Micromobility operators across Europe are under increasing pressure to ensure they can accurately track the position of their vehicles. Failure to do so is resulting in licenses being lost, so operators need to know precisely where a vehicle is and what surrounds it.

The positioning side of the challenge has been effectively handled by utilization of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology, which in conventional situations delivers accuracy of 2-5m in open sky conditions. However, this performance is affected by obstructions such as trees and high buildings, which can cause performance to degrade to 10-50m in dense urban scenarios. A 10-50m range allows enough inaccuracy for vehicles to operate outside agreed geofenced areas and to be parked in unapproved areas.

Micromobility operators are addressing this positioning degradation by adopting multi-band GNSS, dead reckoning (DR), and real-time kinematics (RTK) through a single sensor fusion engine to improve location accuracy. More than 500,000 shared e-scooters across Europe now rely on GNSS positioning, augmented by additional technologies, to operate, unlock, navigate, and park without needing fixed infrastructure.

The rising cost of non-compliance

In London, Westminster City Council has issued more than 2,500 parking notices to operators since November 2025 and now has powers to seize non-compliant vehicles. We’ve already seen Paris ban shared e-scooters completely while enforcing dedicated parking areas for shared bicycles. Madrid has withdrawn operating licenses from several major operators because of repeated compliance breaches.

Increasingly, operator proposals are judged on the ability to prove compliance rather than fleet size. In Liverpool, the city’s 2026 e-scooter and e-bike contract was awarded to an operator whose parking enforcement system automatically flagged wrongly parked vehicles.

Regulators now expect micromobility operators to prove compliance in real-time at the level of the individual vehicle, so if they want to keep operating, they need to have the ability to immediately confirm the accurate position of every vehicle in their fleet.

This can’t be achieved by a single technology, so operators need to integrate on-vehicle sensors including multi-band GNSS, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), and wheel encoders, which then feed a sensor fusion engine. The combination of these components, with techniques such as wheel click counting, DR, and RTK corrections, provides the basis for accurate positioning.

Position and context awareness

Compliance is a critical challenge for operators as the micromobility sector massively scales up, but these capabilities also benefit operators as they can improve fleet retrieval operations, lower operational costs, increase rider satisfaction, and enable autonomous fleet operations.

Read the new Quectel white paper ‘Precision positioning for the next generation of micromobility’ to learn how micromobility operators can achieve position accuracy.