It seems that after two delays of announcement, Singapore government has finally scrapped the licensing scheme of shared e-scooters.
Lam Pin Min, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Transportation, made this announcement in parliament on Monday. He said the government will not accept more applications, and all the existing applications will be rejected.
That came after on average 370 incidents involving e-scooters each month recently, and a fatal accident in September. The government is at the same time banning e-scooters on pavements, imposing a fine of up to S$2000 (US$1473) and prison term of up to 3 months.
This is pretty harsh treatment. It would be interesting to see governments of other dense, developed cities in Asia will follow.
Anyway, our predictions for Southeast Asia 2019 ends with: “E-scooter fails to take off in the region”.