The advance of the dangerous e-scooter – now causing increasing misery on our streets – is a symbol of the decline of our country and its once-impressive levels of road safety.
The easiest way of telling if you are in a well-ordered nation is to use its roads.
Badly-run countries have roads that are chaotic, unsupervised death traps, and cities that offer no safe places for pedestrians. Britain is fast ceasing to be a well-run nation, judged by these criteria.
Among the main reasons for this decline are electric scooters and their faster, heavier big brothers, electric bicycles.
Some people will say ordinary bicycles are a menace in such places, and so they are. But this is a separate issue. Pushbikes simply do not have the lethal weight and speed of modern electric machines.
Almost everyone who does not use e-machines agrees that these devices are nasty.
They infest parks and pavements. They are dumped in ugly heaps – dangerous to the disabled and those with poor eyesight. They go extremely fast, often well above the supposed official limit.
They are ridden in blatantly illegal ways – in university towns it is common to see two drunk students weaving homewards on scooters plainly designed for one.
The advance of the dangerous e-scooter – now causing increasing misery on our streets – is a symbol of the decline of our country and its once-impressive levels of road safety
As my colleague Richard Marsden reported in Monday’s Daily Mail, e-scooter collisions have trebled in three years, leading to deaths and serious injuries at worrying levels.
Twenty-nine people died and nearly 5,000 were injured – 1,402 seriously – between 2020 and 2023, including Linda Davis, a 71-year-old grandmother, who was killed in 2022 when a 14-year-old, glued to his phone, mowed her down while riding an e-scooter.
That’s to say nothing of the risks posed by the flammable lithium batteries powering them – which are thought to have sparked more than 36 e-scooter fires in 2023 alone.
This week, the BBC’s Panorama voiced growing doubts about the parallel increase in electric bicycles.
Both might have been invented for the convenience of bag-snatchers and phone thieves, who can silently swoop on victims from behind and be hundreds of yards away in less than a minute.
I have been hit by an e-bike, luckily at no great speed. Its rider, typically, did not stop, apologise or seem to be aware she had done anything wrong.
And I have (so far) been narrowly missed by many more of them.
How often do such things happen? A lot more than we think. The Department for Transport does not compile central records for electric bicycle casualties. That is left to local police forces.
None of this would have mattered had it not been for the invention of astoundingly potent electric motors and smaller, lighter batteries to drive them.
Thanks to these dangerous changes, a new kind of fast, largely unregulated motor vehicle has come into being just as more and more people under 30 can’t be bothered, or can’t afford, to learn to drive. It has also arrived as town halls increasingly struggle to provide reliable public transport.
Could it be officials high in the Department for Transport see e-bikes and e-scooters as a way out of these problems, and have managed to persuade ministers of this? I could not possibly comment.
But what is happening now suggests something of the kind is going through Whitehall and Westminster minds.
Linda Davis, a 71-year-old grandmother, was killed in 2022 when a 14-year-old, glued to his phone, mowed her down while riding an e-scooter
At one point in 2022, the last government was all set to legalise e-scooters, but a series of leadership changes meant this never happened
There is certainly a strong drive from somewhere to promote what the Government calls ‘micromobility’: one-person motor vehicles exempt from all the usual rules about licence plates, protective gear, insurance and driving tests.
At one point in 2022, the last government was all set to legalise e-scooters, but a series of leadership changes meant this never happened.
In November, the then transport secretary Louise Haigh said electric motor scooters could be a ‘really effective part of an integrated transport strategy’. Has her successor Heidi Alexander adopted the same policy? I’d be amazed if she doesn’t.
The whole thing began with the Tories in July 2020, when they announced a series of so-called e-scooter trials in many English cities.
The trials made such scooters legal if hired in certain locations – though the use of similar, privately-owned machines on normal roads is still against the law.
The police, reasonably, have struggled to enforce this daft arrangement. How can it be legal to ride a hired scooter, and illegal to ride one you’ve bought? The whole arrangement undermines the law by making it ridiculous.
Meanwhile, the ‘experiments’ drag on and on, with no sign of a conclusion.
I have been unable to find out how these experiments could possibly fail, and they seem mainly aimed at doing market research on who uses the machines. The responses of those increasingly forced to share pavements and roads with these vehicles are barely examined.
Back in May 2021, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner – grinning like a gargoyle – was photographed whizzing through a Bristol park on an e-scooter, clad in a black fake-fur coat and leopard-print trousers.
The promoters of these vehicles must have been ecstatic to get such high-level endorsement, better even than the sight of actors riding e-scooters through Amsterdam in the BBC drama Us back in October 2020.
Certainly the Department for Transport’s minister in the Upper House, Lord Hendy, shows no signs of being a critical opponent.
On December 19, he batted his way through a series of often hostile questions in the House of Lords, without giving much away about what the Government actually plans to do.
Would anyone be surprised if the numbers of electric two-wheeled vehicles quietly grow to such a level that a Bill to legalise them fully, with few real restrictions in their use, is passed?
Then we will have officially abandoned the key to road safety – the 90-year-old rule that motor vehicles can only be driven or ridden by people who have passed tests, and must carry licence plates to identify them.
Without this simple set of rules, anarchy will follow in which the weak, the old and the poor, who can’t armour themselves inside cars, will be the biggest losers.
Obviously, the businesses who make, sell and rent these things have a strong interest in promoting them. But what is the Government’s interest?
The claim that they are green and nice is pathetically thin. How much of the power used to charge their (sometimes dangerous) batteries comes from Dutch coal-fired power stations or British gas-powered ones as from windpower?
How polluting are the factories that make them? Are we sure the lithium for their batteries is ethically sourced? And when they wear out, how easy will it be to recycle them?
Claims that they get people out of their cars are also thin.
They probably get some people out of taxis and Ubers, but they mainly attract riders who would otherwise have walked or taken the bus.
So their main contribution to our society’s general health is to get people to walk less, just as experts are proclaiming walking as a key to good health and long life.
This is why they catch on. Like all really successful sinful products – from cigarettes to booze – they appeal to our bad, weak, self-indulgent side.
In this case, they appeal to the natural laziness of us all. The price will be growing danger on our streets.
We will be stuck with them if the Government gives way – as it looks like doing. Now is our last chance to stop this.