E-Scooters in Mexico City: The Fragile Line Between a Fee and a Tax

On a street in the Roma Norte district, a delivery rider named Marcos pulls his e-scooter to the curb, takes out his phone, and reads a headline that makes him read it a second time. From the moment the new rule takes effect, riders of VEMEPE — the Spanish acronym for "personal electric motorized vehicles" — will need an A1 or A2 driver's license. Marcos does not need a legal definition. He needs to know what he will have to pay. Two numbers appear on the screen: 572 pesos for the A1 category, and 1,142 pesos for the A2 category. I have spent more than forty years in the stands, counting passes and recording numbers few people bother to write down. My trade is reading tables until they stop pretending to be neutral. So when an analysis of a Mexico City transport regulation landed in my hands with a "football" label stuck on top, I did not throw it away. I read it. And what I found was not a match, but a dispute over definitions — the kind of dispute I have run into on the pitch many times, with only the name changed. The first thing to say clearly: this source is not a football article. There is no club in it. No player, no coach, no competition, no transfer, no governing body. All twenty information points in the original revolve around one thing: the Mexico City Congress folding personal electric motorized vehicles into the scope of existing A1 and A2 driver's licenses under the city's Fiscal Code. The word "football" pasted onto it is like a numbered shirt in the wrong size — it does not kill anyone, but it misleads people about who is wearing it. I retell this story using the method I always use: verify first, write second. And I will be blunt from the outset, because I believe transparency about a source's origin matters as much as the information itself. E-scooters appeared in Mexico City as a textbook urban phenomenon of the 2020s. Cheaper than a car, faster than walking, they slip into streets that buses refuse to stop on. Within a few years, tens of thousands were on the central avenues, used mostly by delivery riders, students, and ordinary workers. A means of transport had become a means of livelihood. But there was a gap: no one defined what they were in the eyes of the law. They were not bicycles, so they fell outside the non-motorized category. They were not motorbikes, so no license was required. They were not cars either. For years they existed in a grey zone — permitted to run, but not classified. That grey zone was the fertile ground for every dispute that followed. When a thing has no name, people can call it anything. And names, as I learned over years of covering competitions, tend to decide the fate of the thing named. Major cities around the world have handled this differently. Madrid banned e-scooters from sidewalks and pedestrian zones. Paris went through a referendum and decided to remove most free-floating rentals. London trialed speed-restricted zones and designated parking. Each city picked a balance between freedom of movement and public safety, and none is entirely happy with its choice. Mexico City chose a different direction: no ban, no speed cap, but bringing riders into the existing licensing system. This is an administrative choice rather than a prohibitive one. And precisely for that reason, it becomes a small lesson in how cities define their citizens through paperwork. The core point of the rule is this, and I want to say it slowly so readers do not miss it: this is not the creation of a new scooter license. The Mexico City Congress expanded the scope of two long-existing license categories — A1 and A2 — so they also cover personal electric motorized vehicles. In other words, the city did not build a new door. It widened an old door to let one more line of people through. That distinction sounds technical, but it governs how the whole rule should be understood. If it were a new license, people could fairly ask: why add a burden? But when it is the expansion of an existing legal framework, the question becomes: why were scooter riders outside that framework for years? The A1 category in Mexico City's system is tied to motorbike operators, with a recorded fee of 572 pesos. The A2 category is tied to cars and motorbikes, at 1,142 pesos. These figures sit in the 2026 fee schedule — a schedule that already existed, not one invented for scooters. This is the most valuable legal detail in the whole story, and also the easiest to overlook. A fee already in the system, unchanged in amount, simply had its scope of application extended. As a matter of administrative technique, this is entirely different from enacting a new tax. So why did the public worry? Because in everyday speech, every payment owed to the state tends to be lumped under "tax." Ordinary people do not distinguish between a "derecho" and an "impuesto" — between a licensing fee and a tax levied on ownership or use. And the gap between those two concepts is where the political argument erupts. The original notes that Morena representatives in the Mexico City Congress spoke up pre-emptively to explain: the sums are "derechos" — fees for issuing and renewing a license — not an "impuesto," a new tax. The fact that they had to explain before the public could ask shows they anticipated the reaction. And anticipating the reaction shows scooter riders are a constituency large enough to make a political party cautious. Notice this. A group of transport users has become a political bloc heavy enough to force legislators to choose their words before publishing a text. That is a sign e-scooters are no longer a fad, but a living part of the city's infrastructure. On timing, the rule sets a specific condition: it takes effect the day after publication in the Gaceta Oficial of Mexico City — the city's official gazette. This means that at the time of writing, the effective date was not yet fixed, because it depends on an event that has not yet happened: official publication. For someone who follows legal texts, this is an important detail. It means any information about a "deadline" or "start of enforcement" cannot be confirmed. Citizens are advised to watch the Gaceta Oficial for the exact date. In my trade, we call this a "pending trigger." A rule has been passed but the clock has not started. The structure of the original is also worth noting. It takes a Q&A form: what the scooter license is, how much it costs, whether it is a new tax, what VEMEPE means, how A1 and A2 differ, when it takes effect, why the city is regulating. This is service journalism — written for a reader who needs a concrete answer, not a stance. The Q&A form has its own power: it frames the question before the reader can form a doubt. But it also has its own weakness: it makes the headline broader than the body. The headline speaks of a "scooter license." The body speaks of expanding two existing licenses. Those are not the same. One is creation, one is extension. I still teach young reporters a rule: read the headline, read the body, then ask whether they retell the same event. Most of the time, the answer is no. Not because anyone is deliberately deceiving, but because a headline must be short, and the truth is long. The same applies here. A reader may enter expecting a wholly new license and leave understanding that an old framework was widened. At the same time, a reader may enter fearing a new tax and leave realizing the fee figure pre-existed. Two perception gaps, two corrections of understanding. What is interesting is that the original does not dodge either gap. It raises and answers them directly. It asks plainly: "Is this a new tax?" It answers plainly: No, this is a fee. That candor is the strength of the service format. But I want to push the story one step further. When a fee and a tax are distinguished by the difference between "issuing a license" and "taxing ownership," we touch a much larger question about the nature of the right to move. If a person must pay to be allowed to move on a public road, is that movement a right or a granted privilege? I do not ask this to oppose the rule. Cities need evidence of driving ability before letting someone merge into dense traffic. A rider at twenty km/h among pedestrians can harm others. Requiring a little confirmation of competence is reasonable. But the question remains, and it is not Mexico City's alone. It belongs to every large city trying to balance urban speed with administrative capacity. This is where I leave my territory and enter the territory of fact. I re-checked the core events in the original. The Mexico City Congress approving the rule is verifiable. The 572 and 1,142 peso fees are recorded from the 2026 schedule of the Secretaría de Administración y Finanzas — the city's administrative finance authority. The publication-triggered effective condition is grounded. These three events form a solid frame. The rest — background explanations, extended Q&A — is synthesized from public knowledge rather than directly cited sources. This does not make it false. It only means readers should distinguish the verifiable core from the contextual shell. I say this not to diminish the original, but to place it on its proper tier. In journalism, not every sentence carries the same evidentiary weight. A good piece lets readers tell bone from flesh. The original has clear bone. The flesh around it is firm enough to hold its shape. What I want to stress, after all this, is an observation about how public debates operate. They do not operate on facts. They operate on the feeling of facts. And the feeling of a fee depends almost entirely on what that fee is called in a headline. An existing fee schedule can become a new tax through one misplaced word. An expansion of a legal framework can become a new license through one headline broader than its body. That is the power of language in journalism, and the responsibility of language in journalism. I have spent a career fighting the distorting lens that makes everything on the pitch look different from reality, and here I meet the same phenomenon, only with the stage changed. There is another thing worth a closer look. Fee schedules are usually the driest documents a bureaucracy produces. Little read, little cited, little understood. But they are where much public policy actually ends up: not in speeches, but in columns of numbers. That is why expanding an old fee schedule to a new group carries more weight than its technical appearance suggests. If you want to understand how a city prices its citizens, do not read political statements. Read the fee schedule. The 572 pesos for A1 and 1,142 pesos for A2 say nothing about the morality of the policy. But they say a great deal about how much a city expects a citizen to pay to be allowed to move legally on its streets. I recall my years tracking match statistics — passes, distance covered, midfield duels. People often think those numbers merely describe a match. In truth, they describe our conception of the match. When we choose what to count, we declare that it matters. When we omit something, we declare it does not. Mexico City chose to count licenses, not collisions. Every counting choice is a value choice. This is where I want to offer a contrarian view, because urban regulation debates usually collapse into two camps: prohibitionists and libertarians. But a rule like Mexico City's does not fit neatly into either. It bans no one. It abandons no one. It places a group into an existing system, at an existing price, in exchange for a legal status it never had. From a safety angle, this may be a step forward. A licensed person has gone through some evaluation — though the exact process is not fully described in the original. From an administrative angle, it is rationalization: pulling a grey zone into a framework. From the user's angle, it is a new sum to pay — though not a new type of fee — for an activity that previously cost nothing in paperwork. Three angles, three names, and each name leads to a different set of emotional reactions. This is why I say the real debate here is not in the number but in the verb. People are not arguing about 572 pesos. They are arguing about what to call paying 572 pesos. And this is why Morena's legislators chose the word "derechos" rather than letting "impuesto" seize the headline. They understood that in urban politics, words precede numbers. A fee called by its right name can be accepted. A fee called by the wrong name can generate an opposition movement. So the next question is: what happens when the rule formally takes effect? At the time of the original, the answer was not available, because the publication date had not arrived. Readers were advised to watch the Gaceta Oficial. In that waiting period, every party is preparing: users for the cost, the administrative agency for the issuance process, and political representatives for the explanation. There is one signal I want to track going forward, and I say this as someone who has long watched systems. When a new rule takes effect, the real question is not who complies and who does not. The real question is: what resources the city will use to enforce, and what routes the people will find to adapt. Every urban rule passes through what I call a "bargaining phase," where both sides negotiate a practical equilibrium different from the one on paper. For a city with tens of thousands of e-scooter riders, full enforcement from day one is nearly unthinkable. Some areas will be tightened first, others later. Some user groups will comply quickly, others will wait. All this lies outside the original, because the original is an explainer, not a behavioral forecast. But it is the part I, with my old instincts, cannot help seeing. I return to Marcos — the delivery rider on Roma Norte. He has finished reading the headline. He does not know how A1 differs from A2. He does not know what the Gaceta Oficial is. But he knows one simple thing: today costs more than yesterday. And he will find a way to pay, because the scooter is not a hobby. It is the tool that gets him where he needs to be, when he needs to be there. Over my career I have learned that every system, whether a football league or a fee schedule, is built by some people to press upon others. A writer's job is not to pick a side, but to show readers how the system runs and whom it tilts toward. A fee does not become a tax just because people call it one. But a fee also does not exempt the system from explaining why it exists. A city does not lack rules. A city lacks clear enough definitions for people to know where they stand. And the story of e-scooters in Mexico City, once the mislabel is peeled away, is the story of the gap between two words — between what the system calls a fee and what those outside the system see as a tax. A gap two syllables wide, but large enough to hold an entire public debate. There is one thing I want to leave readers with, after walking with me through the fee schedule, the effective conditions, and the political statements. It is this: when a city decides who may move and at what price, that city is drawing the boundary of its citizenry. That boundary can be drawn by law, by money, or by naming. In Mexico City's case, it is being drawn by all three at once. What is worth weighing is not whether a particular rule is good or bad. It is that every urban rule is an answer to a larger question: how do we want our city to move, and who gets to decide what that movement costs. That question has no technical answer. It has only a political one. And every citizen watching the Gaceta Oficial is, whether they want to or not, taking part in that answer.