It’s not a ban, but it might as well be 

Lars: In your own words, why has Brussels chosen to ban e-scooters?

Martin: To be 100% accurate, it is not a complete ban. The current licences of Bolt and Dott for shared e-scooters are ending at the end of 2026, and this is a decision not to renew them. In the longer term, it is still technically possible to issue new licences. But in reality, starting January 1, 2027, there will be no shared scooters in our streets.

Lars: What drove that decision?

Martin: Two main things. First, the difficulty of managing a competitive ecosystem with multiple private operators. Public-private partnership is supposed to be the magic recipe, but it is genuinely hard to move the needle towards the service you want to see when you are working with competing private operators. 

Second, the user behaviour of a minority of users. We see reckless riding, and a parking problem that has improved but that operators did not do enough to address. There was also a letter from the General Attorney of Brussels to ministers and the mayors of the 19 municipalities, flagging a rise in incidents and accidents in 2025, and the fact that criminals were using e-scooters for illegal activities. That became a political signal that was hard to ignore.

The data shows e-scooters were popular 

Lars: What does the data actually show about the service?

Martin: I have been defending the mode for years. In 2025, shared scooters represented 10 million trips in Brussels. In comparison, our public transport operator handled 400 million, so it is not the same scale,  but it represents 2.5% of trips at minimal public cost. Operators pay a yearly fee, so the net cost to the public sector is very low for a service that was starting to reach real scale.

The value showed up most clearly on strike days. We had a lot of public transport strikes last year, and scooters kept people moving. And since the announcement of the end of shared scooters last week, I have had a lot of informal feedback such as people saying "I was using this for this specific thing, what do I do now?". The capillarity of the mode allowed for a kind of maximum flexibility in the transport system. From the data I see, shared scooter users also drove far less than average.

E-scooters were a disruption when they arrived, but transport behaviour then adapted and new needs were created around them. Ending them overnight is now a bigger disruption than them arriving.

Private scooters will fill the gap, even though they’re harder to regulate 

Lars: Private e-scooters are not banned. Paris saw more private scooters in the streets after it ended the shared scheme. Does Brussels face the same paradox?

Martin: You make a fair point. We do not have the tools at our level to enforce or control private scooter use. There are measures being discussed at the federal level, but I do not know the timing, and it could take a couple of years to come into force.

Lars: So you could end up with more scooters, just ones you cannot track or regulate?

Martin: We saw that in Paris. But each city has its own identity, so I do not assume Brussels will follow the same pattern. But we will be watching the data carefully. 

What could’ve been done differently

Lars: What could operators have done to avoid this outcome?

Martin: Honestly, over the years there has been a lot of bullshit. Operators would come in and say "we have a solution for this, we will fix that", and then not follow through. It made them hard to trust, and it made it hard for me to defend the sector to my management and to decision makers who have dozens of other issues to handle. A good example: last year we started working on ID checks for scooter users. It was not in the regulatory framework so we asked four operators to do it voluntarily. They all agreed in the meeting. When the implementation date came, one provider did not do it, and stepped back. The others immediately said they were bleeding customers to that competitor and could not maintain the policy either. We were close, but one operator not complying undid the whole effort.

The impact on other forms of mobility 

Lars: What does the scooter story teach us about managing future transport innovations such as autonomous vehicles, for example?

Martin: It raises a real question about how we manage transport innovation going forward. The end of shared scooters, and the end of the Floya mobility app around the same time, feels like a kind of failure. And I do not know what signal that sends to the wider industry. There are lessons to learn.

One thing I always come back to is Cambio, the station-based car sharing operator. They have been in Brussels since 2003, with very lean, patient growth. They knocked on municipalities' doors, took their time, explained the value. From a public sector perspective, we love that approach. 

Self-driving companies will not grow that way and I understand why, but they have to at least understand what our goals are. We are not there to be a hurdle. We are there to make sure the added value is for citizens, not just for the operators.