E-scooters 'are five times safer than bikes' - Study by The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents
- Thread starter guerney
- Start date
There are a few cheaper standalone video editing suites which offer graphics co-processing, you might have to try a few out before you find one which uses both CPUs plus the 1060 and is stable. Unstable will give you a stroke! As it fails after hours days weeks or months rendering something.
Two days to go! There is speculation about a legal 500W 
escooter limit, which sounds excessive - pedelecs should have their legal power limits doubled! 500W would be much better for cargo bikes. 500W for escooters but not pedelecs makes no sense, escooters are lighter than pedelecs! We should be allowed throttles!
escooter limit, which sounds excessive - pedelecs should have their legal power limits doubled! 500W would be much better for cargo bikes. 500W for escooters but not pedelecs makes no sense, escooters are lighter than pedelecs! We should be allowed throttles!
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Fscking hell, I'm going to be overtaken by 500W invisible ninja clad escooterists... At this rate walking will be forgotten - babies will proceed directly to tiny escooters, people will grow as wide as cars, and coffins will be carried to graves by pallbearers with crane attachments on their escooters. Mark my words: it'll will be self-driving stretchers next. Roads clogged with big blobby rhino-humans on motorised self-driving stretchers playing video games.
At this rate walking will be forgotten - babies will proceed directly to tiny escooters, people will grow as wide as cars, and coffins will be carried to graves by pallbearers with crane attachments on their escooters. Mark my words: it'll will be self-driving stretchers next. Roads clogged with big blobby rhino-humans on motorised self-driving stretchers playing video games.
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Well it would, allegadly, be safer than letting them travel by bus.
We don't need helmets on those allegedly dangerous buses, so why require them for e-scooters? They've painted themselves into a corner with this fiddled study, leaving low justification for helmet requirements - a disaster if many e-scooterist brains ooze out of broken skulls.
Well exactly.
I dont recall seeing anyone suggesting that helmets be worn in busses.
Which is odd really, if there is such an (alleged) elevated risk of travelling in a bus.
It's ideological, isn't it? Public transport is communism, and the funding of communism is deeply unsettling to red blooded Tories. 24 hour waits nursing crushed bones in underfunded A&Es, will remove problematic but aspirational poor e-scooterist voters from the political equation, who can't afford cars or home ownership - no need to continue lying to them if they're dead. It's also a great way to get rid of the elderly. A magnificent mass coup de grâce! I cannot wait for tomorrow...
And whilst that sounds extreme, some may recall that Boris (allegadly) resisted introducing covid lockdowns as "Covid only kills over-80s"
Personally, if people choose to ride the things on the road and accept the risks then let them get on with it.
What could easily turn into a catastrophy is that as they become popular, and maybe very popular, the pavements could become a nightmare for pedestrians, especially those who are elderly or poor sighted. And do remember that most of us will get old and less mobile.
The study was carried out by RoSPA, with technical assistance from safety-focused e-scooter operator Neuron Mobility.I'm having major difficulties believing this
The bicycle & motorcycle figures are correct - from here:
Road safety statistics: data tables
Detailed statistics about reported personal injury road collisions for Great Britain, vehicles and casualties involved.
On the scooter front - basic stats from the ROSPA report:
- 360,000 scooters
- 431 casualties
- and they claim 0.66 casualties per million miles
Therefore the miles travelled on scooters must be 431 / 0.66 = 653 million miles per year.
That's 1,813 miles travelled by every scooter - or 5 miles per day, every day, all year.
I could believe that from a central London hire scooter, but not from a private use scooter.
I'd agree that their figures are poor.
Any practitioner of arithmetic can perform the simple extrapolation that RoSPA have presented. Tying their names to such incurious claptrap devalues their reputation in my eyes in an irreversible way.
What they have done is use the figures for the number of vehicle crashes.
Its maybe possible that the crash rate per million vehicle miles is 1.52 for a bus and 0.66 for an eScooter.
But buses normally have more that 1 passenger. Busses may well be used for much longer longer journeys too.
If someone wants to know the risk of that commute into work etc, they probably want to know the risk per person mile.
When I first saw articles about this report, the question that came to my mind immediately was “Why would e-scooters be ‘five times safer’ than bicycles?”
I then read the ROSPA report in full but did not find an explanation.
The Rospa report aims to assess the relative safety of e-scooters and does indeed state a key finding that e-scooters have casually rates 5 times lower than bicycles per million miles travelled. It also concludes that it is clear that e-scooters carry a risk for riders lower than that for bicycles. I don’t doubt the statistics used, however I believe that the conclusions drawn may be misleading and at least warrant some explanation.
The ROSPA report states that most of the e-Scooter accident stats relate to use in local authority areas where there was no rental scheme running and involve collisions with larger vehicles. This implies similar mode of use to bicycles, but there is no explanation behind the large difference in apparent safety between the two modes of transport.
If anything, you could expect that e-scooters would be less safe, given that scooters have a short wheelbase and small wheels which makes them less stable and more susceptible to potholes etc. The standing position is also less secure over bumps and scooters are far less practical for carrying loads safely and they don’t even have a suitable place to mount a rear light to be seen clearly.
I suspect that if e-scooters and bicycles were compared in genuinely like for like mode of use, there may be a different conclusion.
I wrote to ROSPA highlighting my concerns and await a response.
I then read the ROSPA report in full but did not find an explanation.
The Rospa report aims to assess the relative safety of e-scooters and does indeed state a key finding that e-scooters have casually rates 5 times lower than bicycles per million miles travelled. It also concludes that it is clear that e-scooters carry a risk for riders lower than that for bicycles. I don’t doubt the statistics used, however I believe that the conclusions drawn may be misleading and at least warrant some explanation.
The ROSPA report states that most of the e-Scooter accident stats relate to use in local authority areas where there was no rental scheme running and involve collisions with larger vehicles. This implies similar mode of use to bicycles, but there is no explanation behind the large difference in apparent safety between the two modes of transport.
If anything, you could expect that e-scooters would be less safe, given that scooters have a short wheelbase and small wheels which makes them less stable and more susceptible to potholes etc. The standing position is also less secure over bumps and scooters are far less practical for carrying loads safely and they don’t even have a suitable place to mount a rear light to be seen clearly.
I suspect that if e-scooters and bicycles were compared in genuinely like for like mode of use, there may be a different conclusion.
I wrote to ROSPA highlighting my concerns and await a response.
The National Federation of the Blind UK are delivering a petition to Downing Street, calling on politicians to not legalise e-scooters. When e-scooterists outnumber the blind by a very large order of magnitude, they could deliver a petition demanding the removal of hazardous blind people and their dogs from pavements.
Charity campaigners to deliver e-scooter petition
The charity calls for politicians not to legalise the use of private e-scooters on public highways.
www.bbc.co.uk
I'd like a folding version of a seated e-scooter, which can be rolled when folded, and which folds small enough for luggage compartments on trains, and under shopping trolleys on the tray intended for folded prams. For legal road use only, of course.
RoSPA have never had a credible reputation of any value. They are an organisation neurotically seeing imaginary danger in almost every aspect of life.
.
If one uses those quoted figures - with 50 people per bus, commuting by bus is 21.7 times safer than escooters, or 43.4 times safer with 100 people per bus. There's no mention of trains, which many people make escooter-range journeys with.
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they said in their studies that 94% of the accidents don't involve the hire e-scooters, so they have to make guesses.
Their first guess is 20,000 e-scooters are from the hire companies, 730,000 from other sources.
I don't know how they come up to this estimate.
Only accidents involving hire e-scooters (2.7% of the total of e-scooters in use, from their first guess) are documented.
The rest of their study seems thus result of guesswork.
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