Personal Electric Vehicles in Mexico City: A Pre-Existing Fee and an Inflated Label

Early morning in Mexico City, the flow of personal electric vehicles still threads through the packed lanes of Paseo de la Reforma, between bus horns and dust. For years, riders of these machines have not had to produce a single document when traffic police stop them. The Congress of Mexico City has just voted to change that. Under the approved text, personal electric vehicles will fall within the scope of the existing A1 and A2 licences, at a fee of 572 pesos for A1 and 1,142 pesos for A2. Within hours the item showed up on football pages as well. The way it was named, a scooter licence, buried the most important part.

VEMEPE is the administrative shorthand for vehiculos motorizados electricos personales, the class of personal battery-powered vehicles that users simply call scooters. Until now the class sat outside every driving-licence category. The Congress of Mexico City amended the city Fiscal Code to fold VEMEPE into two licences that already exist: A1, designed for motorcyclists, and A2, the broader permit covering both cars and motorcycles. The point worth stressing: this is an expansion of an existing scope, not the creation of a new licence class. No new issuing authority, no separate file, no new administrative body.

The two fee figures that dominate coverage are 572 pesos and 1,142 pesos. This is where confusion concentrates. Morena representatives in Congress spoke up before any wave of criticism could form, insisting the amounts are derechos, fees for issuing or renewing a permit, rather than an impuesto, a tax on ownership or use. The distinction is not wordplay. It shapes how residents of Mexico City read the story: a routine administrative cost, or a new levy on the way they move every day.

The fees of 572 and 1,142 pesos already existed in the 2026 tariff table before the vote took place. They were not created for electric scooters. Congress merely widened who must pay a charge already written into law. That tariff table is the quiet figure in this story, and a quiet figure needs no goal to be remembered. It is the least-reported detail, and it dismantles the popular reading that the city invented a new tax.

The second consequence sits in the naming. The phrase scooter licence makes readers picture a new card, a new test, a new procedure. In practice, VEMEPE users step into the existing A1 or A2 framework. Administratively that is the cheapest option: no new line in the Fiscal Code, no retraining of issuing staff, no bespoke document template. Politically it is also the option that makes the least noise, and the silence around it has been filled with more attractive headlines.

The effective date has been misread too. The amendment takes effect from the day after publication in the Gaceta Oficial de la Ciudad de Mexico, which means the practical application date is not yet fixed. For scooter riders in the city, that leaves a grey zone: they know a fee is coming, but not when police will begin checking documents.

The two licence classes need spelling out, because most short reports compress them. A1 is tied to motorcyclists, at 572 pesos. A2 is the wider permit for cars and motorcycles, at 1,142 pesos. Where VEMEPE users land between the two, and on what basis they are classified, is left open by the text. It is a familiar ambiguity in rounds of urban administrative reform.

From watching how European cities handle this vehicle class, Mexico City has taken the opposite route to most. Barcelona, where I live, tightens e-scooter rules through operating requirements: maximum speed, a ban on pavements, parking rules, insurance liability. Paris once held a referendum on banning free-floating rental fleets outright. Mexico City, at this stage, starts from paperwork: who is allowed, and what they pay. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but the order of priority says a great deal about each administration enforcement capacity.

The common reading that this is a new tax on scooter riders is technically wrong, yet the feeling behind it is not baseless. An old fee, applied to a group that never had to pay it, is still new money leaving that group pocket. A glow is never free; we simply owe it without knowing. Telling riders the law was always there does not soften the sense of being charged extra.

And here is where I could be wrong. If the city finance authority publishes detailed guidance showing that A1 and A2 fees for VEMEPE were designed separately, at different amounts and through a separate process, the whole argument above collapses. Public data does not show that yet, but a tariff table is not an enforcement guideline.

What matters more than the fee is what the text does not touch. A licence says a person may ride. It does not say how fast, whether a helmet is worn, where to park, or who is liable when a rider hits a pedestrian. For a vehicle class whose risks live mainly in behaviour, licensing is a slow and blunt instrument. A card in a wallet does not slow a rider into a corner, nor make them yield to someone crossing.

There is another layer, and it belongs to the craft of writing. This urban-regulation story flowed onto football pages, where speed and appeal outrank accuracy of category. Media has its own law: the modest hold the keys, the loud hold the tickets. A football desk has no tool for processing a municipal finance document, so it treats the item as a sensation: a new licence, a new cost. Readers get a headline spelled correctly and wrong in substance.

A testable prediction: on the day the Gaceta Oficial publishes the amendment, the number of people queuing for A1 and A2 licences at Secretaria de Administracion y Finanzas offices will rise for a few weeks, then fall away quickly, because most VEMEPE users in Mexico City work informally and have no incentive to volunteer for an administrative queue. If compliance after six months stays under a third, the city will have to reach for other tools: technical rules for manufacturers, or direct penalties at parking points.

The real test is not the 572-peso or 1,142-peso figure. It is whether a city that chooses to count vehicles instead of shaping behaviour ends up with safer streets, or merely one more line in the revenue table.