Lights in the UK

OnYerBike wrote:

... E-scooters is a case in point ...

 

Sorry to hijack.

But - those bl00dy escooterists!

They are illegal to ride on the road.  Or the footpath.  Or the shared-use area. 

Can someone please do something about it???

I am so sick of meeting salmoning escooters in a cycle lane, or some buffed-up bloke (seriously, why are so many of their riders so buffed?) speeding through the shared-use area with way less concern for pedestrians than I ever show as a cyclist...?

But Socrati supports them so they are alright. Coventry have already suspended their hire scheme trial because off all the Ped path users but that was always going to be the case. 

The hire schemes are pretty much only legal on roads, Shared use and cycle lanes, but because of the size of them people still see them as ped path only use and not something to use on roads.

The problem surely is the rider not the e-scooter. Every scooterer isn't driving so we need to make sure they can be used safely. UK vehicle legislation has always had problems with categorisation and standards, so that innovation (e.g. led lights, to wrench this back to the actual topic) is stifled or operations are illegal.

I think e-scooter riding should be treated in the same way as cycling, and both badly need better infrastructure and the hierarchy of vulnerability that might come into the Highway Code. Better scooterism, not banning.

brooksby wrote:

Sorry to hijack.

But - those bl00dy escooterists!

They are illegal to ride on the road.  Or the footpath.  Or the shared-use area. 

Can someone please do something about it???

I am so sick of meeting salmoning escooters in a cycle lane, or some buffed-up bloke (seriously, why are so many of their riders so buffed?) speeding through the shared-use area with way less concern for pedestrians than I ever show as a cyclist...?

Someone on a scooter is potentially one less car on the road, and they can do a lot less damage to others by not being encased in metal, never-mind the reduction in congestion and pollution. As they're getting more common, I think we should just legalise them and deal with the problems that could create and get people out of cars. Personal transport via cars doesn't scale well in cities, so we should adopt what works well in other countries.

So, are there any examples from countries where escootering works well, and what can we learn from those?

Sriracha wrote:

So, are there any examples from countries where escootering works well, and what can we learn from those?

I was impressed with the amount of traffic flowing around Copenhagen which has lots of infrastructure to separate motor vehicles from bikes and scooters. I was only there on holiday, so it'd be interesting to see how the residents view them, but I thought that e-scooters and cycles were able to safely share the same space.

However, when I went to Paris (again, just a holiday) there were a lot of e-scooters ridden on the roads as well as pavements which seemed to cause more of an issue. I was surprised that I didn't see any aggression from the motorists when sharing the road with the e-scooters but it looked a bit precarious from an onlooker. They do seem to have a big problem with the scooters littering the pavements but I don't know if that's more of a cultural difference between France and Denmark. There were a lot more cycle lanes than I expected for a major big city.

I think the lesson is that if there's decent infrastructure then people are actually quite flexible in changing how they travel around the place. The other aspect is having good public transport that provides space for bikes and e-scooters. (I have never seen a train carriage so crowded as one in Copenhagen that must have had about thirty bikes crammed in so tight that people could hardly move).