I’ve seen several of these around, on roads. And to be honest, if I had to replace my car, it might be for one of these!
But what the hell? They are ONLY allowed on sidewalks, which IMO, they really shouldn’t be. And are NOT allowed on roads because they are classified as “pedestrians”?
We need new laws to accomodate and encourage the adoption of “mini cars” as car alternatives within urban and sububan travel…
It’s hard to address these concerns pretty specifically because every type of device, whether it be a pedal bicycle, an ebike, an e-scooter, or one of these enclosed mobile scooters, all have different weights, different powers, and kind of go the same speed.
The exception of pedal bikes, which can far exceed 30 km an hour quite easily.
That’s why I think alternative infrastructure should be made for these electric vehicles, which aren’t cars but also not ebikes.
And hell, take away a lane from cars. I don’t give a damn. 😂
30km/h isn’t bad, if you’re using this on low speed roads (for example, 40 km/h roads). But if we are to see an exit from large cars and SUVs, then we need to rapidly change laws and infrastructure to accommodate “mini cars” like this.
I really don’t think that’s feasible, though. Most cities genuinely struggle with trying to make space just for bicycle lanes, there’s no way most of them can fit another lane for yet another class of vehicles. Taking away all regular car lanes might do it, but I don’t think that’s remotely realistic :D
That was my assumption from the start (30 km/h roads are fairly common here), but it’s still pretty bad IMO. These scooters being fully enclosed pretty much means that the driver will take the full force of an accident very often, compared to bicycle accidents where they often spend some of the accident force by flying around (which is still survivable at 30 km/h), and usually won’t go nearly as fast. Nevermind cars, the driver could easily die by driving into a pole, wall or parking car at full speed. Though I suppose most of the issue is that I assume that the driver is elderly and thus slow to react and with bad traffic awareness, these people shouldn’t be going 25 km/h on an e-bike, either.
I like to think of it like this: cars are not the future. The sooner we build for non-car modes of transportation, the better. And any city that fails in this regard will not attract the best people, because it will be an undesireable city to live in.
Hey, you don’t need to take “lanes” from cars, so we can start with on-street parking! Any new developments should have design for these other forms of transportation in their plan, just like many do with multi-use paths (instead of sidewalks + bike gutters).