Apply the brake: users of electric scooters began to personally reduce their speed
Electric scooter users are faced with individual speed limits of up to 18-20 km/h with an acceptable 25 km/h. The rental companies told Izvestia about this. This affected not only drivers with rough driving who violate traffic regulations, but also those who drive rarely — kicksharing simply does not have enough data about them. The driving rating is only one of the measures to reduce the accident rate of electric scooters and others should be applied, experts say.
Electric Scooter User Ratings
Russian kicksharing companies introduce ratings for their clients that affect the speed at which they are allowed to drive electric scooters. This was reported to Izvestia by representatives of these companies. For example, the Whoosh operator started using scoring for customers back in late May. According to a company representative, 89% of customers currently have a rating that allows them to develop a full speed of 25 km/h on personal mobility equipment (SIM). But for 11% of users, the "Sport" mode, which allows you to accelerate to these values, is closed because there is not enough data to assign them a rating: they are beginners or drive too little. Less than 1% of them had their rating lowered and, consequently, their speed was limited due to aggressive driving style or parking violations to 18-20 km/h.
— In case of proven violations of the rules, the service still applies sanctions: fines or blocking, - the company added.
The rating takes into account several factors at once: the experience (number of trips) of users, the presence of fines, warnings and accidents; driving style, parking quality, age confirmation and much more. Based on this data, Whoosh sets personal settings.
An industry source noted that due to insufficient information for rating, the speed is limited to about 6%: however, the necessary information usually accumulates over several weeks.
"We are currently testing it on a part of our user base, but in the near future it will appear on all accounts in the service's application," MTS Yrent noted. — Violators will lose rating points, and the maximum speed of the electric scooter for them will decrease to 18-20 km/h.
However, according to the company, there are now less than 0.001% of users in the control test group with a rating below the maximum.
Yandex, which also sells electric scooters, declined to comment.
The introduction of scoring is one of the measures designed to improve traffic safety, representatives of kicksharing companies say. The previously introduced stricter rules, the appearance of fines and the blocking of accounts for violations have already led to a reduction in accidents, they claim.
In 2024, operators imposed restrictions and fines for violations of the rules for using their services. Sanctions, in particular, are imposed for transferring control to minors, taking their time at crossings, parking incorrectly and driving under the influence. Fines can amount up to 100,000 rubles, and the user faces account blocking. At the level of federal legislation, the upper speed limit (25 km/h) is limited, in some regions of the Russian Federation this threshold can be set even lower — at 15 km/h or even 10 km/h in certain zones.
According to Whoosh, in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period last year, accidents involving SIM decreased by 35%.
— The absolute number of accidents involving SIM decreased by 46%. The number of accidents decreases most noticeably when minors travel (by 65%), when traveling together (by 48%) or at the intersection of a pedestrian crossing (by 50%). The most common causes of accidents are driving violations or situations caused by an imperfect state of infrastructure. In 2025, 93% of accidents were without injuries or with minor consequences, the company notes.
The increased awareness of users is also confirmed by official data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, according to which accidents involving SIM decreased by 20% in the first half of the year, MTS Yuret added.
Will scoring help reduce accidents
Yaroslav Shitsle, Head of the It&Ip Dispute Resolution department at Rustam Kurmaev & Partners, considers these measures justified, but insufficient. After all, if the speed is limited to 6% or even 10% of users, then it is fair to speak of such a measure as exceptional, that is, by default, the operator considers all users who provided all the information they requested worthy of the highest rating, he argues.
— Unfortunately, practice shows that this is not the case. It is possible to lower the rating of an "athlete" user after he has failed to justify the operator's trust, causing damage to someone's property or health along the way, but there is no preventive component to this measure. It would be more logical not to limit the speed based on the scoring results, but, on the contrary, to increase it from the minimum as the rating increases. The effect will be when the maximum possible speed is available not for 90% of users, but for a quarter, but precisely to those who have confirmed their skills, the expert believes.
In general, in his opinion, the introduction of the rating is legitimate — the operator determines access to certain services under the contract by having access to user data, which he is legally entitled to collect and process. A person has the right not to agree to the terms and conditions and not to conclude a contract with a specific operator, he explains.
By itself, the introduction of the rating is unlikely to affect the reduction of accidents, in particular, because malicious violators use fake accounts, says Sergey Polovnikov, head of the Content—Review project. He believes that the solution to the problem should be comprehensive. For example, rule-abiding scooters could provide companies with information about users who violate them and receive bonuses to their accounts.
In his opinion, the key to improving security is high and unavoidable fines. The authorities did this to punish reckless drivers on the roads — since a lot of surveillance cameras appeared on the streets, violators who came into their field of vision began to issue fines, so they began to drive more carefully in large cities, the expert concluded.
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