Mar 3, 2023
Today, we’re excited to announce the Bolt Scooter Safety Pledge. This blog post provides an overview of how we developed the pledge, with key input from a research report on scooter safety jointly authored by Bolt and Steer.
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At Bolt, we have ten principles that guide how we operate and make decisions at every level of the company. The first of these operating principles is ‘Customer First’.
To bring this principle to life, ensuring that all of our users reach their destinations safely is an essential responsibility that’s been a top priority since Bolt was founded almost a decade ago.
To make our commitment clear, today we’re announcing the launch of Bolt’s Scooter Safety Pledge, a set of nine safety principles embedded in how we operate our shared scooter service.
Since scooters are still a new form of urban mobility, there are naturally questions about how they impact the safety of riders, pedestrians, and other road users.
To ensure we’re committing to the most impactful safety solutions, we worked with Steer to comprehensively review the available research and data and develop a research report that identifies the most pressing scooter safety issues based on the current evidence.
As a data-driven mobility provider, we already understand the safety issues and have consistently developed new solutions to address them. Some of these include:
Still, it was essential for us to work with an independent party to verify, build on, and in some cases, challenge our views.
The research process included a review of the available literature and other public data as well as interviews between Steer and the following third-party experts to gain further insights:
The resulting report covers a wide range of safety topics, from scooter design to the primary risks related to scooter crashes.
Combined with our data and experience, the report provides the basis for developing commitments reflecting the safety challenges associated with shared scooters.
To further ensure our pledge is aligned with the cities’ safety priorities, we interviewed administration officials from Lisbon, Milan, Nuremberg, and Krakow to discuss the pledge points and receive their feedback.
The result is a pledge informed by academic research and real-life experiences of Bolt and the cities where we operate.
“A critical part of delivering the best possible customer experience across our mobility products — from ride-hailing to car-sharing to micromobility — is to make sure that all customers can reach their destinations safely.”
Markus Villig, CEO of Bolt
Commitments are nice, but actions are better.
Bolt has emphasised safety from the outset, and in many cases, we’ve already implemented the measures mentioned in the pledge. In other cases, we’ve explained how we’ll bring our pledges to life.
For example, our new Rider Score feature highlights our ongoing technical innovation to ensure scooters are used as safely as possible.
Furthermore, we’ve been developing a framework of key indicators to track our progress to measure how well we’re improving results over time.
By continuously refining our data collection and analysis process, we aim to improve our performance and help improve wider understanding among cities and riders of the successes and challenges related to scooter safety.
One key finding of our report is an ongoing gap in publicly available safety data related to scooters. This makes it difficult for city policymakers and other stakeholders to get a clear picture of scooter safety.
That’s why it’s important to not only gather data but be transparent about it as well. Our 2022 Scooter Safety Report highlighted the reduction in our scooter accident rate compared to 2021. And we’re looking forward to publishing a wider set of data points in this year’s report.
The full Scooter Safety Pledge is available here, while our joint research report with Steer is available here.
