2,000 new green scooters will be made available to riders from tomorrow Controls will be in place to manage parking of new e-scooters across Liverpool as bosses of the firm managing the scheme hope to deliver ‘better, safer outcomes for the city.’ A fleet of new e-scooters and e-bikes will go live across Liverpool from tomorrow as the city council marks the start of its new partnership with Estonian company Bolt. ‌ Gone are the coral coloured vehicles and in is Bolt’s green livery as 2,000 e-scooters and 150 e-bikes will be available as far as Speke and Garston from February 1. Operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Liverpool marks Bolt’s latest foray into the UK market and its first city in this country to host scooters. ‌ Speaking ahead of the official launch on Sunday, Georgia Heathman, Bolt’s UK policy lead, said the company was excited to be in Liverpool but conscious of the challenges it faced to get the public onside. Previous operator Voi’s distinctive scooters adopted areas from Liverpool Council following the closure of its CityBike scheme. ‌ A cabinet report in 2022 said the size of the scheme reduced year on year, due to theft and vandalism, coupled with a lack of available funding to invest in new bikes. The scheme became unsustainable due to the annual losses of around £300k each year. As a result, Voi stepped into the breach under a government trial system which had originally been slated to end in November 2021. This was extended until March 2022 to take into account the slower start as a result of the pandemic. Trials were further extended to the end of May 2024. Voi confirmed in an email earlier this month it would no longer operate in the city as of February. ‌ Georgia told the ECHO how the northern European company had chosen Liverpool for the expansion of its service. She said: ‘It’s our first multi-modal service in the UK which we’re really excited about. ‘The service is growing as well so we’re going to be a 24-hour operation and we’re extending to cover the whole Liverpool Council boundaries so going down to Speke and up to the border with Sefton, covering a much larger area than Voi had before. We’ve been working closely with Liverpool Council in terms of identifying those areas but they were really keen as well in partnership to see the service grow. ‘I think we’re building on a great operation that has existed for the last few years, the city has really embraced e-scooters and we’re just delighted to be bringing e-bikes and growing the multimodal side of things here.’ While some have welcomed the introduction of scooters as a quick and easy way to get around, the issue of vehicles being dumped became a bugbear for many. ‌ View 2 Images Georgia explained how Bolt would look to clamp down on those leaving scooters in an anti-social manner. She said: ‘We will be maintaining mandatory parking and we have controls in place so we will have caps on the number of vehicles that can be left in a certain parking bay. ‘We also introduce a different pricing mechanism as well so we have something called distance-based pricing. We find that encourages users to slow down because they’re just paying per mile. ‌ ‘They have a set fee then for their journey, they’re not rushing against a clock and that also means they’re not racing to find a parking bay or they’re going to leave a vehicle in a poor area. That’s another key feature