Aren’t we alleged to be the Land Of Well being And Security, banning the whole lot from cheese-rolling contests to Remembrance Parades as a result of authorities say it simply isn’t secure to carry them?
But the Authorities has intentionally blessed the arrival on our roads and streets of two terribly harmful menaces, e-scooters and e-bikes. The place are Well being And Security once you actually want them?
There’s hardly a city or metropolis that has not heard the push and whine of those machines, or seen the adjustments they create.
This week the BBC reported that three trauma centres – in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield – say they’ve handled 477 under-16s for e-scooter accidents since 2019, with the variety of instances per 12 months rising from fewer than ten in 2019 to just about 150 in 2024. Detective Constable Steve Pennington, from Better Manchester Police, warned e-scooters ‘usually are not innocent toys and will result in horrific penalties when utilized by inexperienced riders’.
The official reply to that is that the privately-owned scooters so usually concerned in these accidents stay unlawful. Technically you can not trip them on public roads. However any street or pavement consumer is aware of that this regulation has ceased to be enforced in any systematic method.
They’re all over the place. And one primary motive for that is that the Authorities has undermined its personal regulation. It has licensed using employed scooters in additional than 50 English cities, together with London and my dwelling city of Oxford.
E-bikes on pavements current hazards for pedestrians, particularly for the disabled and aged. ‘The place are Well being And Security once you actually want them?’ writes Peter Hitchens
Lately it added schemes in Leeds, Brighton and Hove and Plymouth, plus Cornwall.
These exemptions are alleged to be experiments, although they started in 2020, beneath the pretext of Covid, and there’s no signal of them coming to an finish or any clear indication of what must occur for them to be deemed a failure.
If the Authorities had been really attempting to make the regulation look ridiculous, it couldn’t have considered a greater method. Oxford is stuffed with these gadgets, swerving and bumping about, zooming via pink lights, menacing pedestrians and cyclists and making the roads extra chaotic for drivers.
They’ve kind of taken us into the Third World. They lie about in ugly orange heaps close to historic monuments or are parked in equally ugly official reservations offered for them by the native authority. They’re, in fact, incessantly simply left the place their riders completed with them.
Particular websites for them are marked out on the pavement. If they’re authorized, how can anybody take the ban on privately-owned scooters severely?
A survey of 29 police forces discovered that 5,544 unlawful e-scooters have been seized and brought off the streets between 2023 and late 2025. That isn’t very many. From what I’ve seen, this should imply that tens of hundreds go unmolested.
As for the authorized ones, they’ve drastically diminished the standard of life. I’ve myself been walloped (happily fairly mildly) by one in all them in Oxford’s majestic Excessive Road. On the time I used to be serving to a pedestrian who had tripped and fallen.
Essentially the most wonderful factor was the rider’s complete lack of regret, embarrassment and even curiosity in what she had achieved. I can solely assume she was medicated ultimately. I’ve by no means seen the police cease folks breaking clear guidelines for employed scooters, such because the one saying just one individual ought to trip them at a time.
I’ve myself been walloped (happily mildly) by an e-scooter in Oxford’s majestic Excessive Road. On the time I used to be serving to a pedestrian who had tripped and fallen, writes Peter Hitchens
This occurs so usually that maybe these concerned suppose it should be authorized and I can hardly blame them. The police, even when current, are plainly uninterested.
I can discover no particular figures for the numbers stopped or fined for this blatant, frequent offence. That is usually an issue with revealing what’s going on with e-scooters or their extra menacing cousins, e-bikes. Central information are onerous to seek out. Enforcement of guidelines towards harder-to-spot misdeeds, resembling driving whereas drunk or on medication, or driving underage or with none type of licences should be weaker nonetheless.
Everybody in the true world is aware of that pace limiters on e-scooters and e-bikes, supposedly retaining them under 16mph, are a sick joke. Many of those gadgets can do 40mph, usually extra, and will be seen tearing around the streets – doing so with impunity. For, as muggers, phone-snatchers and different criminals have shortly found, they’re the best automobiles for crime. They haven’t any quantity plates and can’t be traced. They’ve the liberty of the pavements, as a result of no one will stop them being there. Who can catch them?
Anybody with two ounces of creativeness might absolutely have seen the possible penalties of permitting these ‘experiments’ in a rustic the place the police are largely absent from the streets.
We work ourselves right into a nationwide frenzy over the potential menace of Synthetic Intelligence. Perhaps it should finish our civilisation. It’s onerous to inform. However e-scooters and e-bikes are an actual drawback right here and now. They take the stable type of onerous, quick hunks of steel hurtling about in our midst.
The precise arrival in our cities of highly effective, low-cost, light-weight, easily-recharged electrical motor automobiles has stimulated nearly no thought in any respect – regardless that it is among the most vital technological adjustments for the reason that invention of the motor automobile.
Anybody who brings up the topic, or suggests it might matter, is nearly at all times met with empty-headed catcalls on anti-social media of: ‘Haven’t you something extra essential to fret about?’
The licensing of them has barely been debated in Parliament.
E-bikes have been permitted on roads and cycle tracks via an EU regulation confirmed with out debate. E-scooters have been semi-legalised via a fishy process referred to as the ‘unfavorable course of’ by which the brand new guidelines would undergo (in a number of brief days) so long as there was no substantial opposition. And there wasn’t.
Again in July 2020, a little-known physique referred to as the Secondary Laws Scrutiny Committee requested: ‘Is it a pilot scheme to check the viability of a controversial automobile on British roads? Is it a way to quickly increase transport capability in cities everywhere in the nation throughout the Coronavirus pandemic? And are these two aims appropriate?’
It mentioned MPs and Lords may want to ask the transport ministry for extra proof to assist its case for scaling up the variety of trial schemes. It puzzled if there was sufficient knowledge on security, nuisance and sure prices to native authorities to justify this growth. It sought readability on the precise targets and aims of those trials.
It additionally mentioned that comparable schemes in different nations had been ‘very divisive’, which is a method of describing the fury towards them in cities resembling Paris.
I see no signal that anyone listened. Is there some sturdy, wealthy foyer pushing the opposite method? We want a correct nationwide debate and correct Parliamentary scrutiny.
I’ve looked for years for any signal that anyone in authorities is pondering severely about the issue. Will or not it’s the standard factor, that we should wait till a horrible tragedy has taken place, maybe captured by cameras in all its grisly ache and distress, earlier than something is completed?
