Opinion: scooter and e-bike riders' poor road manners... aren't their fault

The imperatives of the new on-demand economy, the climate emergency and the cost of living crisis are colliding. It’s playing out as bedlam on the streets. In any decent-sized city, powered stand-up scooterists and electrified meal delivery cyclists swarm among the traffic, making their way by the law of Brownian motion rather than the Highway Code. Are they likely to keep to their own side of the road? Do they feel any obligation to look over their shoulders before swerving across a junction or onto the pavement? At night, do they see the point of wearing anything other than black, or showing any lights? To all the above, the answers are an emphatic no.

I used to get arsey with them, even as a fellow user of an integrated urban transit module – my pushbike. More than once lately I’ve been riding along and another rider overtakes me, then unannounced swerves left, crashing into me. I have a go at them and they clearly don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. Which, the last time it happened, gave me an epiphany.

I now try not to get mad with them because I’ve realised they don’t know any better. They’re unlikely to have done a driving test so why should they know the rules of the road? There’s nothing in the national curriculum for any road safety training, so if you mentioned mirror-signal-manoeuvre to them, they’d stare back as if you’d dropped out of a UFO. These kids come with a pedestrian’s mindset. If you’re walking down the street and decide to go into a shop, you don’t check back over your shoulder and stick your arm out. You just go. You probably don’t so much as look up from your phone during the entirety of this unannounced change of course.

So that’s how they ride. Hoodies pulled up, zero peripheral vision, fixated on making their next Uber Eats delivery. They don’t know, because they haven’t been told, that while the cars and trucks behind are technically obliged to give way, they might well not be able to because the speed differential is too much. Or because they haven’t seen them on a dark wet night, or fully clocked their trajectory. Someone on a stand-up scooter looks, at a glance in the mirror, like someone walking. Not someone doing 25mph in a quasi-random direction.

Some autonomous vehicle engineers think ‘vulnerable road users’ could use transponders that communicate with the cars. Like, yeah. If the Deliverooists shun even cheapo bike lights, they’re hardly going to bother with some expensive dongle to promote the AV ecosystem.

So yeah, I’ve sympathy for these kids. Less so for the middle-aged men in Lycra. You see them lifting their £5,000 carbon-fibre road bikes off their £50,000 SUVs, so they must have a driving licence. Yet they too mostly wear black. Hasn’t it occurred to them that if the sun’s low in the sky and a driver behind is dazzled, their black Lycra will simply disappear into the shadows? Wear fluoro, people. I don’t want to hit you.