’Tis the season to be silly as scooters hit our footpaths

Transport Agency policy on Lime vehicles has Auckland pedestrians under threat

Christmas, in my trade, has traditionally been dubbed the “Silly Season”. It’s that time of the year when the newsmakers disappear to their fancy holiday homes, leaving the skeleton staff in newsrooms around the country to scratch about for the weird and wonderful to fill the empty pages.

This year the silliness seems to have broken out early with a Lime e-scooter hitting the headlines at the weekend for making a break for it across the Auckland Harbour Bridge with Sergeant Plod in hot pursuit.

The NZ Transport Agency, which runs the bridge as part of the state highway system, very sensibly has laws in place to prevent cyclists and other low-powered vehicles from dicing with death by sharing the same space with cars and the like.

Yet a few months back this agency saw nothing odd in rewriting its rules to allow e-scooters, capable of speeds approaching 30km/h, to access our urban footpaths.

Neither rider nor scooter needs any form of licensing. The driver just has to be “careful and considerate” and “give way to pedestrians and drivers of mobility devices”.

The power imbalance between an e-scooter and a double-decker bus on the same stretch of tarmac was recognised by the NZTA. But a similar imbalance between an e-scooter sharing a footpath with a strolling mother and child was not.

Incredibly, this didn’t happen by accident. The commercial scooter operator lobbied the NZTA to wipe the existing ban on e-scooter use on footpaths. NZTA did, by adopting the fiction that a scooter with an electric motor not exceeding 300 watts in power was not a “motor vehicle”.

An official Gazette notice was issued enforcing this patent untruth. Unfortunately there is no NZ Pedestrian Authority to speak up for those of us who just want to walk along the street safely. Our politicians have been reluctant to speak out for fear, it seems, of being denounced as out of touch old codgers.

It wasn’t until one of the old codgers, Auckland councillor Christine Fletcher, was almost skittled by a scooter on her way to a meeting six weeks ago, that mayor Phil Goff called for an urgent report.

That was well after his officials had rubber stamped the current trial on Auckland streets. Goff tut-tutted loudly and wrote to the Transport Minister demanding a 10km/h speed limit and compulsory helmets for users. As for reclaiming the footpath for the poor old pedestrians. Nothing.

In my experience, it’s the riders who tend to look the most scared. Which is genuinely worrying. Lime says hirers have to have a credit card and a driver’s licence to operate one. But mostly they seem too young to have a licence, hanging on for grim death as they speed past. Their concerns seem well justified.

In the two months to December 12, there have been 392 claims to ACC for injuries involving Lime e-scooters in either Auckland or Christchurch. That’s six a day. There’s no mention of how many victims are pedestrians.

The latest to hit the headlines was a Welsh visitor who broke her neck after “a few drinks” as she scootered to her Grey Lynn home in the early hours. She’s now calling for a 15km/ h speed limit and compulsory helmets. I’d add a special ACC insurance levy on Lime to that.

Coincidentally, 30km/h is the new speed limit Auckland Council wants to introduce for all central city streets.

Auckland Transport argues nearly half of all crashes “involve people walking and this is not acceptable”. “If a person walking is hit by a vehicle travelling at 30km/h, the chance of dying is 10 per cent. At 50km/h, the chance of dying is 80 per cent.”

AT is committed to reducing death and serious injury on our roads by 60 per cent in the next 10 years.

How? By directing powered traffic on to the footpaths? No thank you. Especially not when I have a 10 per cent chance of dying if I get hit by an e-scooter at full throttle while I’m walking on the footpath.