Q&A: How e-scooter racing aims to improve road safety Car News

Many new studies on the road safety of electric scooters have highlighted how different they are from bicycles when it comes to driver injuries in the event of an accident. Racing scooters will be much faster, so have you been able to use any of these studies when considering your own safety systems?

“You work from scratch. There just isn’t enough data. When you look around the world, we see that micromobility is happening – it’s happening. It is already overwhelming existing lawmakers and regulators, police and medical care. In some countries, when you go to fill out a road accident report, electric scooters do not exist as an option.

“There are so many things to do to connect people, there are not really good practices at the moment. So we have to establish best practices, so we look around the world at which countries are smart in terms of legislation – and then we want to be the platform to connect them together.

“That means we have to go out and do our own research. So we’re looking at the existing data, peer reviewing it to see if it’s really done independently and cleanly, and determining what applies to other jurisdictions. It’s a very systematic approach to developing track safety – and, more importantly, road safety.

Were you surprised at how fragmented global micromobility regulations are?

“It’s not really a surprise. You can only really compare it to the invention of the automobile at the end of the 19th century. The horse was the main means of transport, then suddenly you had cars, and there were overwhelming road safety issues because no one knew what to do with them.

“I hope we can do it faster and better. We have to because people are already using micromobility and electric scooters are means of transport – and it’s a very, very sensible and smart form of transport. with many benefits, so we have to take care of education, law enforcement and physical environment, such as road separation for different users.

“It’s engineering. Can we use internet-connected scooters as part of a smart city? Can we use the technology both to make it safe and for the application? Policing must be strict in terms of enforcement, and for that it needs appropriate legislation. We must all work together to achieve sustainable and safe transport.