DEATHTRAP E-SCOOTERS AND THE HEIGHT OF IDIOCY
This is Emily being given an e-scooter – days before she died in a collision with a lorry. Yet these riders whizz past her shrine, despite the trendy gadgets’ dangers. So why, when they’re illegal on roads and pavements, is no one stopped or warned?
THE huge roundabout is frankly terrifying in rush hour. Thousands of lorries, vans, cars and cyclists hurtle round it over the course of a morning.
They play a cat-and-mouse game with mothers pushing buggies, schoolchildren in unruly gaggles and office workers running to catch the bus. And now a controversial newcomer — the electric scooter — has joined this dangerous melee of pedestrians and vehicles.
It was here at Queen’s Circus, just south of the Thames in London’s Battersea, that 35-year-old TV presenter and YouTube star Emily Hartridge lost her life eight days ago. She is said to have been in a collision with a lorry as she circled the roundabout while riding an e-scooter bought for her by her boyfriend as a birthday present less than a week before.
Today, a shrine with flowers and moving messages from her loved ones marks the spot beside the road where she perished.
Emily was the first person using an e-scooter to be killed in Britain and, sadly, is unlikely to be the last. Just a few days later, a 14-year-old boy collided with a bus-stop as he rode an e-scooter in Beckenham, South-East London. He is still in intensive care.
E-scooters are electric versions of the two-wheeled manual scooters that have been around for years. Many children ride manual ones to school, although technically even these are banned from the pavement — but not from public roads.
This week, the Mail spent two mornings monitoring the traffic at the roundabout where Emily Hartridge was killed.
Plenty of e- scooter riders rode past the spot where she died. Some glanced down at her shrine as they used the nearby cycle lane. Some were even on the pavement. All moved surprisingly fast.
London’s Metropolitan Police has promised a purge on the scooters from Monday, with hefty £300 fines for any rider breaking the law by using them on a public road.
A minister has launched an inquiry into e-scooters’ safety; and this week, London’s cycling commissioner called for ‘new regulations’ for them, adding: ‘They are currently not safe — with no restrictions on speeds, no mandatory brakes and lights, and no rules on who can ride them and where.’
For few realise that e-scooters, available on the web for under £200 and selling fast, are illegal on all public roads, cycle-ways or pavements in Britain because they are deemed, under the Highways Act, to be a ‘ personal light electric vehicle’ only suitable for use on private land.
But that has not stopped large numbers buying them and illegally using them on British roads, as any trip to a city centre will show. This week, after Emily’s tragic death, the debate over e-scooters got heated. Are they a menace to other road users? A risk to the people who ride them? or are they a green alternative to the vehicles belching out toxic pollution?
The recent accidents in London have led to questions about escooter safety, as manufacturers call for the law to be changed so they can be legally ridden on roads.
one e- scooter company, Bird, told a Parliamentary committee earlier this year that current rules risk ‘the UK falling behind its competitors’. The e-scooters, insisted Bird, ‘help reduce congestion and improve air quality’.
This week, the Mail bought an electric folding e- scooter on Amazon for £199. The listing said it was suitable for adults and children from ten upwards. The blurb that came with the e-scooter added its top speed is 14mph, claiming: ‘Get to your destination fast and ride freely through the streets.’
Who could resist? Yet by yesterday the model we purchased seemed to be unavailable on the Amazon website, although it was still being sold via eBay.
The Mail understands that Amazon is writing to e- scooter sellers to ask them to include information on their pages reflecting that the machines should not be used on highways.
However, a spokesman declined to comment on issues we raised about the age suitability of the vehicle we purchased.
In Brighton, where e-scooters are popular, we were told by a shop selling them that although the vehicles are illegal on public roads, they were still flying out of the showroom in their hundreds.
‘They are used everywhere here,’ said the young salesman. ‘We tell the buyers about the laws, but just look outside the window and you will see them on the road.’
As we talked, a man came in to pay a little under £12 to collect his e- scooter that had been in for repair. He wheeled it to the door, got on it on the pavement, and was soon whizzing off down the street, winding his way through traffic.
on Brighton’s famous promenade, it was the same story. Amid cyclists, skateboarders and joggers came countless e- scooters (one girl using her mobile with
earphones as she raced along). And who could blame the riders who sailed past the rest of the throng (outpacing the cyclists) so easily?
Well, not everyone is so enamoured of them. Sam Preston of CD Scooters, a motorbike and moped shop in Brighton, does not sell e-scooters, calling them ‘scary’. He says: ‘We have so many regulations to get [mopeds and motorbikes] on the road, such as MOT checks and tax. So why should something a fraction of the price be allowed?’
Britain is not alone in seeing a spate of accidents with e-scooters. earlier this year in Paris, a man on an e-scooter died after being hit by a lorry. And Isabelle van Brabant, a brilliant pianist and star of the Paris Opera, was hit by an escooter in a Paris park in May, breaking her wrist in two places.
‘She cannot play piano for one year, and piano is her life,’ said her husband Jean-Rene Albertin, who has now set up a group campaigning for safer e- scooter use. He added: ‘We think that about 200 people a day are hurt in this city [in e-scooter accidents].’
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has said it is time to end the vehicles’ ‘ anarchic’ increase in the city where numbers are expected to reach 40,000 next year.
She has banned the vehicles in parks and gardens and imposed a 12mph speed limit for roads.
In the UK, insurers will not take on a rider who is planning — as is so often the case — to use his or her e-scooter illegally.
Germany has also seen a spate of accidents since e-scooters became legal on roads (but not pavements or pedestrian zones) last month.
About 10,000 scooters have been rented across German cities and more Germans have bought their own.
In Munich, which has 4,000 rental scooters, police caught 98 drunkriders in the first four weeks of testing them.
With heavy irony, a spokeswoman from Germany’s Council on Traffic Safety, said: ‘In our view, the launch of e- scooters in this country is not going particularly well.’
In Britain, where cities and towns grapple with heavy road traffic, struggling public transport and massive pollution, should the electric scooter really remain out of bounds to the law- abiding commuter or tourist?
In Battersea Park on Monday night, our reporter Amelia Clarke test-rode a M365 Xiaomi, which costs about £350 on the internet.
The scooter has front lights and rear lights, which makes it safer than many cheaper versions. But Amelia says that her instructor told her that like all e-scooters, the vehicle was illegal for road or pavement use and riders risk being stopped by the police.
‘He was totally honest,’ she says. ‘He said that although he uses his own e-scooter daily as part of his commute in london, he has never Taking a risk: Commuters ride e-scooters past flowers left for Emily at the roundabout where she was killed in London been stopped by a policeman.’ The instructor told Amelia — as our e- scooter seller in Brighton had also warned — that, unlike cyclists, e- scooter riders cannot use hand signals to indicate turns.
The vehicles are also eerily silent, making it hard for other road users to hear them coming.
EARLIER that day, when I visited emily Hartridge’s shrine by Battersea Park, I walked back into Central london using the pavement over Chelsea Bridge.
A man on an e-scooter came up behind me silently on the left hand side. I couldn’t see or hear him coming. He flew past, missing me by a whisker.
Had I moved one pace to the left, he would have collided with me. Had I tried to chase him to remonstrate, I couldn’t have caught up with him.
Had I wanted to report him to the police, without a numberplate or any identification, it would have been pointless.
That time I was lucky. But how many other pedestrians in the UK will be injured as they walk the streets sharing space with this whizzy new phenomenon?
e-scooters deserve a place in our modern go-green age, but is it really the best idea to unleash thousands onto the streets without a rulebook — when we’ve already seen that users can risk death while riding them?
As emily Hartridge’s distraught friend, Noel Forrest, 35, said this week: ‘ Clearly e- scooters are not safe. Why allow the sale of something that is not safe?
‘The existing ban on them should be enforced.’