Irish Examiner view: E-scooters need to be legislated for

We're at the dawning of a new era for road-users and the type of vehicles they use

Last year, three people were killed and 459 injured in accidents involving e-scooters on the streets of Paris.

Last weekend, the city’s population voted overwhelmingly to ban rental e-scooters from their streets, and although the vote was non-binding, authorities have vowed to respect it.

Urban residents everywhere have long expressed the view that e-scooter users disrespect the rules of the road and regularly flout a ban on riding them on pavements. 

Paris has an estimated 15,000 rental e-scooters and was seen as a pioneer when introducing them in order to promote the use of non-polluting forms of urban transport.

However, the lack of regulation of the scooters — and their riders — not just in Paris, but across Europe is something in need of a wider debate. Here at home, the Government has made a couple of half-hearted attempts to bring regulatory governance to the matter, but those efforts have been both paltry and ineffective.

There is no doubting the popularity of e-scooters, but they need to be legislated for — and quickly. We are well used in this country to high numbers of deaths and casualties on our roads, and we have gone a long way towards educating our road-going public about how to prevent such carnage.

However, we are at the dawning of a new era for road-users and the type of vehicles they use. That era needs to be defined by proper legislation and not just short-term and short-sighted papering-over-the-cracks solutions.