What may look like miniature electric cars zipping through city streets are actually enclosed mobility scooters — and they’re not allowed to be there. The North Bay Police Service is now cracking down with fines.

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…

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.orgEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    That’s why I think alternative infrastructure should be made for these electric vehicles, which aren’t cars but also not ebikes.

    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

    30km/h isn’t bad, if you’re using this on low speed roads (for example, 40 km/h roads).

    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.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2·
      20 hours ago

      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

      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).