Your Relatively low weight and their ease of use make e-scooters the target of vandals, who apparently prefer to throw the scooters into waters like the Rhine. (Image: Tier Mobility)
Research by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) has shown that there are hundreds of e-scooters in the Rhine near the large Rhine bridges in the North Rhine-Westphalian metropolis of Cologne. Above all, the Hohenzollern Bridge in downtown Cologne should be a kind of junk hotspot for me at least 500 scooters sunk.
Vandals throw scooters into the river
Obviously in Cologne vandals are making it a kind of sport to throw the relatively easy-to-carry scooters from bridges or from the bank into the river. In the meantime, the rental companies have at least responded by using geofencing to ensure that their scooter trips can no longer begin or end near the Rhine.
However, as far as the responsibility for the recovery and removal of the scooters already lying in the river is concerned, the WDR was able to take little initiative on the part of the rental company. Only the rental company Bird announced to the broadcaster that it would commission a specialist company to rescue their scooters from the Rhine “as soon as possible”.
Construction diving specialist company meets for all uses on scooter scrap
Such a specialist company is headed by Markus Hambüchen, a construction diver from Cologne. He was recently asked by one of the largest scooter rental companies in Germany for an offer to rescue 500 scooters from the Rhine. According to Hambüchen, however, the lender declined when he heard the price for the salvage. That is way too expensive. Then the scooters should stay where they are, the rental company is said to have communicated.
According to Hambüchen’s description, however, that is exactly not an option. On the one hand, he and his employees have come across e-scooters on almost every dive. It is not a handful or a few dozen, but hundreds. On the other hand, many of these scooters would secrete a “sticky mass” – an indication that the battery seals are leaking and secreting dangerous chemicals into the Rhine and the sediment of the Rhine floor.
BUND alerted: Environmental authorities must react
That in turn alarms Paul Kröfkes, the water expert from the Federation for Environment and Nature Conservation Germany in North Rhine-Westphalia. He describes the behavior of the lenders as an environmental scandal. After all, the Rhine supplies drinking water to 30 million Europeans. He calls on the responsible environmental authorities to take immediate action.
The rental companies responded to the WDR’s questions about how to deal with the scooters that were sunk rambling. The rental company Tier claims that the company’s scooters are only very rarely thrown into the Rhine in such a way that they cannot be recovered immediately. None of the lenders wanted to give concrete figures.
Update: Animal answers with a statement
After this article was published, Florian Anders, Head of PR at Scooter -Lender Tier Mobility, registered with us. Anders points out that the numbers that WDR cites in its report appear “very high” from his company’s point of view. At Tier Mobility, the cases of vandalism were very limited. Since the start in Cologne around 2 years ago, a middle double-digit number of scooters has been thrown into the Rhine or other bodies of water, said Anders. That would correspond to a loss of around two vehicles per month. Overall, the Tier fleet in Cologne comprises around 1,800 e-scooters and 500 e-mopeds.
