For emergency … the electric scooters driving an accident epidemic
AYOUNG man from the West Midlands is the latest person to die in an e-scooter accident. Shakur Pinnock, 20, suffered multiple injuries, including a fractured skull, two severed arteries, a broken jaw and punctured lungs when his electric stand-up scooter was involved in a collision with a car in Wolverhampton last month. His girlfriend Chanté Hoosang, who was a passenger on the scooter, was also seriously injured. Just six days after the incident, Pinnock died from his injuries at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
His mother Celine Fraser-Pinnock posted the message on Facebook: “I miss you so much. My beautiful, gorgeous baby.”
Despite such obvious dangers, e-scooters are now a common sight on the streets of Britain. Many road users tell stories about nearly being hit or watching e-scooters weaving through traffic, across pavements or the wrong way up one-way streets.
Sometimes carrying passengers, often young children, their riders almost never wear helmets. Aside from Department for Transport-sanctioned trials staged around the UK right now, they are illegal except on private land. Riders risk a £300 fixed penalty notice and six points on their driving licence if stopped by police.
Predominantly made overseas, bought and sold online and costing as little as £300, which puts them within the reach of young people, their availability and ease of use has seen tens of thousands sold in the UK.
Research suggests they are 100 times more dangerous than bicycles, yet arrests and seizures by the authorities appear relatively uncommon. At least four people including Shakur Pinnock are now known to have died in accidents across the UK involving these new battery-powered scooters.
Perhaps the most high-profile case was that of 35-year-old TV presenter Emily Hartridge who, in July 2019, was killed in a collision with a lorry in south London.
She is believed to be the UK’s first fatality involving such a vehicle.
“We all loved her to bits and she will never be forgotten,” her family said after the tragic accident. “She has touched so many lives.”
Emily’s boyfriend, Jake Hazell, a former contestant on the 2021 series of TV show SAS: Who Dares Wins, bought the e-scooter for her and later explained how much he regretted the gift.
“It is an adult toy and obviously there is a
THEY have been branded a “transport revolution”, a zero-emission alternative to polluting cars, and an antidote to congested roads. Not fully legal but achingly trendy, e-scooters are blamed for at least four deaths, scores of injuries and a nascent crime wave. So how did this new form of transport become so common in our towns and cities while seeming to bypass legislation? And what are the authorities doing to control their spread? DOMINIC BLISS reports
massive risk that comes with it,” he told the BBC. “The road had a massive part to play in Emily’s accident. The condition of the road was shocking. It wasn’t necessarily Emily’s, the scooter’s or the driver’s fault. I don’t blame the driver whatsoever.” Chief
Superintendent Simon Ovens of the Metropolitan Police’s road and transport policing command, says e-scooters “remain notoriously dangerous, and illegal when driven in public areas or on the roads”.
He added: “Under the Road Traffic Act 1988, it is the equivalent of riding a motorcycle on the road without any MOT, tax or insurance.”
Last week police confiscated more than 500 e-scooters from the streets of London during “proactive patrols” across all boroughs. There are also suggestions they have become the ride-of-choice for criminals, with robberies, assaults and even in one alarming incident a drive-by shooting having been carried out on the devices.
THE legal scooters being used in the Department for Transport trials are capped with a top speed of 15.5mph. However, Chief Supt Ovens is concerned that illegal users sometimes modify them to go faster. “Whilst we have seized e-scooters which can operate up to 40mph, there are some which can reach 70mph,” he said.
Most e-scooters are designed so that riders stand on a narrow deck, supported by small wheels – often with pneumatic tyres – which are propelled by an electric battery-powered motor.At the front, a stem rises up to handlebars where the brakes and accelerator are operated.
Users see these vehicles as a fast and convenient way to commute, while certain pedestrians view them as a menace. Used responsibly, they can transport riders around busy towns in record time.
But at full speed and without due care and attention – or carrying extra passengers – they risk injury and death.
In June 2020 57-year-old charity fundraiser Barrie Howes lost control of his
scooter while speeding down a steep road in Chatham, Kent. He was thrown off and, despite wearing a helmet, suffered brain injuries. Nine days later he died in hospital. In September 2020 55-year-old Julian Thomas was killed when his e-scooter struck a parked car in Swansea.
While deaths are rare, accidents both minor and serious are sadly all too common. In April, a three-year-old boy broke both his collar bones after he was struck by an e-scooter in west London in what the Metropolitan Police described as a “hit-andrun” incident. Milosz Gleba had been walking on the pavement with his grandmother when a female rider knocked him over.
“Out of nowhere an electric scooter hit my son from behind,” Milosz’s mother, 33-yearold Natalia Kwasowiec, later explained.
“The scooter hit him really hard and he fell down. The woman on the scooter fell down as well but then she got up and just sped off. She said sorry and just left. Milosz could have been killed.”
Kwasowiec said she feared other pedestrians would suffer in the future: “This is horrible because they are driving very fast on the pavement and they don’t care. The police don’t do anything about it and it’s so dangerous. I hear about accidents all the time. Something needs to be done or someone else will be hurt or even killed.”
There are 31 e-scooter trials in cities all over the UK, due to finish at the end of March 2022. Riders in these trials – minimum age 16 – are permitted on roads, cycle lanes and tracks, but not on pavements or motorways.
So far the Department for Transport has recorded more than two million trips, covering a total distance of more than 3.1 million miles.
“We believe that e-scooters can offer an affordable, reliable and sustainable way to travel during a time of social distancing, improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the UK,” a department spokesperson said. “E-scooters could help ease the burden on our transport network.”
Living Streets is a charity which campaigns for pedestrians.
“Pavements are for people, but more and more people are scooting on them illegally,” said chief executive Stephen Edwards. “The speed, acceleration and quietness of e-scooters causes alarm to pedestrians. We need speeds to be capped and robust police enforcement against dangerous riders. We previously asked the Government to cap speeds at 12.5mph instead of the 15.5mph adopted for the trials.”
Edwards claims that e-scooters are more difficult to handle than bicycles.
“They have smaller wheels, the footplates are closer to the ground and if you meet a pothole you are much more likely to come off than if you are cycling.
“The poor state of our roads combined with high levels of traffic lead us to believe that we don’t have the right infrastructure currently in place to support e-scooters.
“This could lead to people scooting on the pavement because they are scared to use the road. Extra space for walking, cycling and scooting is required for the safe use of e-scooters.”
He did concede, however, that e-scooters have a future on Britain’s streets. “But this must not be at the expense of walking,” he added. One of the e-scooter hire companies running UK trials is called Lime, with schemes in London, Manchester and Milton Keynes. They claim their vehicles are safer
and more robust than some of the illegal e-scooters on the streets, thanks to larger wheels, better brakes and suspension, a speed limit of 12mph, and discounts offered to riders who wear helmets.
“Our e-scooters are a fun, accessible, environmentally friendly and consumer-friendly form of transport,” says Lime’s public affairs manager, Hal Stevenson.
HE ADDS that e-scooters are “not a silver bullet” for Britain’s urban transport problems, but “part of a wider solution to how people move around cities, and how we can create a greener, happier urban environment.”
Another e-scooter company involved in the trials is Bird, operating in Canterbury and Redditch. “Riding an electric scooter in a city is just as safe as riding a bike,” said the company’s general manager Charlotte Bailey who points out how GPS technology limits the speed and range of her scooters.
“As electric scooters are a relatively new phenomenon in cities, incidents do generate publicity, however, in reality they are few and far between.”
Despite all the benefits, as e-scooter usage soars, accidents continue to occur. In the United States, researchers at the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety reported that, up to April this year, 38 riders had died in crashes.
A recent tragedy involved American actress Lisa Barnes, who appeared in the movies Gone Girl and Cocktail. She died days after being struck by an e-scooter in New York, where the vehicles are legal. Police said the scooter passed through a red traffic light before hitting the 65-year-old and fleeing the scene.
Nevertheless, it looks inevitable this new form of transport will become widespread across the UK. “When you look at other countries, such as the US, shared eclectic scooters have become a part of everyday life,” Bailey adds. “As scooters start to become more prevalent in the UK, our towns and cities will start to become cleaner and greener for everyone.”
Whether this is true – and at what cost to pedestrians and other road users – remains to be seen.