Council needs to banish these toy scooters from city’s highways

HOW long is it going to take Bristol City Council to banish (‘E-scooter user banned after riding on M32 – with passenger’ September 21) Voi electric toy scooters from Bristol’s highways?

In my opinion they are an absolute menace and their continued usage is akin to playing very childish scooter games of vehicular Russian roulette. It is surely only a matter of time before serious accidents occur involving scooters, pedestrians and others on the highway.

Moreover, despite their manufacturer’s claim that their usage is regulated, nothing could be further from the truth! For after the initial starting up procedures their Peter Pan users more often or not flout the rules by riding on pavements or indeed treating the whole of Bristol as a gigantic playground!

Your story told us that: “Footage has emerged of someone riding a motorised Voi scooter down a Bristol [M32] motorway – with a passenger holding onto their back.”

He thankfully has been permanently banned from using them. It seems possible they were not alone for the Bristol Post also reported that: “Officers from Avon and Somerset Police were called to reports of “a group of six to seven men sighted riding e-scooters” on the hard shoulder of the M32 outbound...”

The fairground supervisor of Bristol’s scootering ‘helter-skelter’ is no other than our fun-loving Mayor Marvin Rees. However, he should perhaps note that his enthusiastic ‘Roll up, roll up. Everyone’s a winner!’ support for the motorised scooters seems likely to end in very serious injury/death.

He and other toy-scooter fanatics might like to note the biblical words: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man , I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

Time me thinks, to remove the toy scooters from Bristol’s streets and return them to the pointless merry-go-round of insane activities!