ACP gives up referendum on shared scooters in Lisbon

O Automobile Club de Portugal (ACP) withdrew the initiative presented at the Lisbon Municipal Assembly (AML) for holding a referendum on the permission or not of scooters shared in the county, after the House approved the suspension of the system.

The information was advanced during today's AML meeting, which was shorter than usual due to the bad weather, which still approved the creation of the Eventual Commission to assess the popular local referendum initiative on the use of the municipal public domain for the exploitation of scooter sharing systems, called “Trotinetes, Yes or No?”, with the vote against Aquida, the abstention of the PSD and votes in favour of PS, Livre, PCP, BE, PAN, PEV, CDS-PP and IL.

The president of AML, André Moz Caldas explained that what was at stake was “the fulfilment of a legal obligation, which is born with the submission of the request for the popular local referendum initiative, to set up a possible committee to accompany the referendum”.

According to Moz Caldas, on Monday the ACP issued a request to withdraw the initial request for a referendum, but the AML may consider that “a public interest that deserves the continuity of the process is established”.

According to the PSD, Américo Vitorino considered that after the ACP initiative, the municipality of Lisbon “decided the suspension and end of the scooters in Lisbon, as happened in many other cities”, which “fills the goals of the promoters themselves” of the referendum”, so “naturally this process dies, because it no longer has reason for existence”.

André Biveti, from the PS, argued that “Lisbon invested in public resources, in a network of cycling infrastructure, to promote precisely other forms of mobility” and, therefore, “it makes no sense to invest in alternatives to the car and then remove one of these alternatives, instead of creating conditions for its use”.

As to the decision of the mayor of Lisbon (CML), Carlos Coins (PSD), before the referendum, the socialist questioned: “What is the City Hall afraid of? From a more demanding regulation, to recognize the limits of supervision he has done or to hear what Lisbon has to say?’.

“ Public space is too important to be abandoned to disorder, but it is also too important for each problem to have an answer such as prohibition,” he said.

For Enough, “the ACP acknowledged that when the House made the decision it made on the platforms of the scooters, it solved the problem that was at the base of the initiative”. “The ACP withdrew, it has exactly the same legitimacy it had when it placed [the application],” said Margarida Bentes Penedo.

By the IL, Pedro Bugarin said he did not understand the ACP retreat, “since the question was not even put to the Lisboners”.

“ We find this withdrawal strange because, let us see, the decision of the House was on a Wednesday, as I recall, a meeting of the House on a Wednesday and the ACP delivered here, at the headquarters of this Municipal Assembly, on the previous Monday, a vast set of signatures validating the request of this referendum ", called the liberal.

On the day of the delivery of the 20,000 signatures collected at the AML on 19 October, ACP President Carlos Barbosa told Lusa that he was “very happy” with the announcement of the suspension of shared scooters and that the process for a referendum would follow the normal procedures.

“If, by chance, however, the president [Carlos Coins] decides that, effectively, the scooters end, this process, in the background, dies because it has no reason to exist,” he said.