Head of Mobility Stefan Majer is proud of the new, spacious fixed parking area for e-scooters on Berliner Straße, opposite the Paulskirche.

The five operators who have applied for and received a special use permit for more than 20,000 e-scooters in Frankfurt, 5,000 of them for the extended city center alone, can each park five vehicles there.

The area comes pretty close to the ideal that Green Party politician Majer imagines for the future of scooters, especially in downtown Frankfurt: no more chaos with e-scooters parked wildly on narrow sidewalks, tree grates, fire brigade driveways, in green spaces or on bridges.

Rather, the vehicles should be in a specially designated zone - it includes the extended inner city up to the avenue ring,

Mechthild Harting

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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If users do not comply with this requirement, this is detected by GPS and the provider app refuses to end the rental.

But it will be a while before sufficient areas are marked in the city center.

The first step for the road traffic office is to take the side streets of the Zeil, then it goes to the station district.

The office assumes that in the end there will be around 50 such areas for scooters in the city center alone.

"We want to designate such parking spaces wherever there is a lot going on," says Majer, but not in the more distant parts of the city.

The situation there is often such that citizens sometimes want more scooters than are currently available.

The ultimate goal of the city of Frankfurt is to promote the use of e-scooters, says the city councilor responsible for transport.

Because the future "consists of networked mobility".

That fits with the statements of the operators such as the provider Voi.

Its statistics show that around half of the drivers use the scooter to get to the next stop.

Majer is convinced that the parking area on Berliner Strasse is also ideally located, albeit in a different way: attractive for tourists and for visitors to the neighboring trendy bars.

Both groups, which - the providers also confirm - enthusiastically use the scooter offer.