Electric scooters got banned from a campus here in Boston. Students are being told to bring them home or they will get confiscated and given a fine.
Cited lots of serious accidents, including running into pedestrians.
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Anyways... I think that this will become the trend for other college campuses and maybe some Cities will also start restricting their use.
I wouldn't mind more regulation here. Specifically because the whole market is a bit of a mess. You've got the cheap stuff that can go about 10-15mph. But you also have stuff that starts climbing into the 30+ mph range very quickly for not much more, much of it with the budget going almost entirely into the motors and controllers, and what's left going into the battery. I
don't want scooters that require motorcycle gear on multi-use paths flaunting the posted speed limits. Same with electric unicycles, one wheels, etc. One wheels in particular are tricky to use safely, and have some rather ugly failure modes as they depend on battery power to maintain balance while it's in use.
I honestly wouldn't mind seeing these start getting lumped in with class 2 e-bikes and have to follow the same rules (max speeds, access to multi-use paths, etc). And in areas that are supposed to be pedestrian-only, disallowed. One reason I got in line for the Segway P100S is that I can put it into such a mode (limited to 20mph, easy to control at the <10mph speeds needed in more congested areas of multi-use trails) and be able to follow the rules of the areas I intend to use it. I'm of the mind that we need to strike the right balance to avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water.
That said, I'm mixed on Boston College's statement here. On one hand, they do have an absolute right to ask what's up with scooters being brought into and/or causing access issues for the facilities, and to address accidents happening on campus. That said, as bikes and e-bikes are still allowed on campus, I think this is akin to the
early conflicts with Snowboarders, rather than these being used in pedestrian-only spaces or in some other blatantly irresponsible way. Outright bans aren't a great answer for mixed-use spaces, IMO, but it'll also take time to properly reach the right balance because there's no clear guidance for anyone to follow (industry, local governments, etc). BC themselves say:
Many faculty, staff, and students have reported near-collisions and limited access to facilities because of scooters, and recharging lithium batteries in such vehicles has resulted in numerous fires around the United States. Additionally, a number of BC students have suffered injuries from e-scooter falls, and such accidents have caused serious injuries on college campuses across the country.
So I'd be somewhat careful how you read into that. It sounds like in the case of BC, they are saying that scooter riders are not showing proper care navigating around pedestrians and causing many reported near-collections, and at the same time, injuring themselves when they faceplant on a scooter or skateboard they don't know how to properly control, or when using it inappropriately. It's also vague enough that it points out a problem, but doesn't have enough detail to describe enough specifics to understand the nature of the problem and if other options might be feasible. But that's not the point of these sort of statements either, it's a statement about new policy, not the thinking behind that policy.
There's a reason why the bike industry itself pushed for the "3 class" laws in the US for e-bikes. It helped side-step a lot of this early flailing about, but even then you see the "Snowboarder conflicts" there. Local DNR lands prohibit e-bikes of any class, partly because MTB groups have been pushing against it. So as a I result I can't even ride my class 1 e-bike on the gravel fire roads that are wide enough and built for vehicles, and I'm not interested in the single track that the MTB folks are trying to "protect". As I said earlier on, baby and bath water.
Fires from batteries overheating (although I cannot find any fires on record). Maybe this is a general US cited cause?
Fires from lithium batteries in
e-bikes and e-scooters are up in NYC (as one of the few places tracking this), and that's probably what they are citing. As the number of incidents are rising in NYC by almost 100% in 2022, the city does want to get ahead of this trend. Interestingly,
this article goes into a bit of detail as to where these fires are happening. Lower income areas are interestingly harder hit than other areas. So e-bikes are also part of this statistic, not just e-scooters. Which leads me to my question/argument in this space:
One thing that I would want to know is more about the batteries themselves and their origin. These cells are common in many kinds of laptop batteries that still use cells rather than pouches, power tools, etc. So it's not an inherent issue with the type of cells used in e-bikes and e-scooters. But there's a growing DIY community using cheap BMS units off Aliexpress to build cheaper batteries with no-name cells. The e-scooter market in particular is dominated by Chinese dropship brands fighting on how cheap they can make extremely fast scooters, so I have questions on what sort of BMS these units use, and what type of cells. Cheap cells with low QC can create problems where the cells may not be properly balanced at assembly, and if the BMS lets a cell get too discharged... welp...
E-bikes aren't immune to this issue either, as the article points out. It's a bit easier to stick with an established brand with e-bikes and reduce the risk though, because of the dominance of drop shippers in the e-scooter market.
This is another reason that I'd personally stick with someone like Ninebot/Segway if at all possible. They are approaching the market much more like an established brand, rather than a drop-shipper trying to make hay with cheap goods an nonexistent support/service.
