On 15 December, Transport Minister Jesse Norman MP repeated the government’s commitment to designing new laws to permit wider use of e-scooters on roads in Britain. Although the plan to do so can be traced back to the Queen’s Speech some seven months ago, neither any proposals nor any form of consultation has so far emerged.
There may, however, be some progress in the New Year. We base this on new research about scooter use being published by the Department for Transport on the same day as the Minister’s remarks.
This new empirical research is based on views and experiences, up to December 2021, within the 30+ government-approved scooter hire schemes in England & Wales. The researchers sampled views of users, residents and local and national stakeholders.
A good deal of the findings relate to matters such as: user demography, modal shift (ie how the user would otherwise have made the journey), concerns about street clutter and anti-social use, and assessing environmental impact and sustainability. From a risk and safety point of view, however, perhaps the key finding from the trials is that the risk of an e-scooter user having an accident may be around three times greater than that of pedal cyclist.
The report points out that the accident data is limited, that many riders may have been novices and that other road users will have been unfamiliar with this new mode of transport. Even with those caveats, however, this level of excess risk is significant.
Looking ahead, DfT may now be able to combine the findings from this new report on the scooter hire schemes with comprehensive research into privately-owned ones published earlier in the year by a leading road safety group (The Safety Of Private E-Scooters in The UK, PACTS, March 2022), Bringing these analyses together in a meaningful way should help inform any future consultation by the Department about the safety, risk and insurance measures that might feature in the new legal regime permitting more widespread e-scooter use. We hope to see consultation about that some time during the first half of 2023.
the Government intends to create a Low-speed Zero Emission Vehicle (LZEV) category that is independent of the cycle and motor vehicle categories. The first focus of this new system will be e-scooters, which we are looking to legalise for private and rental use through secondary legislation
https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2022-12-07/105245
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