Electric scooters: the new sustainable mobility?

The electric scooters are the last trend of the moment. They are appreciated by the nostaligic of the skateboard, and they allow to be faster than walking and much more easy to handle than a bike used for short routes. But let’s see which are the limits of this new vehicle that invades the cities.

The characteristics of the electric scooters

Let’s start to talk about how they are made: much similar to the models without engines, the electric scooters are equipped with two wheels, a brake, a stand and a chargable battery. They are light, often even foldable and some models have even a seat where we can sit. The one that we see from the first look is the lack of light or every kind of signs.

The prices are really variable, there are models from 200 euros until to arrive even to thousand euros.

The electric scooter can arrive to a speed of 25 km/h and, if downhill, it can even touch the 30 km/h. This sets them exactly in the middle between a recreational vehicle and a real means of transport.

Their success is infact due to the fact that they allow us to move quickly and in a more comfortable way that with a bike: we might just stay upright and we don’t have to take any specific arrangements to not get dirty with the chain or with the rays.

Furthermore the main advantage compared with a bike is surely give by its reduced size, which makes it easily portable in train, quickly foldable in the office.

Spaces and rules for the electric scooters

This characteristics to stay between two categories, means that there isn’t an ideal place for them. Infact for a pedestrian area they are too fast, besides the fact that they are incredibly quite and it’s hard to see their arrival.

For the street instead they are too small and less visible, they don’t have lights or position lamps, they don’t have signals to turn. Their road circulation on the streets is really dangerous because the user doesn’t even have enough protections in case of accident.

This happened, for example, recently (the last 12nd of July) the british youtuber Emily Hartridge a morning crashed on a tir with her electric scooter, by loosing her life.

The “monosharing”

The popularity of the electric scooters is spreading around as much as that, all over the world, after the car sharing and the bike sharing, are available even the electric scooters to rent. Like the bike sharing: Bird, Lime , Grüv, Voi and Flash just to say some of them, make available many sustainable vehicles through their track.

But there are two things to not underestimate about this new.

The first one is strictly connected to the usage of the new vehicle. If all of us know how to ride a bike and if for the car we had to make a licence, on the electric scooter is a whole new experience.

The fact that everyone can rent them, without practice adn without get used with its driveability make them potentially dangerous.

According to the american department of health, infact, a third of the victims of the accidents with the electric scooters was using it for the first time.

The second thing is surely linked with its sustainability, the possibility to take it in sharing (as well as for the bikes) put the instrument under a higher usury. Even because the usage is surely much more intense, and because they are left at the mercy of the weather, the average life of a renting scooter is only 29 days. Which is surely few if we talk about sustainable mobility.

What should we do so? Surely we will need to wait for some regolamentation that will give more rules to the ones that use them to make the experience safer. Meanwhile we will firstly try to pay more attention.

This post is also available in: Italiano