While bright orange scooters may have become a ubiquitous sight around Cambridge streets over the past few years, Vois may soon become a thing of the past.

The e-scooter trial which has allowed Vois to operate in Cambridge, despite a nationwide ban on e-scooters, is due to expire in May 2024.

Since 2020, the Department for Transport has allowed certain cities to conduct trials of e-scooter services, such as Voi. The DfT claims these trials were put in place to gather information to inform future legislation. But despite the trials running for over two years, no new legislation has yet been announced.

While Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority extended the trial by a year in October 2022, Voi has called (08/02) on the Government to offer greater clarity regarding future e-scooter legislation.

Appearing before the Transport Select Committee, Head of Public Policy for Voi in the UK, Matthew Pencharz, said that the company did not “have certainty after May next year when the trials are currently due to end”, citing the lack of a timeline for new legislation to be implemented.

Stockholm-based Voi operates in several other European countries like the Netherlands and Germany, but unlike the UK, these states have amended legislation to partially legalise e-scooters.

Student reaction to the news has been mixed. One student who lives at Girton and used Vois to get into town called the move “egregious” and claimed Vois were a “national pastime”.

Others, however, will be less sad to see the scooters go. An often cited concern were scooters being parked improperly and becoming both an eyesore and an obstacle. For one student, the process of reporting these badly parked scooters was a source of frustration. While saying they didn’t have “strong feelings” about the news, they did not like the fact that the “onus would be on [them] to take pictures and send them to Voi to get them removed”.