Millions of people will have been cheered by the Daily Mail’s exclusive report yesterday, in which David Churchill revealed that ministers are thinking of doing something about the menace of e-scooters.
It has taken them a long time, even though these mechanised tin trays have become a symbol of lawlessness, danger and disorder since they first began to infest our streets a few years ago.
After ages of total government indifference to the perils, nuisance and crime linked with these devices, it has to be good that someone in the protected regions of politics has finally grasped that there is a problem. I suspect their e-mail baskets are full of complaints from citizens baffled that this huge change in our lives has gone ahead without any serious debate. Votes are at risk, so they have begun to think a bit. But not enough.
Politicians are among the few groups of people in the country to get any actual help or protection from the police force, so are often unaware of the miseries that bother the rest of us. You are unlikely to have your phone stolen, or your shin broken, by a speeding electric scooter on the premises of Parliament, or in Downing Street. But do not get too excited by this news. Churchill also quoted a government source as saying ‘e-scooters can be a great way to get around’. Are they?
That source might as well have been parroting the huge lobby for electric vehicles which has been so successful in the last few years. Bodies such as ‘micro-mobility for Europe’, whose publicity is full of smiling young people in helmets, totally unlike many real-life scooter riders, have cleverly linked these devices with Green dogma.
The name ‘e-scooter’ is a key part of this. They say, in the flowery language of modern Green business, ‘We came together under this newly created coalition as a recognition of the need to develop a framework that ensures micro-mobility solutions flourish in cities in full respect of all road users and to revolutionise urban transportation toward a shared, electric, and carbon free future.’ Well, up to a point. But the electricity charging scooter batteries comes from power stations here and in Europe, where plenty of voltage is produced by carbon fuels.
The lobby ceaselessly claims that its machines get people out of cars, but who will abandon the physical protection of a steel vehicle so that they can bounce from pothole to pothole in the wind and rain, unprotected by the comforting safety devices of the automobile – seat belts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, side-impact protection and the rest?
E-scooter and e-bike users mostly cannot afford cars or driving tests or taxis. They cannot be bothered to wait for a bus, let alone walk or use a pushbike. This may give us a clue as to why politicians want to encourage these crude, dangerous vehicles.
E-scooters have become a symbol of lawlessness, danger and disorder since they first began to infest our streets a few years ago, writes Peter Hitchens
Weirdly missing from the government source’s mind is the much greater menace of e-bikes – heavy, fast electric bikes which are increasingly supplanting e-scooters as a major source of danger on the road
Bus services are a growing burden on the Treasury, with subsidies and price caps now costing more than £1billion a year. If millions used e-bikes and e-scooters instead, think of the savings.
Their operators insist that hired scooters can only be ridden by someone with at least a provisional licence, but can this be enforced in practice? They also say that they can be used by only one person at a time, a rule constantly broken. I have never seen anyone stopped by the police for this dangerous and selfish action.
In any case, it turns out that the planned ‘crackdown’ on e-scooters will not affect the thousands of hired devices which lie in piles in many cities, as part of a never-ending ‘experiment’. Only the privately owned machines, which are officially illegal on the roads anyway, will be affected.
Weirdly missing from the government source’s mind is the much greater menace of e-bikes – heavy, fast electric bikes which are increasingly supplanting e-scooters as a major source of danger on the road. These, unlike scooters, are already wholly legal, under the Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycles (Amendment) Regulations 2015. Officially, they can be ridden only by those 14 or older, a law broken many times a day. And they are in theory limited to 15.5mph. But the devices which impose this are easily bypassed. Many weigh five stone or more (that’s 32kg for those taught only in foreign measures). Some of those adapted to carry goods, so-called ‘cargo bikes’, can weigh 12 stone (76kg).
On Tuesday, on a cycle lane in Oxford, while doing about 20mph on my pushbike with the gradient and the wind in my favour, I was passed by an electric bike doing at least 40mph, keeping up with the cars on the neighbouring dual carriageway. Its two riders were masked up to the eyeballs, and I had noticed them a mile back engaged in a furtive roadside transaction, so I don’t think they were taking the air for their health, or delivering burgers. They could not have stopped if a child had run in front of them. They filled me with horror. Yet I have not been able to obtain central figures for deaths and injuries caused by these potentially lethal machines.
For I see this everywhere I go and it is the biggest retreat from road safety in 90 years or more. All my life the state has tried to make the roads safer, with MoT tests, seat-belt laws, breathalysers, ever-tighter speed limits enforced by cameras. All of these measures were backed up by a simple system invented in the 1930s. If you wanted to drive or ride a motor vehicle you had to pass a test and hold a licence which could be taken away from you if you misbehaved. And all motor vehicles had to carry a nice big licence plate, so you would probably be caught if you broke the rules. But, in a stealthy and unannounced change, we now have a category of motor vehicle on our roads which is free from these rules.
Several people have written to me to say that nothing will be done about this until somebody is killed in a spectacular e-bike accident. This may well be so, but will it be reported when it happens? A few months ago, I witnessed the aftermath of what looked like a serious e-scooter accident, from a passing bus.
A police car and an ambulance were both present. I tried to find out what had happened. It took me weeks. The police said they had no knowledge of any such event, so perhaps I hallucinated their patrol car with its lights flashing away. The ambulance service refused to discuss it until I used Freedom of Information rules to get them to tell me, weeks later, that they had indeed been at such an event and had taken somebody to hospital. The police reed silent. I suspect it won’t ever be in official statistics. If I hadn’t been passing, there’d be no record of it at all.
If you think everything that goes wrong in this country is reported, you’re mistaken. This change is a huge mistake, and it will take a great deal of public anger to put it right.
