Too drunk to ride? The test you’ll need to pass to rent an e-scooter

Melburnians looking to get home after a boozy night out or a day at the tennis will have to pass a cognitive test on their smartphone before they can ride a Lime e-scooter or bike.

The test has been installed on the Lime Micromobility app, automatically activating between the hours of 10pm and 4am during the Australian Open, in a bid to weed out intoxicated riders.

The video, which runs for several seconds, asks riders to complete a test as soon as they attempt to scan an e-scooter or bike to ride.

The test flashes up on the smartphone with instructions requesting the user to touch their screen when a red safety sign appears on the virtual road.

Failure to react to the road sign fast enough will lock the user out of hiring a scooter or bike for three hours. Users who wait out the lock out period can attempt to re-rent a device.

Lime director of government relations and public affairs Will Peters said the technology had also been activated across Melbourne on New Year’s Eve, locking out almost 400 people in a day. That’s equivalent to about 9.3 per cent of people who had sought to hire scooters late in the evening or in the early hours of the morning.

“It’s there as a deterrence factor,” Peters said.

“You might be really tired or just not up to riding a scooter or bike, or you might be impaired through other means. The simple thing is community safety is number one for us.”

The company is still collating data from the Australian Open, but Peters said preliminary results suggested the number of users locked out for failing the reaction test this month was substantially lower than during New Year’s Eve.

He said the timeframe for the test was designed to focus on the hours people were most at risk of injuring themselves.

This year, the technology will be enacted in Melbourne every Friday and Saturday night between 10pm and 4am, and during peak traffic or high-risk times, including the AFL football season and upcoming events such as the Taylor Swift concerts.

“We did a lot of research,” he said. “We looked at what the best method of detection would be and there’s quite a bit of peer-reviewed research out there, which indicates that obviously reactions is a good determinant of how cognitively aware a rider would be to operate one of our devices.”

The test comes after a rise in serious injuries was reported in Melbourne during the e-scooter trial, prompting alarm among senior doctors, who warned of the life-changing implications of the crashes.

Last year, St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne revealed hundreds of people had attended its emergency department with e-scooter-related injuries – many of whom were drunk and not wearing helmets – during a controversial inner-Melbourne trial with e-scooter hire companies Lime and Neuron.

A study at the Royal Melbourne Hospital also identified 247 riders and nine pedestrians who attended the hospital with scooter crash injuries in 2022, including 21 with major trauma and one who later died from a brain injury.

Thirty-four per cent said they had been drinking and two-thirds were not wearing a helmet when they crashed, the research found, with half suffering injuries to their head, face or neck.

Most patients were young (average age 29) and male (68 per cent). The estimated cost of treating them was $1.9 million.

Peters said that as the popularity of the scooters swelled in Australia and in major global cities including London and Paris, users had begun riding at all hours of the day, including on the way home from the pub.

Peters said Lime wanted to encourage users to treat the devices like they would a car, and not ride them if they were heavily intoxicated.

Lime, which has been using the technology since 2021, is not the only company to roll out safety measures.

Neuron – the orange e-scooter provider – also has an in-app cognitive reaction test, which it says promotes “self reflection” and helps riders assess whether they are capable of riding. The one-minute test presents a series of traffic signs and gives a rider a certain amount of time to react.

Australian Medical Association Victoria councillor Dr Sarah Whitelaw, an emergency medicine specialist, said measures such as late-night e-scooter lockouts to stop partygoers riding home drunk, and intoxication tests on users’ smartphones, were “terrific” initiatives.

Whitelaw said data from Australia suggested injuries were most common between 10pm and 4am, and on weekends.

However, she added in the future she would like to see the technology applied during times when people were consuming alcohol such as during the day at the Australian Open.

“What we do need though is to be collecting really accurate and detailed data regarding injuries that occur during this period and how many are associated with major events like the Australian Open,” she said. “This will help us tailor interventions to be the most effective.”

As part of safety blitzes during the Australian Open, Lime is also posting parking wardens near high-traffic areas, including Southbank, through the Hoddle grid and close to the MCG.

A Neuron spokeswoman said the e-scooter company was running a Summer ScootSafe with “safety ambassadors” positioned at e-scooter hotspots.

“Those who ride dangerously can be suspended or banned entirely from the service,” she said.

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