The mess of scooters, victims of regulatory uncertainty

With the entry into force of the new highway code, electric scooters have become relegated to the fringes of the urban mobility market. Of course, they are not inherently safe vehicles, and helmets are needed on a par with insurance and, perhaps, number plates. And it would also be useful for bicycles, especially e-bikes, which, needless to pretend not to see, dart around the city and are in fact illegal electric motorbikes in the hands of riders who, in order to bring sushino to the radicals of the centre in five minutes, equipped with bicycles but not in the rain, are forced to violate every rule in the highway code for a miserable income from a precarious job as in the film by director Pierfrancesco Diliberto, aka Pif 'E noi come s...i rimanemmo a guardare'.

Quotations aside, what has happened with electric scooters in Italy is grotesque. On the one hand, it is undeniable that the absence of rules has created a disaster in terms of safety, especially in sharing, where inexperienced users would get behind the wheel, perhaps with a passenger, and crash like flies into windows.

Not to mention rigged vehicles and hyper-cheap vehicles, little more than toys, with 7-inch wheels and brakes that slow down at the limit. Truly lethal. However, these vehicles, useful for urban micro-mobility, have improved technologically in the last two years as regulations become more stringent. They have large-diameter wheels (10 inches), dual brakes, arrows (by law) and suspension. Used with a head, they can be a practical way to get around, even in the eco-socialist 15-minute city.

What is the problem of scooters with the highway code? Always been atypical vehicles, now with the new regulations there is also a lack of enforcement provisions. The Cds prescribes a number plate, but one does not know how to make one. Scooters generally do not have a chassis number (only the newer ones have a vin stamped on them). So without a chassis number, how do you issue a number plate whose shape has not even been defined. And how do you get the old ones in order with turn signals and speed limit? Then there is the subject of compulsory insurance, but the companies' offerings are in limbo and many are afraid of the bloodletting. The helmet issue is more precise because one must use products that comply with Uni En 1078 or and Uni En 1080. The 20 km/h limit is open to criticism: 25 km/h, as it used to be, would have been the right speed, because at 20 km/h modern e-scooters, like the latest Navee and Xiaomi, are 'corked': you feel that they could give more to get us out of the way and instead we get stuck in the middle of an intersection and are perhaps forced to nail it.

The result of all this is that the market is at a standstill and has effectively been wiped out. Not nice if you aim to streamline traffic in the city, but here comes the absurd issue of municipalities like Milan, which from October 2025 will block old motorbikes whose pollutant emissions are negligible. And that is another (bad) story.