Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- More on that useless medical insurance for Brits scandal. 15 companies named.
- A Marxist historian has written a book in which he claims that it was an uprising among Spain's working class - a 'revolution', in fact - that brought democracy to Spain. He complains that not a lot of people know that. Which I guess we can agree with him on. The reason, he says, is that it was 'scandalously betrayed and hushed up'.
- There's a lake in Galicia which is turquoise and Instagram has made it a tourist destination. Which is a shame, as it's actually a 'toxic dump'. So, if you see the names Monte Neme and Carballo, steer clear. Dubbed the 'Galician Chernobyl', it has proved hazardous to those who have swum in it, with one Instagram 'influencer' reporting she had suffered vomiting and a rash that persisted for 2 weeks after she took a dip.
- Spanish chanteuse Rosalía Vila Tobella performed in London last night. She's already famous in Spain but one reviewer this morning is predicting global superstar status. She's 25 and from Barcelona, and I believe her singing is related to flamenco.
- On the same stretch of pavement yesterday I was passed in the morning by a guy on an e-scooter doing at least 25kph and in the evening by a young woman on a normal bike doing 15-20kph. The latter is illegal but the police do nothing about it. The former might well be illegal but imagine the fines and income to be made from bringing in licensing and insurance requirements. Bound to happen.
- The thing is . . . In pedestrianised Pontevedra, even the streets which allow cars - always only one way - now have pavements so wide they could accommodate bikes, scooters and pedestrians, in separate lanes. Something else that is bound to happen?
- I've discovered another reason why law degree courses don't demand high marks in the entrance exams. You have to dress like this when you graduate . . .
The UK
- What are the odds on this oddity? The pub with the longest name in England is right next to the one with the shortest. The Old Thirteenth Cheshire Astley Volunteer Rifleman Corps Inn and the Q Inn.
- More seriously . . . Political correctness, once the preserve of preposterously woke Corbynistas and the liberal establishment, is spreading its self-righteous tentacles into every British institution, strangling common sense. See the 1st article below.
- Even more seriously . . . Brexit isn't some imperial fantasy – it just means we want to be ourselves. See the 2nd article below.
- Yet more seriously . . . A Guardian columnist's take on 'Britain's nervous breakdown'. Possibly of more than domestic relevance.
- The departure of Martin Selmayr from the position of secretary-general of the European Commission overflows with poetic justice. With the inevitability of a Wagnerian opera (but a quicker endgame), Selmayr had to leave because of the way he arrived. . . . It’s the bureaucrats who are smiling now. See the full article here.
- Twitter is celebrating its 13th birthday. See minute 2.10 here.
- See below 2 articles on the topic of the moment - e-scooters.
- Some political strategists saw in Trump's ['Go Home'] tweets more than just a president lashing out. They perceived a cynical attempt, however unseemly, to frame the Democrats as radicals who did not have the country's best interests at heart. “With his deliberate, racist outburst, Donald Trump wants to raise the profile of his targets, drive Dems to defend them and make them emblematic of the entire party. “It’s a cold, hard strategy.” . . As Trump has shown repeatedly in the past, once he has identified a weak point he will punch and punch repeatedly, regardless of the outcry over his methods or the lines of traditional acceptability he crosses, to cause maximum damage. Expect more ‘anti-America’ attacks on the Democrats - be it ‘the squad’, the White House hopefuls, or anyone else - in the future, however unpalatable they are deemed.
- Word of the Day: Basura
- I wonder what it was alerted the police to the possibility that this chap on a flight from Colombia was smuggling drugs on his person . . .
THE ARTICLES
1. We must defend our Armed Forces in the fight against 'woke' authoritarians: Allison Pearson, the Daily Telegraph
Forgive me, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the readers of this column are still in full possession of their marbles. (Is “marbles” offensive yet? I’m losing mine, so I honestly can’t remember.) Building on that expectation, I’m guessing that the majority of us are not entirely surprised that most of the leaders of the UK’s Armed Forces are white, middle-aged and – the more sensitive among you may wish to look away now - men. What with, you know, 87.2% of the population still classified as White British and just under half of those being blokes. Add the fact that, most of the aggression in society still resides in the male of the species and there are good reasons why the composition of the senior military is as it is.
Good reasons, alas, are no longer good enough. According to a finger-wagging new report, our Armed Forces have unacceptable levels of sexism, racism and bullying because they are led by a “pack of white middle-aged men”.
Crude generalisations which attribute blame to a single group on the basis of sex or colour are now illegal. Except if that group is white and masculine, in which case, go right ahead, fill your boots!
According to the report’s author, Air Chief Marshal Mike Wigston, an “unacceptable level of inappropriate behaviour persists” in the forces because the leadership of the RAF, Army and Navy come from a “generation not used to having people from other diversity groups serving alongside them”. Amidst these frightful old soldiers “use of language can be inappropriate and offensive, simply through a lack of understanding of how it may be perceived by a minority group”. The report goes on to highlight how “microaggressions, the brief and commonplace daily verbal or behavioural indignities, could be unintentional, but none the less communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults”.
Pass the smelling salts, Marjorie. Imagine how irrelevant those so-called “microaggressions” must seem to anyone who has experienced macroaggressions in Helmand Province. If you have seen your best mate’s head blown off then, chances are, you’re not that worried about using the wrong pronoun for Corporal Robyn or engaging in banter which might upset Harriet Harman. Nor should you be. The services have always had a tough, give-as-good-as-you-get culture, underpinned by strict discipline and fierce loyalty. A monstering from the Sergeant Major is not “bullying”; it’s vital for building up internal armour. On the battlefield, there’s no time to take offence or fret about “behavioural indignities”. Are we seriously expecting those we pay to kill on our behalf to be held to the same standards as civilian social workers?
It’s like that line in Dr Strangelove: “You can’t fight in here. It’s the War Room!” Political correctness, once the preserve of preposterously woke Corbynistas and the liberal establishment, is spreading its self-righteous tentacles into every British institution, strangling common sense.
They’ve already nobbled the universities, the judiciary and the police; now they’re coming for our soldiers.
Only two months ago, a leaked report revealed that the Army considered that being patriotic might be a sign of extremism. Qualities which would once have been considered indispensable for joining up – love of country and anger about “threats to so-called national identity” - are now seen as evidence of an “extreme right-wing outlook”.
Seriously, what other country in the world would try to eradicate patriotism from its armed forces and enfeeble service personnel by claiming standard military conduct is “unacceptable”?
Britain is in serious moral difficulty when even our top brass and senior politicians have to bow down before this warped and insidious ideology. If feels as if the thought police will not rest until James Bond is a woman of colour and white men are banished from all the top jobs and every banknote.
The announcement this week that the wartime codebreaker Alan Turing is to appear on the £50 should have been a cause for pride and celebration. Not for the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. “So that’s still 75% male and 100% white,” she tweeted, “Really disappointing Bank of England. You were meant to change your selection procedure to include diversity across the characters as part of the criteria, What went wrong?”
I applauded Criado-Perez’s successful campaign to get Jane Austen onto the tenner, but this contemptuous dismissal of Turing seemingly because he’s white and male is appalling. The grandfather of modern computing, Turing pitted his magnificent mind against the greatest evil in modern history – and won. Millions of lives were saved. As a gay man, Turing was persecuted and took his own life after being chemically castrated. I’d call that pretty damn diverse, wouldn’t you? Even if he hadn’t been the victim of such barbarous injustice, Turing would still rank as one of the most remarkable humans in our history. Congratulations to the Bank of England for having the incredible daring, in the present climate, to pick a white, middle-aged man for a posthumous honour he so richly deserved.
By contrast, are white middle-aged men like now to be obliged to end their long service careers and hand over our air force, our Army and our Navy to younger, inexperienced BAME personnel who say “offensive” a lot and use behaviour in the plural? Just so that self-loathing lackeys can congratulate themselves on their commitment to diversity?
It’s nonsense, all of it. Fatuous, flatulent and fundamentally unBritish nonsense. The public could not care less if their armed forces are led by “a pack of white middle-aged men” so long as those men are not wasting time pandering to some fashionable agenda and weakening the military morale which sustains serving men and women as they engage in the battles that matter. I reckon it’s time to begin the fight back against the enemy within. We must defend our armies against this monstrous regiment of liberal authoritarians.
2. Brexit isn't some imperial fantasy – it just means we want to be ourselves: Tim Stanley, The Daily Telegraph
What is Britain for these days? I hear it said that Brexit Britain has lost its mission in foreign policy, that we’ve cut ourselves off from the continent, that Donald Trump is abusing us, and so we splash about in the Atlantic like a drowning bulldog. We have no clear purpose because we don’t know if we’re European or American, conservative or liberal, imperial or in retreat. And we’re nothing without a purpose, right?
Actually, if one listens to Vernon Bogdanor’s smashing history lectures on foreign policy – available on YouTube – one senses that Britain has always been as uncertain about its role as Selwyn Lloyd was when Churchill surprised him with a foreign ministry he didn’t want. “There must be some mistake,” said Lloyd, “I do not speak any foreign language. Except in war, I have never visited any foreign country. I do not like foreigners.” Churchill growled: “Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages.”
Two key points emerge from Professor Bogdanor’s lectures. One is that we’ve long had a difficult relationship with the continent, caused in no small part by geography. We are a European country, undoubtedly, but the English Channel cuts us off physically and emotionally from the continent and, like any island nation, we must trade overseas to survive. Thus the argument was made prior to the First World War that if Germany conquered much of Europe it had nothing to do with us because we were all about Asia and Africa.
The second controversy is our empire – half criminal enterprise, half civilising project – which regularly divided a British public that wasn’t of one mind on what to do with it. Think of the tremendous debates over the Boer War or Suez.
Yet the idea of a global mission bestowed by providence undoubtedly came to define us and, when it disappeared, because of the English Channel, we didn’t all do as France or Germany did and redirect our imperial dreams into the European project. If anything today’s Empire 2.0 is not Brexit; it’s the European Union. Guy Verhofstadt let the cat out of the bag recently when he said “The world of tomorrow will be dominated by empires like China… We need a strong, united Europe to protect our way of living.”
So, the historic European empires are gone but the global aspirations of publics shaped by that era remain in spectral form, no less in Westminster than in Brussels. Left and Right in Britain yearn for a “cause”. Tony Blair thought it was to expand democracy. Jeremy Corbyn wants us to be a socialist light unto the nations. And there is a brand of Brexiteer who thinks free trade solves everything; that Britain should tear down its protections and jump into bed with China, India and the rest.
This is the Boris Brexit – an unexpectedly liberal Euroscepticism that also pushes a points-based immigration policy that could see us take more immigrants rather than less. Is that really what Leavers voted for? If anything, they tend to be the one bit of the population most sceptical about the idea of Britain having a Westminster-mandated purpose. Like Selwyn Lloyd, they might find themselves a bit confused by the turn of events if free-trading Boris becomes PM.
Common sense dictates that the best foreign policy is dictated not by what intellectuals want but what the country needs. Take the recent clash in the Gulf, when the Iranians spooked a British tanker and a Royal Navy frigate chased them away. This need not be the beginning of a war to liberate Iran from the Mullahs: it simply makes sense that an island nation that replies on imports and exports to survive needs military muscle to protect its shipping. That’s why, yes, we probably do have to spend more on defence; not for the bolstering of ego but to ensure our people can trade safely. We can’t rely in every instance on Uncle Sam to get us out of trouble.
It makes sense, too, that we will sometimes swallow our pride – perhaps accept the resignation of an ambassador for saying something that embarrasses Donald Trump, even if he is speaking the truth. We must occasionally say one thing and do another without getting overly moral about it: at the same time as we court Mr Trump’s approval our actual policy leans towards the European position on everything from Iran to climate change. We act not as a crusader but as a mediator, which is uninteresting but – for a country located in that position between two worlds – is what we need.
A country like ours is ultimately not for anything. It just is. It’s the product not of a revolution or constitution with written-down aspirations but of time and place. The Left, which exists to try to remake the world, hates this point of view because it leads to paradoxes, contradictions and cop outs – all suffered, even enjoyed, rather than fixed. A healthy Brexit would abandon utopianism and see Britain, if not retreating, then recalibrating and doing some things a bit less. The last few decades have been exhausting. It would be nice to catch one’s breath.
3. Invasion of the electric scooter: can our cities cope? James Tapper, the Observer
They’re cheaper than cabs, less effort than a bike and more convenient than buses. But as the number of e-scooter accidents rises, a backlash is growing
Most of the people riding electric scooters around Copenhagen glide like swans, bodies motionless and serene with heads tilted into the sunshine.
I am the ugly duckling, wobbling and jerking while I struggle to figure out exactly how this two-wheeled contraption works. Where do I put my feet? How hard do I thumb the accelerator? And how on earth am I meant to indicate left and press the brake with my left hand at the same time?
It doesn’t take long to start gliding, even if I don’t feel very swanlike, or to notice that people in Denmark have found all sorts of less conventional ways to use e-scooters since they were introduced in January. Couple after couple perch together, heels of their feet barely balancing on the footplate. A traveller presses his suitcase between his knees while he crosses the junction near Tivoli Gardens. Two teenagers dart along the footpath outside the city’s central station, nipping between pedestrians.
“I’ve seen a guy sitting on a suitcase using it as a scooter chair,” said Jesper Hemmingsen, a researcher at the Danish council for road safety, the RST. “I’ve seen parents delivering their children to school, a child standing at the front and their parents steering. It’s an easy way to get there, but it’s not a safe way. I’ve seen parents hire scooters for their kids to give them something to do. People treat them like toys. But they have no protection.”
Over the past 18 months, it feels as though e-scooters have taken over many of the world’s cities. Scooter share firms have staked claims in more than 100 cities worldwide. Lime and Bird (from the US) and Voi, Circ, Flash and Tier (from Europe), are start-ups dripping with venture capital backing, attempting to create and carve up a market that is changing cityscapes everywhere.
But piles of scooters discarded by the roadside, a worrying number of injuries and even some road deaths have provoked a growing backlash in some places.
Those dangers were underscored recently when Emily Hartridge, a 35-year-old YouTuber and TV presenter, was killed while riding an e-scooter in Battersea, south-west London, after a collision with a lorry at a roundabout. Last month Paris – the e-scooter hub of Europe, with an estimated 20,000 trottinettes on the streets – saw its first fatality after a young man was hit by a truck.
So are e-scooters a vital new part of modern, eco-friendly urban transport, or are they a risky and unnecessary fad, pushed by tech investors desperate to disrupt the status quo? And what can people in the UK, where the use of e-scooters remains illegal on both roads and pavements – despite the rise in models for sale in shops – learn from the experience of other European cities?
Copenhagen, where e-scooters arrived nearly six months ago, is well-placed to answer this question. The police and road safety council are assessing the impact of the seven scooter firms and 7,000 scooters that have arrived since the Danish government introduced a trial period on 17 January.
Pedestrians complain about scooters strewn across pavements and that they are a hazard for blind people and wheelchair users, as well as other anti-social behaviour: one young man rode an e-scooter through the aisles of a Netto supermarket in Odense seven times in one day.
Walking around the Danish capital with Hemmingsen, it’s clear that the city’s road network is much more friendly to e-scooter riders than London. The reason is the Danes’ love of cycling. “In Denmark you’re born, you’re potty trained, then you cycle,” Hemmingsen said. “Copenhagen is the second most bicycled city after Amsterdam – we cycle 1.4 million km every day.” Only 3% of people here don’t ride bikes every day.
The city is flat, which helps, but more importantly there are miles and miles of wide roads with dedicated cycle lanes, usually raised and separated from car traffic with a kerb. No one has to compete for space. A scooter shouldn’t need to be anywhere near a lorry.
But the road safety council is still worried about a growing number of injuries. “At the moment we have an assumption that it’s the same level of injuries for e-scooters as for cyclists,” Hemmingsen said, mentioning a recent study by two casualty departments in Copenhagen that found an average of about two injuries a day. About 800 cyclists a year are seriously injured.
Copenhagen police are also acting. After running an information campaign, senior officers mounted an operation against drink-riders earlier this month, posting officers around the city centre.
In one night last weekend, 24 e-scooter riders were stopped on suspicion of riding while over the legal alcohol limit, and four more for some form of narcotic intoxication, superintendent Allan Teddy Wadsworth-Hansen said. They face fines of up to 2,000 krone (£240).
One of the motorcycle officers standing in Frederiksborggade, a main route into the heart of Copenhagen’s night life, stopped one rider and breathalysed him. Then a second arrived who had also been drinking. “While he’s still trying to process the first one, a third e-scooter turns up with two people on it,” Wadsworth-Hansen said. “When they see the police, they try to slow down. The woman on the back falls off – she wasn’t hurt seriously – and the driver turns out to be driving under the influence of alcohol. And then a fourth one approaches, and he has also been drinking.”
Although there is sometimes a spike in the number of car drink-drivers over the summer, “you would never get four drivers in a row over the limit,” Wadsworth-Hansen said. “It doesn’t really bode well for e-scooters late in the evening, because drinking and driving is dangerous.”
“Road users are used to seeing bicycles, but they’re not used to e-scooters. When you see someone standing up, arms by their sides, it’s easy at a glance to think they are a pedestrian and not realise they’re coming towards you at 20km/h,” he said.
The experience of Parisians suggests that it’s not only e-scooter riders at risk. Isabelle van Brabant was hit by an e-scooter in the park at Les Halles in May, breaking her wrist in two places and causing a bone tear. For the pianist at the Paris Opera, it’s a professional disaster as well as a personal one. “She cannot play piano for one year, and piano is her life,” said her husband Jean-René Albertin. “When Isabelle was at the hospital, they said that each day 10 people come in for treatment. We think about 200 people a day are hurt.”
They have set up a campaign group, Apacauvi, to win compensation for victims, with legal actions planned against the Paris municipal authorities and the rider who injured Van Brabant. “We have received 10,000 messages and we have about 850 people who want to participate in the association – people who have been hurt,” Albertin said.
He wants the French government to force riders to take out insurance before they start riding, so that victims can be compensated from a central fund, even if an individual rider cannot be identified.
Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, was in favour of e-scooters as a greener alternative to cars, but she has announced a crackdown on the “anarchic” dockless scooters. From this month, bad parking, riding on pavements and breaking the 20km/h speed limit will all result in fines. Police said they had issued 1,000 tickets and impounded 600 scooters.
Albertin is unconvinced. “People just ignore the rules,” he said. But he is not in favour of an outright ban, as in the UK. “I don’t think making them illegal is right.”
Britain remains a lacuna for the e-scooter share firms because, for at least the last 30 years, it has been against the law to ride them either on the road or the pavement. Electric scooters, like Segways, hoverboards, Go-Peds and self-propelled unicycles, are neither roadworthy enough under the Road Traffic Act 1988 to be registered as vehicles – complete with licence plate – nor can they be used on the pavement: an offence against the Highways Act 1835. People are occasionally prosecuted.
Yet the e-scooter trade is flourishing. Halfords has 15 models available in the “kids zone” on its website. Argos has 23, also marketed as toys with designs from Trolls, Star Wars and Jurassic World. Ministers are in a bind, under pressure to liberalise or be left behind, while also wanting to enforce the law to prevent further tragedies like the one in Battersea.
Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald told the Observer there was a “pressing need for the government to provide clarity and guidance” on e-scooters.
In March, then transport minister Jesse Norman told the Observer he was considering licensing e-scooters, and his successor Michael Ellis is overseeing a review of legislation at the Department for Transport. But the government is also concerned about retailers flouting the law, and Ellis will hold a roundtable with Halfords, Lime, Bird and some manufacturers to urge them to tell consumers that they might be able to buy an e-scooter, but they can’t ride it in a public place.
“We are examining whether they can be used safely on the road – and if so, how that should be regulated to ensure the public’s safety,” Ellis said. “However, companies must understand that reviewing laws does not necessarily mean laws will change. People who use e-scooters need to be aware it is currently illegal to ride them on the pavement and the road.”
At night, the streets of Copenhagen are busy with e-scooters, and it’s easy to see why so many people have been stopped recently for drink-riding. You’re free to travel on a whim: it is cheaper and more immediate than cabs, far more convenient than buses or trains, and doesn’t require the effort of riding a bicycle.
“It has completely divided people,” Hemmingsen said, as we walk round the meatpacking district. “Either people think they are the best thing ever or they are a scourge. I saw someone had put one in a rubbish bin. They dredged the harbour in March and they found 12, and scooters have only been here since January.”
Here, there are neat rows of five Lime scooters on the street corners, and we soon catch up with the person leaving them there: Andrew, a Romanian driving a Lime van who has been working in Copenhagen for two months, repairing and recharging the scooters.
He shows me how the handles, the GPS tracker and other parts of the scooter are damaged – “by drunk people” – but not very often. In other cities, scooter-share companies will pay freelancers, nicknamed “juicers”, a bounty for each scooter they charge, but Andrew says that there are 20 people like him in Copenhagen who are all well-paid Lime employees.
There is some dispute about how long an e-scooter will last – some need to be replaced after just 28 days’ use in Paris, Albertin says, while Hemmingsen says they can go for up to three months. Andrew says many last much longer. The closest comparison in the UK is with dockless bike companies, three of whom have pulled out of the market within a year, complaining that vandalism in Britain is higher than anywhere else they have done business.
The e-scooter firms say they take safety very seriously, and each app will remind riders of some basic safety tips when they scan and hire a scooter. Kristina Nilsson of Voi said the Swedish firm was in the process of creating dedicated parking spots in the 31 cities where they operate, giving riders the incentive of extra credits if they leave them in the right place.
“We’re also in the process of rolling out speed zones, so in certain areas you go slower than 20km/h,” she said. Nilsson claims the crackdown by Paris is having an effect: “I understand Paris will have a tender for having only three players there. And we hope to be one of those three.”
Some cycling charities see e-scooters as potential allies in the battle to get better cycle paths. Rachel White, head of policy at Sustrans in the UK, said they were “generally supportive” of scooters, if speeds were limited and they were kept off pavements. Beyond safety, they are only worried that having access to effortless travel might make us put in less effort. “A slight concern is that they don’t have the same health benefits as walking or cycling,” she said. “But generally, another group of organisations lobbying for more protective cycleways can only be a good thing.”
The UK’s road network may yet dictate the future of e-scooters. In London the volume of traffic dwarfs the number of cars in Copenhagen while the cycling network is far less developed. London has 239km of cycle paths – less than the 375km in Copenhagen, and serving 13 times as many people. And outside the capital, the fragmented and often unreliable public transport system means commuters are wedded to their cars.
Paul Hodgkin, CEO of UK mobility start-up Ginger, believes that in spite of this, Britain can introduce e-scooters safely. His firm is in talks about putting e-scooters in business parks and campus universities – on private land. “Innovation is happening elsewhere. Wait-and-see is not a neutral position. If we take too long, the industry will move on and we won’t be able to help set the model and get it right,” Hodgkin said.
4. Electric scooters are the future of transport in our congested cities: Lucy Denyer, the Daily Telegraph
Travelling to work the other day, I was nearly knocked down by a fellow commuter whizzing past on an electric scooter. Immaculately dressed, poised serenely on her two-wheeled chariot as she sped gracefully to work, she seemed the epitome of modern mobility, and I gazed at her rather enviously – even as I scuttled out of her way.
But what should we do with her and her ilk? Exorcise them from the road – no more near-misses for pedestrians like me – or encourage them as they glide along our streets?
It’s a question that is, or should be, exercising our transport mandarins, not least after the news this week of two serious crashes involving e-scooters, one involving a 14-year-old boy who is now critically ill in hospital, the other in which a woman died after being hit by a lorry at a roundabout.
Reaction to both cases from some quarters has been predictable: critics point out that e-scooters are currently illegal on both our roads and pavements (punishable by six points on a driving licence and a £300 fine), that they are dangerous for both riders and other road users, and that they are, increasingly, the scourge of daily urban life.
All of which may be true. But then consider this: that an estimated 40,000 deaths are caused annually from air pollution and that said pollution inhibits cognitive function in our children, lodges tiny particles in our hearts and can lead to a range of associated health problems. Our urban centres are clogged with queues of cars and lorries pumping this stuff out. Perhaps the rise of the e-scooter could go some way towards addressing these problems.
Cyclists and pedestrians may cry that more of these vehicles will cause havoc. Car lovers will fear that the state, emboldened by the green lobby, will use any success that e-scooters enjoy as an excuse to further curb their freedom to jump behind the wheel and hit the open road. But have you ever tried driving down the Embankment in London? That’s no open road – it’s hell, and it’s killing us all. The reality is, as our cities become ever more crowded, we need an alternative to cars – and small electric vehicles are the future.
The Government seems, cautiously, to be cottoning on to this. It recently released its Future of Urban Mobility Strategy, which examines how to make low-carbon transport cheaper, safer and more reliable. It contains no plans to change the law with regard to scooters, but acknowledges that it is “essential that people have the chance to make the most of the opportunities from micromobility”. Perhaps it might want to look to Paris where, reports of road chaos notwithstanding (it is France, after all), in the first four months of introducing e-scooters, 70 per cent of users said they used their cars less. Or look at US cities, from Dallas to LA, where e-scooters have become the preferred mode of transport for commuters: cheap, easy to use and green (as long as you can avoid the potholes).
But our policymakers need to move faster. E-scooters – and e-bikes, hoverboards and the rest – aren’t going to go away. Why would they, when they get you from A to B in a crowded urban centre quickly and efficiently? But their users need to know where they stand. That means rules on where they’re allowed to go; bike lanes or similar that are safe to use, and policies that encourage, not punish.
We all want to sail quickly and gracefully to work each day. It’s a test for our Government to work out how we can.
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