首尔市拟对违停共享电动自行车征收每辆4万韩元拖曳费，9月18日约谈运营商、11月推条例修订，遭行业反对

Seoul Weighs Towing Fees for Shared E-Bikes, Drawing Industry Pushback - Seoul Economic Daily
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Shared electric bikes. Clipart Korea
The Seoul Metropolitan Government will meet with mobility companies to discuss a plan to impose towing fees on shared electric bicycles.
The city will hold a meeting with the mobility industry on Sept. 18 to discuss specific measures on illegal parking, industry officials said on the 15th. Companies expected to attend include GBike, The Swing, PUMP, Kakao Mobility and Socar, all of which rent shared e-bikes in Seoul.
The city is bringing the operators together because it is pushing to revise an ordinance on the towing of vehicles in violation of stopping and parking rules, through a council member-initiated ordinance revision in November. Under the ordinance, when an e-bike is parked on a sidewalk, at a subway station, in front of a crosswalk or on tactile paving blocks, a towing company would remove it and bill the mobility operator. The charge would be set at 40,000 won per unit in towing fees plus hourly storage fees. It is the same approach currently applied to illegally parked shared scooters. The city intends for mobility operators to pay the costs first and then bill the customers who actually parked the e-bikes illegally.
Under current law, electric bicycles fall under the Bicycle Act. The law stipulates that bicycles left unattended in public places for 10 days or more and obstructing passage are to be moved and stored by the head of the local government. Seoul has already obtained a legal interpretation that the ordinance revision does not conflict with the Bicycle Act. A city official said complaints from residents about illegal parking have been raised in considerable numbers not only over shared scooters but also over shared e-bikes, making action necessary, adding that the Ministry of the Interior and Safety agreed on that need.
The mobility industry, by contrast, is objecting that such a revision would hurt the e-bike business. Their argument is that if regulation comes first while Seoul has not secured enough legal parking spaces for shared e-bikes, operators will have no choice but to reduce the number of e-bikes.
The city says it will expand legal parking spaces in consultation with district governments once the ordinance is revised, but the industry agrees that an immediate increase in legal parking spaces will not be easy. Because cooperation from district governments is essential, operators unable to bear the towing costs will instead scale back their e-bike businesses altogether, they argue.
One industry official said that although the city tells companies to collect towing fees from customers who used and illegally parked the e-bikes, it is not easy for operators to verify whether a user was at fault and then charge them. The official added that with legal parking spaces already hard to find, the outcome will be the same as with shared scooters, lining the pockets of towing companies alone.
Some also argue that, given the nature of shared services, another user has often already taken a bike before the operator can collect and reposition an illegally parked one. About 52,000 shared e-bikes are estimated to be in operation in Seoul. Another industry official said it would be more reasonable as policy to first use any management system through which operators can resolve problems themselves, and to impose sanctions in stages if they fail to comply. The official added that relying too heavily on strong tools such as towing to reduce the administrative burden could draw criticism as an approach that favors administrative convenience, so the proportionality of regulatory tools and the structure of economic incentives need to be examined together.
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Original reporting by
Kim Ji-young
for Seoul Economic Daily.
AI-translated from Korean. Quotes from foreign sources are based on Korean-language reports and may not reflect exact original wording.
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