ROB CAMPBELL
A few older folk tell me they are now a little more inclined to catch a train into town and scoot to appointments
RIDING an electric scooter need not be a political statement, but it sometimes feels that way in an era where everyone is apparently divided into two camps. One camp is leftie or woke or whatever the label is this week, and the other right-wing and reactionary and the rest.
An item appeared in the news last week about a group of Bristol City councillors demanding an end to the trial of e-scooters, warning of chaos on the roads and risk of accidents.
Guess which party hates the scooters? The Greens, Lib Dems, Labour? The anarchists, revolutionary communists, tree-huggers or the monster raving loony party faction?
It is instead, and utterly predictably the Conservatives, but they do have a point about the roads in Bristol and Bath.
On my visits to those cities, I have to battle for space on roads clogged with people weaving in and out, some so recklessly that they must presumably be drunk or drugged. Parking is so bad that pedestrians frequently have to walk in the road.
That’s just the cars. The scooters, which were introduced across the area as a trial, cause their own problems too.
It’s the people, though, who worry me. It feels as if you can divide the anti and pro scooter folk along ideological lines with such depressing predictability that every other view they hold would fall into place.
Scooterists are also Remainers, cyclists, happy about same-sex marriage, pro-immigration, and they applauded the toppling of Colston’s statue while eating an organic bean-burger. They also want everyone to go to university and do media studies. They like wearing masks, too.
Their opponents are just as easy to define, wanting mostly to bring back everything. The empire, hanging, racist jokes, proper food, proper wars, women who do ironing, smoking in pubs, ties for chaps, no more masks and The Black and White Minstrel Show. They would turn the trendier universities in to re-education camps for people who drink oat milk and convert their playing fields into golf courses.
It looks like ‘culture wars’, that American disease that we caught during Brexit, with scooters just being another weapon in that tedious division of our nation in to two mutually suspicious tribes.
The truth about anything is, of course, more complicated than that. Take those scooters: there are real doubts about whether they are directly replacing car journeys and are, instead, making people less fit because they use them instead of walking or cycling. But even that seems perhaps a little short-sighted. Anecdotally, because there seems little longer-term research so far, it seems possible that having a scooter handy could delay - perhaps permanently - a decision to buy a car.
In my own un-scientific survey, young people have told me that the availability of everything from scooters to cycle lanes means they cannot see the point in having four wheels to move around at 10mph on city streets with nowhere to park. A few older folk, too, tell me they are now just a little more inclined to catch a train into town and scoot to their appointments, rather than join the hordes of angry people on the M32.
In each case that’s one less lump of metal threatening the lives of the rest of us. Scooters are also fun and we have had precious little of that these past 18 months of pandemic, but fun can’t be counted.
The best news of all, though, from people who actually do proper research, is that the polarisation of us into those tribes more widely might not be quite as bad as it looks.
There’s a wonderful organisation out there called More In Common which, among other things, studies the links that bind us together. They have, for example, a recent podcast called We Are Not As Divided As We Think.
They look at evidence, rather than just shouting on social media. They found recently that “most people believe cultural change is a central part of the British story, and something that they embrace…there is a particular ‘British way’ of doing change, that allows space for people to ask questions, to voice their opinions, and to learn from their mistakes. People are deeply concerned that the way politicians and campaigners are inflaming culture wars is undermining that British approach to change.”
Goodness me. There are dangers in all this polarisation, far more serious than some clogged pavements and broken ankles from the scooter wave, but it seems we don’t really hate each other so much after all.
Somewhere out there is a Tory riding a scooter en route to a Black Lives Matter protest, and a vegetarian driving a massive car to a golf course while laughing at Jim Davidson jokes. Or maybe not quite, but it’s a nice thought.