Our View: Unfair to penalise e-scooter users before infrastructure is in place

Anyone using the roads these days can’t fail to have noticed the proliferation of people using e-scooters. They seem to be everywhere, weaving in and out from pavement to road.

Obviously, MPs have taken notice and are calling on the authorities to regulate the use of these personal mobility vehicles. As things stand, they could be a danger to those using them and can also be a stress point for drivers.

Three new bills relating to transport are currently under discussion in parliament, a significant one relating to e-scooters, another for bicycles. What makes the e-scooter issue more pressing is that they are more popular than bicycles because they’re cheaper than electric bikes, and faster than regular bikes so there are many more of them on the city streets right now than cyclists.

The government bill provides that scooters can be used only on bicycle paths or lanes, or in a space that is an extension of a bicycle lane – such as a communal area used by cyclists and pedestrians, or in a square or sidewalk.

Operators must be 16 years old and over, and must wear a helmet, have lights front and back, a bell, and tyres etc, and they would be banned from roads. A lot of these provisions are perfectly reasonable.

People who use e-scooters do so because they are affordable and because on some level they feel that public transport is not working for them. The buses do work for some but not everyone. No one wants to take two hours to get to work by having to catch more than one bus.

That is not to say scooter users are not sometimes a menace, like many car drivers are, and there is a huge risk of accidents when you combine the two. In an ideal world, scooter users would stick to pavements, but this is Cyprus.

Pavements are often full of obstacles, wheelie bins, trees, bollards, broken paving and of course parked cars, not to mention that in some areas, they are barely wide enough to walk on. Cycle lanes are hit-and-miss around cities, leaving riders no option sometimes but to go on to the road even if they don’t want to.

Funny how none of the new bills call for a mechanism to expedite the creation of urgent infrastructure to accommodate the increasing use of personal mobility vehicles, which is what the government claims it wants to see develop.

Isn’t it all about encouraging people to use smaller and cleaner vehicles on the roads? Now, instead of providing the means for them to do so, the government wants to get them off the roads by penalising them for often having no other option.

When you have the infrastructure in place and someone violates the rules, it’s fair to penalise them but until then, all this will do is discourage the use of alternative transport and take away mobility options from those who can’t afford another means of getting around.