Sophia Money-Coutts
On your bike — cyclists are far preferable to idiots on electric scooters
IT STARTED around a decade ago with the invasion of the Micro scooters. Small children bombed on the pavements like Spitfire pilots and the rest of us simply had to leap out of the way. Occasionally you’d see an adult on one — either a parent returning from the school run or someone with a trendy rucksack on their own, full-size scooter — and feel embarrassed for them, but you understood (a bit) that they were a convenient and environmentally friendly mode of transport, even if they did make you look like a total berk.
Now, as with other cities around the world, London is facing a hostile takeover by the electric scooter, which is very bad news. In Lisbon earlier this year, I noticed the streets were clogged with the things, lying outside restaurants and shops, turning the pavements into obstacle courses for anyone in a wheelchair or with a gammy leg. Owned by American start-ups such as Bird and Lime, e-scooters are easy for anyone with a phone to hire — download an app, scan the scooter’s barcode and off you go, up to 20mph.
In Nashville, a couple of months after Lisbon, I spied more of these electric bugs littered everywhere and tourists — sometimes three to a scooter, no helmets — whizzed along sidewalks screaming with laughter. It was like taking a Segway tour of a city but even more disgraceful.
On my return, I conducted a Twitter poll to hear similar tales from Brussels, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, Singapore and Auckland. In Zurich and Basel they’ve been taken off the roads after too many accidents. I hear from a friend of a plastic surgeon in Paris who’s doing a roaring trade in facial reconstruction, such is the e-scooter prang rate, and the French have recently announced fines to combat the problem. In a threatening Twitter video, the mayor of Paris’s 13th arrondissement, Jérôme Coumet, declared “enough of this bulls**t” as a
taskforce behind him was seen loading discarded scooters into a truck.
There have been deaths — in March, a man in San Diego drove into a tree; one month l a t e r, i n O k l a h o ma , a mother was charged with “negligent homicide” after her five-year-old son fell from an electric scooter they were riding together. And now the first British fatality: just over a week ago, 35ye a r- o l d E mi ly Ha r t r i d ge d i e d in Battersea after being hit by a lorry while riding her scooter at a roundabout. That she was on her way to a scan at a fertility clinic makes it more heartbreaking. One day later, a 14-year-old boy crashed his into a bus stop in Beckenham and was airlifted to hospital with a head injury.
Technically, they’re banned on British roads, only allowed on private land, and if you’re caught anywhere else you could be slapped with a £300 fine. But nobody is enforcing this so their use is creeping up. Only last week, as I stepped out of my Nisa Local, my toes were nearly clipped by a moron scooting along while wearing headphones.
Alarmingly, in March, the Department of Transport announced that it was reviewing several policies, including whether to allow e-scooters on the roads. Its decision is still pending. Let’s hope it stays that way. Don’t be so lazy, try a plain old bicycle instead.
I hear a plastic surgeon in Paris is doing a roaring trade in facial reconstruction, such is the e-scooter prang rate