by the weekend.
The premise is that users download the app, and you can add a card on file and money to your account. From there, it’s $2 for your start-up and 38 cents per minute. You also receive bonuses for adding money and for parking in certain spots. It works out to around $22 an hour plus the start-up cost.
“You can drive it for five minutes or you can drive it for two hours,” McArthur adds.
Based on comments on social media, the scooters have been spotted pretty much everywhere in Greater Moncton, including in parks, on sidewalks, on trails and side streets.
“It’s a new thing, and to be honest, we haven’t properly set up all the parking zones and all the proper spots. We launched, and we have to work with the people, we have to work with the city, we have to work with the businesses to set up the proper parking zones. Eventually, it will work itself out. If people do have problems with improperly parked scooters, just send us an email. We’ll take care of the scooter,” McArthur stated in an interview.
He adds that when you rent a scooter, you have to take a park and proof photo so they know where the scooters are located, and to ensure it is properly parked. If you don’t take those steps, you’ll be warned and could get kicked off the app and banned from renting the scooters.
“We’re also going to be adding helmet locking systems on the scooters. In the next couple of weeks, 80 per cent of our scooters will actually have helmets on them. So when a customer starts a ride from their phone and the scooter unlocks, they’ll have a choice to wear the helmet or not,” McArthur says.
As to whether McArthur has dealt with theft at all, he says the scooters all have trackers on them, but there is always that risk.
“We have had a couple of incidents, but there’s just nothing they can do with it(the scooter). It’s like stealing a cell phone, it’s pointless,” McArthur stressed.
