Colombia’s Ministerio de Transporte published a draft resolution for public comment in May 2026 establishing the first detailed technical regulations for micromobility vehicles in the country, covering electric scooters, e-skateboards, monocycles, and electric bicycles, and setting mandatory safety equipment standards, user obligations, speed limits, and a national registration requirement through the RUNT (Registro Único Nacional de Tránsito, the country’s central vehicle registry), with a compliance deadline of January 1, 2029.
The draft represents rules catching up with a transport category that has grown rapidly in Colombian cities without a unified technical framework, since Ley 2486 of 2025, which Congress approved on July 16, 2025, ordered the ministry to develop these specific operating conditions but left the technical details to a subsequent regulatory instrument.
What the draft requires from vehicles and riders
The draft classifies VMP (Vehículos de Movilidad Personal, personal mobility vehicles) as single-occupant, electrically propelled units with a maximum design speed between 6 km/h and 25 km/h and a motor rated at no more than 1,000 watts, with each unit required to carry front and rear braking systems, white front lighting, a red brake light, lateral and rear reflective elements, an audible warning signal, a non-tampered speed limiter, a battery and speed display visible to the rider, directional indicators, and a tamper-protection system that prevents users from modifying the vehicle’s speed or power settings.
Those 10 mandatory components form the minimum safety baseline, and the pattern they establish points toward a single regulatory goal: ensuring that vehicles circulating on public infrastructure are identifiable, controllable, and visible to other road users under any lighting condition. Rider obligations under the draft mirror the same logic, since users must wear a certified helmet and a retroreflective vest between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m., while recreational use on sidewalks, pedestrian zones, and acrobatic maneuvers on public roads are prohibited, consistent with the restrictions Congress established in Ley 2486 a year earlier.
The registration system and its timeline
Colombia will integrate micromobility vehicles into the RUNT for the first time through this resolution, requiring manufacturers, assemblers, importers, or individual owners to upload technical data including brand, model, serial number, motor type, rated power, maximum speed, weight, battery specifications, and tamper-protection details, after which the system assigns a unique code that must appear on a physical plate visibly attached to the vehicle. From January 1, 2029, any personal mobility vehicle without that identification plate loses the right to circulate on public or private roads open to the public, while vehicles already in the country before the RUNT functionality activates must submit their technical information directly to a traffic authority for manual registry processing.
That 2029 deadline gives importers, manufacturers, and the estimated hundreds of thousands of urban riders in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and other major cities nearly three years to adapt, but it also means that the safety gap the regulation targets remains open for another 32 months.
The safety rationale behind the regulation
Bogotá registered six deaths involving electric skateboards in 2025, according to figures compiled by ProBogotá, a civic planning organization, a number that reflected the risk of a fast-growing transport category circulating alongside cars and pedestrians without mandatory equipment standards or a formal identity system, since any device without a registration code and visible plate is effectively anonymous on the road.
Colombia set a maximum speed of 25 km/h for micromobility vehicles in cycling infrastructure and 40 km/h for electric bicycles outside urban perimeters, speeds that Ley 2486 already fixed and that the draft resolution now enforces through a technical requirement rather than a behavioral instruction alone, since a non-tampered speed limiter makes compliance a built-in feature of the vehicle rather than a matter of rider discretion.
In reality, Colombia’s regulatory response to micromobility will only prove effective if enforcement capacity at the municipal level matches the technical requirements the national framework establishes, since the country’s traffic authorities in medium-sized cities lack the infrastructure to inspect or register the volumes of vehicles already in circulation, and the January 2029 deadline, while pragmatic, extends the period during which unregistered and unverified vehicles continue to share urban roads with pedestrians and cyclists who have no way to identify them.