E-Scooters rolling into Lethbridge

Lethbridge city council approved a pilot program for e-scooters this summer

LETHBRIDGE, Alta. — Lethbridge City Council has approved a pilot program for electronic scooters, or e-scooters.

The move comes following a unanimous vote by council on May 18 that will feature rentable, battery powered e-scooters to see if they can be viable in the city.

It's a move that many larger cities have already made, including Calgary and Edmonton.

Seeing its success in both cities made it easier for council to make their decision.

"It was pretty useful to have the pilot program with Calgary and Edmonton, that were wrapping up at the time, so that we could get some of the information that they had just to see how this works in different places, especially in the Alberta context," said Adam St. Amant, the city's transportation engineer.

St. Amant said seeing how it's worked in Calgary over the past two years has shown them how handy it can be, especially in the downtown core.

"I think it'll make it easier for people to get around once they are downtown," he told CTV.

"They won't necessarily drive block to block looking for parking, they're able to find one spot and park or they're able to take the bus downtown and easily get to their destinations. So it has a lot of potential for making travel, especially downtown, easier."

Downtown businesses are also excited about this move that could increase the flow of traffic into their shops.

"It's exciting," said Melissa Johnson, interim Executive Director for the Downtown BRZ.

"Any opportunity that we can get people down here exploring our downtown core is a positive for our business revitalization zone."

Alex Petre is the general manager for Bird Canada, one of the popular e-scooter companies that hopes to expand into Lethbridge.

She's seen first-hand what these programs can do for downtown businesses.

"Whenever there's a scooter outside a business, there's a customer inside the business," she said.

"If you think about where scooters go, they actually go from where people are to businesses to restaurants to bars to shops and to wherever people are running errands."

The city has yet to decide what company they will be using for their pilot program, but will be opening up their request for proposals, or RFP's, shortly.

Petre said that Bird will be filing an RFP with the city and are excited to see the continued growing popularity of scooters in smaller communities.

"Whenever you bring scooters to a relatively smaller city, people tell us that it feels like a brand new city because you can explore it from a very different perspective."

"So we're very excited about adding more communities to our network of e-scooters."

The city has yet to announce a timeline for when the pilot program will start, but will do so as soon after they choose an e-scooter provider.