Scooting made safer
- Scoot safe or you won’t get off scot-free! 500-backed e-scooter company Neuron Mobility announced a multi-million dollar investment into front-facing AI-powered cameras, which will be installed on every e-scooter in its 1,250-strong fleet in Melbourne.
- This makes Neuron the first rental e-scooter operator in the world to introduce the technology on such a large scale in a major international city.
- The company’s ‘ScootSafe Vision’ system was created in-house and has been tested in Melbourne for the past six months to train the technology to recognize the city’s streets and footpaths.
- A few nifty features:
- Detects when an e-scooter is on the footpath in less than a second; riders receive a real-time audio alert, follow-up warnings, educational material, and suspensions for repeat offenses
- Configurations to reduce the e-scooter speed, forcing riders to leave the footpath
- Warns riders of pedestrians in their path and instructs them to watch out for pedestrians and slow down
- Furthermore, ScootSafe Vision will be doing trials on uneven riding surfaces, such as potholes, helping to map potentially hazardous areas and set speed limits. The data collected could then be provided to councils for planning road improvements in the city.
- Jayden Bryant, GM of Australia and New Zealand, shared, “The results of a six-month trial show that our ScootSafe Vision system has the potential to significantly reduce footpath riding, and we have given our commitment to our councils to make the investment early, even before the trial phase ends.”
- “We are already using the data from our six-month trial to increase our enforcement activity at key times and locations, and it has allowed us to be even more targeted with our rider education material so we can improve behavior across the city,” he added.
- When it comes to safety, Neuron has a proven track record of innovation. The team was the first to implement geofencing control in 2019 to manage where e-scooters can be ridden and parked in cities, and they launched the first app-controlled helmet lock in early 2020 to ensure that every e-scooter has a helmet.
- Read the full story here.
