E-scooters...The Future Or Pavement Death Traps?

Are e-scooters the future of clean urban transport and a solution to congestion, or a silent death trap for riders and pedestrians? It’s a controversial question and one that is going to be big news as trials are carried out in more than 40 towns and cities around the country.

- Colin Goodwin

These include places like Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Rochdale, Salford, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol and Bath – and now, for the first time, London.

You would also think that electric or e-scooters are legal, too, because within a couple of minutes of leaving home, almost anywhere one lives, you will see someone riding an electric scooter.

But the law is quite simple: You need a driving licence – full or provisional – to ride one, and it is illegal to ride a privately owned e-scooter on public land.

This explains why in May alone the Met Police confiscated 352 e-scooters in London, which is 100 more than were nabbed in the whole of 2020.

Met Police chief Simon Ovens has warned that the machines are death traps. Transport for London, on the other hand, sees e-scooters as part of the sustainable future and as part of the recovery from the pandemic.

So how dangerous is riding an e-scooter? A university in Berlin has analysed accident statistics and found that a fifth of injured riders were over the drink-drive limit and few wore crash helmets.