Mike Hosking: Asleep at the wheel on e-scooter safety

Opinion

COMMENT: From our 'proof is in the pudding' file, we have the Lime Scooter debacle.

And the simple truth is that we really need to stop pontificating, ruminating, and hypothesising on matters like driverless cars, given we can't even have a bunch of scooters arrive without a complete shambles.

Why would we conduct research into the moral and ethical dilemmas of driverless vehicles, why would we feature stories about driverless flying taxis when, after a week of e-scooters, no one even checked to see what sort of issues they would cause when they turned up, seemingly without any regulation or series of rules around them?

What holds progress up almost always is regulation, and governments are a mile behind technical advance. To be honest an e-scooter isn't even a technical advance.

And yet in Christchurch and Auckland, hundreds arrive, and we then are in a free for all, set about almost killing each other.

Has no one, especially those who are normally regulating the bejesus out of us, noticed the irony of e-scooters going faster than cars, given the bus lanes, and the cycle lanes.

Scooters don't have to use cycle lanes, scooter users don't have to have helmets, and yet every other form of transport has enough rules, regulations, and ideology around it to sink ships.

Don't get me wrong -I'm not anti-scooter It just beggars belief that the idiots who regulate have been so asleep at the wheel. And now what do they want? Auckland Mayor Phil Goff orders a report. That's right, when in doubt order up a report.

And then we come to another example of 'the proof is in the pudding'.

The Commerce Commission now have the power to expose the "fleecing" (the Prime Minister's words not mine) that's going on in the petrol industry. And this is good for the commission given the Prime Minister has made their first investigation so easy.

We already know the outcome. They're fleecing us. We know because, Jacinda Ardern said they are. Now all the Commerce Commission need to go and do is show us how badly.

Unless, of course, we are not being fleeced. Unless, of course, the Prime Minister was shooting her mouth off at a tricky time, having increased the taxes herself, and was looking for a distraction to get the heat off her.

Oh, what if that was the case? What if the commission finds a market that largely operates normally, given size, transport, the dollar, refining costs, and competition? What if they find that the oil market is quite complex, and offering up easy one line accusations isn't actually the reality?

Well, that would be embarrassing. Almost as embarrassing as letting hundreds of scooters onto your streets without for one minute working through any of the implications.