Kate Hawkesby: Kiss goodbye to the e-scooter craze

Lime Scooters have landed in Auckland and Christchurch, but their high speeds and lack of helmets have raised fears that they could be an accident waiting to happen.

COMMENT: I have a feeling we'll be waving bye bye to the Lime e-scooters at the end of their three-month trial.

If enough bureaucrats get hold of them, and enough stories of carnage get written about them, their demise will be inevitable.

It started out a happy story: excitement over these fun new Californian e-scooters coming - available to everybody, cheap as chips, and a great solution to traffic woes.

But it wasn't long before the scaremongering began over dangers and potential chaos on the pavements. But then the rubber hit the road, so to speak, and the genuine accidents started racking up... and fast.

Fourteen ACC claims in the first week – that's two accidents a day.
The total number of ACC claims for accidents now stands at 38, with damage including concussion and brain injuries.

We've had the personalised examples - the Auckland councillor almost clipped by one as she walked to work, badly shaken at the near-miss and the sheer pace of them.

Belting down a footpath at 27kmh is not for the faint-hearted, walking towards someone doing that, also scary. Her bad experience led to Auckland's Mayor Phil Goff announcing an urgent safety review of the scooters.

Not urgently enough though it would seem for the person who went face first on one this week, landing themselves in the dentist's chair requiring extensive treatment. Ouch - for both face and wallet. That scooter rider had tried to avoid a pedestrian, braked, lost control, and ended up falling face first.

You have to be 18 to ride them, but the bulk of people I see on them are school kids.
One was blatting round on them the other day, overtook his mate, got his foot caught in the front wheel and both of them wiped out – with a fair few scrapes to show for it.

But there're also the fans. My girlfriend for example, who saw one in her street and made a spontaneous decision to ditch the car, the traffic and hefty parking costs for her meeting in town, and scoot there instead.

Resplendent in heels and handbag, she jumped aboard and got to her meeting trouble-free.

It's up to the council and Auckland Transport to decide if the licence for these scooters gets renewed, if they do, it's likely there'll be a bunch of new rules around how they operate.

But if the litany of accidents continues, my pick is the e-scooter trial will end up like it did in LA and San Francisco - parked.