Q&A: How e-scooter racing is aiming to improve road safety

You can travel far on a e-scooter

A lot of new e-scooter road safety studies have highlighted how different they are from bikes when it comes to rider injuries in the event of a crash. Racing scooters will be much faster, so have you been able to use any of those 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 micromobility is coming – it’s happening. It’s already overwhelming existing legislators and regulators, the police and medical care. In some countries when you go to fill in a motor vehicle accident report sheet e-scooters don’t exist as an option

“There’s so much to do to connect people, there’s no real best practice at the moment. So we have to establish best practice, so we’re looking around the world at which countries are being clever 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 going through existing data, peer-reviewing it to see if it’s really independently done and is clean, and working out what’s application to other jurisdictions. It’s a very systematic approach to developing safety on track – and, more importantly, safety on the road.

Have you been surprised at how fragmented global micromobility regulations are?

“It’s not really a surprise. You can only really compare it to when the automobile was invented at the end of the 19th century. The horse was the main form of transport, and then suddenly you had cars, and there were overwhelming road safety issues because nobody knew what to do with them.

“Hopefully we can do it faster and better. We have to, because people are already using micromobility and e-scooters are means of transport – and it’s a very, very sensible and clever form of transport with many benefits. So we have to engage about education, and about law enforcement, and about the physical environment, such as separating roads for different users.

“It’s engineering. Can we use internet connected scooters as part of a smart city? Can we use technology both to make it safe and for enforcement? The policing needs to be strict in terms of enforcement, and for that it needs thew right legislation. We all need to combine our efforts to achieve sustainable and safe transport.”

The season will kick off in London on May 13/14 before moving on to cities in Switzerland, France, Italy and Spain in the following weeks.

And the first ever championship of its kind will culminate in the USA in October, with the host cities to be revealed in the coming weeks.