Add Category
New South Wales has embarked on a pathway to legalise the use of private e-scooters as some cities around the world seek to restrict or phase them out.
The E-micromobility Action Plan will examine how the state could decriminalise the use of private e-scooters in public and explore more e-scooter trials.
Other states including South Australia have also flagged changes to laws that would allow private e-scooter use in public.
But cities such as Melbourne, Madrid, Rome and Paris have restricted or banned public, shareable e-scooters, mostly over safety fears.
Experts say the rules across Australia are confusing and there is limited regulation for private e-scooters, which poses risks to users and pedestrians.
So is there a place for e-scooters in Australia, and can pedestrians and riders co-exist?
E-scooter safety concerns prompt crackdown
The City of Melbourne ended a shared e-scooter trial in August over concerns about e-scooter safety, mostly because some users were riding on footpaths or not wearing helmets.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said the e-scooters posed an "unacceptable safety risk" to pedestrians in the busy and densely populated city.
"There are literally more people disobeying the law on e-scooters than there are actually following the rules," he told councillors in August.
The City of Melbourne ended a shareable e-scooter trial in August. (ABC News: Iskhandar Razak)
Some Melbourne residents and business owners complained to the council that poorly parked e-scooters presented trip hazards to pedestrians.
One resident told the council: "I routinely have near misses because riders are on the footpaths or are running red lights while I am at a pedestrian crossing."
"They are a torment to anyone trying to use the footpath normally, especially the disabled," one man said.
In Madrid, share e-scooter companies were ordered to remove their devices from the city's streets after officials said they failed to implement riding and parking controls.
Paris banned rentable e-scooters in 2023, while officials in Rome restricted the use of e-scooters to prevent further injuries and deaths.
Are shareable and private e-scooters safe?
Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety Queensland researcher Narelle Howarth said public e-scooters were easier to control than private e-scooters.
Professor Howarth said shared public e-scooters could be programmed to not exceed a certain speed limit and could be banned from some areas, while privately purchased ones could not.
Narelle Howarth says public e-scooters are easier to regulate. (Supplied)
"The shared ones are actually the ones that government can most easily regulate because with the shared ones they can't operate unless they get a permit from the local government," Professor Howarth said.
But she said they still presented a safety risk for users who were often inexperienced and unlikely to wear helmets.
Professor Haworth's research into helmet use on e-scooters found shared e-scooter riders were more likely to ride without a helmet than private e-scooter riders.
Helmet wearing was strongly linked to a rider's understanding and support of the law, according to the research.
Narelle Howarth says imported private e-scooters need to be regulated by the federal government. (ABC News: Curtis Rodda)
"People not wearing helmets despite them being mandatory and also people being often inexperienced … makes them more likely to get into trouble," she said.
"The design of the shared e-scooters is improving but it still has pretty small wheels and pretty small wheels means that it's very susceptible to unevenness on the surface you're riding on."
Professor Howarth said some private e-scooters were unsafe because they could be driven at high speeds and, at times, easily modified.
She said the federal government needed to intervene and regulate the importation of private e-scooters until there were established standards in place.
"The first thing you have to do is to get the regulations and we haven't done that. We certainly haven't done that in terms of what can come into the country," she said.
"Then we need to have settings at the state government level which will relate to how fast and where e-scooters can be used and then we can educate people about what those rules are."
The Australian Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts told the ABC that e-scooters did not meet the definition of road vehicles and therefore were not regulated by the federal government.
E-scooter rules in Australia 'the Wild West'
University of Queensland research lead for micromobility Richard Buning said Australia lacked consistent e-scooter rules.
"The e-scooter legislation across the country is all over the place. It is the Wild West. It is an absolute mess," Dr Buning said.
"We call them different things. Some places are e-rideables, in Queensland we call them personal mobility devices. We can't even decide what we want to call them in the first place."
Private e-scooters — or personal mobility devices — are legal in Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia and the ACT.
Public e-scooters can be hired for a short period of time in cities. (ABC News: Eugene Boisvert)
But they are prohibited in New South Wales, the Northern Territory and South Australia despite some councils trialling shareable e-scooters.
For states where private e-scooters are legal, there are different rules for how fast they can accelerate or where they can be ridden.
Dr Buning said e-scooters were a convenient way for city residents to get to work, school or university if public transport was not an option.
"If you are a working professional or a student and … you can't afford a car or public transport doesn't work for you … [e-scooters are] probably perhaps the easiest solution for you to get there in a sustainable way," he said.
Tourists had embraced e-scooters because it allowed them to explore a city without using "confusing" public transport such as buses, he said.
"Tourists are … looking for an experience when they visit a place. They want to take pictures, they want to slow down, they want to go the long route," Dr Buning said.
"Normally transport is the annoying part of travel and if you're a tourist … and you're in the city, public transport is typically off the cards for you.
"Tourists find buses very confusing."
Can pedestrians and e-scooters co-exist?
Alexa Delbosc from the Monash Institute of Transport Studies said cities needed to create safer infrastructure for e-scooter users and cyclists so pedestrians felt safe.
Dr Delbosc said removing e-scooters from cities would reduce the amount of transport options available for people in urban areas.
Alexa Delbosc says separated infrastructure could provide safe travel spaces for e-scooters. (Supplied)
"If you provide safe, separated infrastructure, people use it," she said.
"The proportion of people riding on the footpath was cut in half in a place where there was a bike lane compared to a street where there was no bike lane.
"If we want people to be riding bikes or scooters in a safe way, we need to be providing more safe separated infrastructure."
She said existing rules needed to be enforced more strongly.
"It would pay back in goodwill from the community and from people doing the right thing," Dr Delbosc said.
"If people don't think they're going to get caught, they're just going to keep riding on a footpath, and clearly there wasn't enough enforcement [in Melbourne]."