This woman is dead. It needn't have happened. A dog could have told you that the chief appeal of e-scooters would be to teenagers who would ride wherever they liked, including the pavement, which is where this woman was killed. The entrepreneurs did not design these machines to solve a transport or ecological problem - they did it because they could. You may be "lucky" enough only to have experienced responsible riders obeying such regulations as exist and on non-modified machines. I have been surprised on my bike by soundless, bell-less machines on both cycle tracks and the road (both illegal for private e-scooters), passing me at speeds greater than fifteen miles an hour on many occasions. It's tough oop north. I blame scooters because this woman (who is dead, by the way) was hit by one. It may be possible to have a world in which these machines have a legitimate use. At the moment they are neither necessary or safe. Officials should have seen this coming and said, "No, we're not ready for it - not yet, anyway." Let them eat bikes.
Pretty much all of this applies equally to bicycles, thobut. They were invented by someone because they could, and changed the world in ways that some people would not consider to be for the better. They're mostly silent (I regularly get spooked by other cyclists overtaking me when riding my bike), commonly ridden by young people, and often recklessly and on the footway. A couple of people die every year after being hit by cyclists.
If we accept bicycles, which I think is reasonable, then I don't see that properly engineered scooters - such as those used by Voi - are substantially different. Bicycles are accepted becuase they're normal and ordinary and just a part of the way the world works, but e-scooters aren't because they're new
[1], and it fits in with the peculiar
BRITISH hatred of our children. Legalising scooters would be a step towards making the private ones comply with some reasonable construction & use standards (brakes, speed limiting, fire safety). It's not like people are going to stop using them - they're readily available from abroad.
I'm lukewarm about the hire schemes, mostly because of the pavement clutter problem. Like hire bikes, I've used the scooters myself for legitimate transport purposes (journeys where I didn't have a bike with me, and it was a convenient alternative to a bus).
[1] Lithium-ion batteries are new. In the sense that they're a technology that's been around for most of my life, but has only recently been applied to transport. Powered scooters aren't; their combustion-engined equivalent were used for transport in the early 20th century, before everything became car-centric.
