Now admit the great e-scooter experiment was a giant mistake

THIS country has many transport problems, from unfilled potholes and unsafe ‘smart’ motorways to the neverto-be-finished HS2 railway line. There is hardly an aspect of our transport network which does not need serious attention and reform. So what was the question to which e-scooters and e-bikes were the answer?

When they first appeared on our streets a few years ago, it was not clear what problem they were intended to solve – except the difficulties of people too lazy to use their own legs, or too impatient to wait for a bus.

The mere fact they were electric seemed to give them a free pass, as if their batteries did not need to be charged from the mains. Like all batterypowered vehicles, they are only as green as the power stations they rely on. Yet the then Transport Minister, Grant Shapps, appears to have swallowed the claims of their operators that they would be good for the planet and persuade people out of their cars.

It is hard to imagine anyone abandoning a weatherproof, well-protected car for one of these machines, bouncing about in heavy rain among the potholes. But Mr Shapps and his Ministry seem to have done and if there was any serious opposition in Parliament, it is hard to locate.

The key fact about e-scooters and e-bikes is that they created a new category in British road traffic law: powered vehicles, capable of considerable speed, which do not carry number plates and whose riders, in reality, do not need to hold a licence to use them. Technically, licences are required for rented e-scooters in local schemes permitted by the Government. But the police have struggled to enforce this rule because of the large number of unlicensed scooters, sold quite legally for private off-road use.

These are officially banned on public roads, but are ridden all over them, and on pavements too. Limiters, supposed to keep them to a reasonable speed, can also be easily bypassed. We simply do not have the kind of police force to enforce the rules, and wrongdoers know it.

Now, a predictable development has made the problem even worse. As we report today on page 11, more than 20,000 crimes and traffic offences involving e-scooters have been recorded by police forces over the last three years, after a national e-scooter experiment began in June 2020. They include drug trafficking, sex offences and hundreds of thefts and robberies. E-scooters have also been linked with shoplifting assaults and with suspects using them to escape arrest.

Fast, silent, manoeuvrable, mostly unregistered, they are a petty criminal’s dream if he wants to make a quick getaway. Meanwhile, in another development that will surprise nobody, pedestrians have been run down by people using them illegally on pavements.

Many of these incidents go unrecorded by the authorities, but the victims are seriously distressed. (The separate but similar problem with e-bikes, a whole new hazard for pedestrians with their combination of silence and speed, is also happening beneath official radar. But it still exists.)

If we treated the whole of the last three-and-a-half years as an ‘experiment’, would any independent body conclude that the introduction of these vehicles had done more harm than good? The people of Paris do not think so. The French capital recently banned rented e-scooters after a referendum.

The current Transport Secretary, Mark Harper, should take a cold, hard look at the issue. It is not too late to undo what is beginning to look very much like a mistake.