Melbourne’s e-scooter trial paying the price for city’s shortcomings
E-scooters are a lot of fun - if riders obey the rules, that is. Photo: Getty
Melbourne’s e-scooter rental ban will remove a much-needed public transport option from the city while failing to address key risks, experts say.
At a Future Melbourne committee meeting on Tuesday evening, Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece launched a motion to cancel contracts with e-scooter companies Lime and Neuron.
The motion passed 6-4.
This was a surprise result to many given the city’s two-year shared e-scooter trial had been successful enough that the Victorian government announced in July share-hire e-scooters would be permanently legalised across the state, beginning in October.
Melbourne’s e-scooter partner companies also seemed confident in the scheme’s future.
Neuron last month revealed plans to equip its e-scooters with front-facing AI-powered cameras to detect and correct footpath riding, suspend repeat offenders, and restrict speed when necessary.
Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan also seemed to be taken by surprise at the development on Wednesday as she urged the City of Melbourne to reconsider its decision.
“It’s an interesting change of heart by the City of Melbourne,” she said.
“I know it was only two or three weeks ago that the Lord Mayor was out there talking about the three million trips that e-scooters have saved across the city, and how they have a role in that public transport network.”
Monash Institute of Transport Studies associate professor Alexa Delbosc told The New Daily the unexpected decision put an abrupt halt to one of the most popular and most heavily-regulated e-scooter schemes in the country.
Although certain rider behaviours do present risks on roads and footpaths, experts say a lack of infrastructure and education were also behind safety risks.
Affordable and convenient
Delbosc said public e-scooters benefited everyone from those who do not own a car, to people on low incomes who could get discounts on rides, to women who felt unsafe walking home at night and wanted a faster mode of transport.
“E-scooters are part of the whole system of sustainable transport,” she said.
“I have a student who did a study recently comparing riding an e-scooter to riding public transport, and for over 40 per cent of the places people are going to, there is no public transport option.
“Even in inner Melbourne, people would have to walk one or two kilometres to their destination; not everybody has the stamina or the time to walk two kilometres across the city.”
University of New South Wales senior lecturer in urban mobility, public safety, and disaster risk Milad Haghani said the relatively cheap transport option – Costing 45 cents per minute, or $15 for a whole day – was also popular with tourists.
Key issues overlooked
At the meeting on Tuesday, Reece said e-scooters were an unacceptable safety risk to the city and were “shameful”.
The council reportedly received 74 submissions and about 600 items of correspondence regarding the potential ban.
Despite being an initial supporter of the e-scooter trial, Reece told 3AW he had run out of patience with bad behaviour.
“Too many people [are] riding on footpaths. People don’t park them properly,” he said.
“They’re tipped, they’re scattered around the city like confetti, like rubbish, creating tripping hazards.”
Melbourne is far from the only major city in the world to ban share-hire e-scooters; Paris even held a referendum over the matter, albeit with extremely low voter turnout.
But some cities, such as San Francisco and Copenhagen, have gone on to overturn bans, while trials in cities such as Brisbane have been embraced more fully from the get go.
Haghani said incidents and injuries involving e-scooters often made headlines and was easily politicised, but no mode of transport was risk-free.
He referred to studies conducted in Europe which found injury rates among e-scooter riders were similar to bike riders.
But he said there needed to be more education around how to ride e-scooters safely, accompanied by stricter enforcement of rules.
“For other modes of transport, such as bikes, the culture has already been developed – not many people go without a helmet, for example,” Haghani said.
“For e-scooter riders, I think the focus could be, as opposed to a binary decision of banning, putting more investment into building the culture.”
Melbourne also may have fallen victim to lack of appropriate road infrastructure needed to keep bikes and e-scooters off footpaths and safe from passing cars.
“We don’t provide enough safe, separated bicycle infrastructure for people to feel safe riding them all around the city,” Delbosc said.
“If they don’t feel safe riding on the road, I can’t blame them for riding on the footpath, because they don’t want to get hit by a car.
“If you want to cut in half the number of people who ride on the footpath, put in a bike lane.”
She said the abrupt end to Melbourne’s trial might put a stop to share-hire e-scooters, but it would not affect private use, which may be more risky.
“If you pull out statistics of crashes amongst e-scooters, they haven’t even distinguished which of those are shared e-scooters versus privately-owned scooters,” Delbosc said.
“Privately-owned scooters aren’t going away, and we have much less control over how people use them. They can ride them anywhere in Melbourne, and it’s very hard to limit the speeds they’re going at.
“So [the end of the trial is] not actually going to eliminate the most unsafe version of e-scooters, it’s going to eliminate the version that we have the most control over.”
