Since Jimi Heselden, the former boss of the standing scooter company Segway, accidentally drove one of his scooters over a cliff and fell to his death, it’s been a long time since we heard about strange and tragic accidents involving such means of transport. However, reports of this type have been increasing for some time. Relatives of Segways are to blame for this: the e-scooters. Everyone knows them, nobody likes them. Unless you’re a tourist, then it doesn’t matter anyway, because you’re in a foreign city where nobody knows you and recognizes when you’re dashing through the city on a scooter undignified and for a relatively large amount of money.
You want receipts? Here you go: In July, a 36-year-old man was driving his e-scooter on the Autobahn near Kahl am Main – on the hard shoulder and against the direction of travel. Drunk. Or at the end of May: A man raced through a Kulmbach shopping center on an e-scooter. Security was able to stop him – and discovered that the scooter had been stolen. The man: drunk. Despite all the love for strange reports of this kind – for which drunken young men are apparently responsible with sobering regularity – there are unfortunately also serious accidents with these e-scooters again and again. And deadly.
In any case, the city of Nuremberg seems to have finally had enough of all the heckling about the e-scooters. The decisive factor here is not so much the many accidents that happen with motorized scooters, but their sheer mass, which annoys many citizens. In Nuremberg – and certainly in many other cities as well – there are scooters lying around everywhere you don’t need them. Across sidewalks, scheps on bike paths, lying in front of entrances, at the bottom of water bodies. The latter is more likely to be due to the vigilantism of some citizens. In any case, the city council in Nuremberg soon wants to drastically reduce the number of scooters by ordinance – and define certain areas on which they are allowed to stand. Rental companies should also apply for the rare and fee-based licenses that the city wants to reassign in a multi-stage process. If that helps reduce the number of strangely tragic reports – please do it!