Driven to distraction
Littering pavements and injuring pedestrians? E-scooter owners would never
Read a tweet thread about e-scooters on social media the other day… and had a fit*.
Typically, the initial tweet was ratioed by much debate between pro and anti e-scooter types, but on reading the Euronews article it refers to, the issue seems instead to be the typical Silicon Valley Bro one of trying to make everything ‘smart’ before the basics are even covered.
The article becomes a defacto press release barely three paragraphs in:
Swedish company Voi Technology and Irish startup Luna Systems have begun integrating computer vision technology so scooters know whether they’re riding on a footpath, a cycle lane or a street. Further down the line, this information could prompt riders to change their behaviour, get off sidewalks and park in the right areas.
Classic ‘smart’ tech: providing convoluted solutions to simple problems. What more wisdom can our tech startup overlords offer us?
Luna CEO Andrew Fleury argues that scooter riders typically don't go on sidewalks for the sake of it – they often end up on them because they don't feel safe riding on a road. Therefore, data highlighting the “hotspots” where this keeps happening in a city could inform local authorities of the need to create safer bike and scooter lanes there.
Trust a techbro to think they can do road safety better than an entire transit authority. Worse still, the claim of full autonomy rears its head towards the end of the article:
“If you think about it from a human perspective, it’s much more agreeable to potentially have an autonomous, lightweight electric scooter than it is to have an autonomous one-and-a-half-ton SUV driving around a city,” said Furlong [Co-founder and chief business development officer, Luna Systems].
But if both machines can be hacked to operate outside the driver’s control then it matters not what size they are. Besides, e-scooters are not a problem, per se; the rules governing their use are. It is (still!) illegal to ride a purchased e-scooter on UK roads, leaving shareride hire ones run by tech startups to dominate cities. And they are dockless, meaning that when the Euronews article mentions e-scooters as ‘causing injuries and a fair load of resentment among pedestrians’, they almost exclusively mean the shareride ones.
This is nothing new. E-bikes suffered the same fate:
Electric bikes 'dumped' just days after launch of £550k green scheme [Derby]
- ITV News, 2018Ofo bike-sharing scheme abandoned amid vandalism and rising costs
- The Times, 2019Cycle hire firms could face £500 fines for dumped bikes
- Road.cc, 2019West Midlands Cycle Hire bikes 'now being abandoned like e-scooters' as offenders told to expect fines
- Birmingham Live, 2021
But are e-bikes so different from e-scooters? The UK Department for Transport (DfT) defines e-scooters (along with similarly-derided-vehicles-which-aren’t-e-bikes) as ‘powered transporters’. As of July 2021, they can be legally bought and sold, but are prohibited from use on ‘cycle tracks, cycle lanes on roads, or other spaces dedicated to pedal cycle use only (section 21(1), Road Traffic Act 1988)’.
E-bikes themselves, however, are a special form of powered transporter called an Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle (EAPC), and are therefore exempt from this ban. DfT’s own guidance for e-scooter rental schemes acknowledges that e-scooters could be classified as such:
For trials to take place, we need to amend existing regulations. In doing so, we proposed to regulate rental e-scooter trials as similarly as possible to electrically assisted pedal cycles (EAPCs). In many ways, e-scooters have a similar road presence to EAPCs and cycles; they are similarly sized with similar visibility for other road users.
Responses so far received from the ‘Future of transport regulatory review: call for evidence’ generally supported treating e-scooters like cycles and EAPCs… In the future, following trials, we may look to amend the law to treat e-scooters more like EAPCs, which are not treated as ‘motor vehicles’ in law.
In short, there is no argument against the use of owned e-scooters that can’t be made against e-bikes, and e-bikes do not attract anything like the same level of controversy. So what’s stopping the UK? DfT could change all of this in a week, probably through secondary legislation amendments of the Road Traffic Act. So who’s paying officials off to go down this ridiculous route of trialling rental schemes only? To quote the Guardian’s UK technology editor Alex Hern: ‘Micromobility can succeed with or without the Silicon Valley business models – but it can’t succeed without being given a chance on the roads’, and that chance must be given to e-scooter owners.'
* Disclosure: I am not sponsored by Big E-scooter. I simply own one e-scooter.