The technology, availability, and convenience of changes in modes of personal mobility have come at a rate at which the administrations have not been able to adapt with the necessary speed or flexibility. It has not happened with the circulation ordinances that define the place that corresponds on public roads to bicycles or other personal mobility vehicles. Neither with the legislation that orders regulated sectors, such as the taxi before the VTC platforms. Or with the availability of necessary infrastructures to promote electric vehicle. This is also the case of the regulations that must regulate the electric scooter. Both for the safety of its users, who are unprotected from new types of trauma that emergency services see more and more often, and of the rest of the users who share the public highway with them. They are already involved in 4.2% of traffic accidents in Catalonia, and reach 6.4% in Barcelona.
The existence of clear traffic rules, rather than the embarrassment that restrictions are random and ads fail to materialize, is a basic requirement for enforcement. But not even the fact that these new forms of transport have already been included in the regulations of the General Directorate of Traffic has cleared up the user’s confusion about what is recommended, optional or obligatory. The DGT, for example, recognizes the need to add the helmet and insurance requirement, but it has not yet been regulated nor, in the current political context, is it clear when it will be possible.
Only 10% of Catalan towns have adapted their own ordinances to electric scooters. So the initiative of the Servei de Català de Trànsit to establish a common framework on how to do it is a positive initiative that should clarify current prohibitions, such as driving on the sidewalk or the use of headphones, which are as obvious as they are unheeded. But some of its proposals, and of the norms projected by city councils such as Barcelona, will appear to the user as obligations when they will only be recommendations until the state regulations do not contemplate them.
Not only are the rules that regulate the circulation of electric scooters through the streets of a large part of the municipalities in limbo. As of February 1, the prohibition of accessing public transport in the Barcelona area with one of these vehicles, given the risk of fire posed by damaged or tampered batteries. A decision that hurts those who had an attractive alternative in the combination of metro, Rodalies or bus plus scooter, for economic or environmental reasons. And once the six-month moratorium runs out on August 1, it is not yet clear if it will be extended or if it will wait to allow, from 2024, only new models that meet the strictest safety requirements dictated by the DGT. . Also in this case a new phenomenon has been regulated with perfectly avoidable delays and hesitations.
The ‘boom’ of this type of vehicle has long ceased to be a fashion to be one more variant of the forms of mobility. And like all of them, they must have basic requirements such as vehicle registration or insurance that guarantees the rights of third parties in accidents. Not in the future, but from the moment they are a reality established in the streets.