United Kingdom

Good point, enforcement is another important issue. I find it annoying how many illegal e-cycles are around and tolerated. I bet all the batteries causing fires are not on legal e-bikes. Generally though, police enforcement of anything road based has declined massively as their funding and numbers have been reduced by austerity.

I regularly see car drivers on their phones, speeding, going through red lights or other issues. Let's be fair though, if you wanted to improve road safety, cars and trucks would be much higher on the list than e-bikes or e-scooters full stop. Once we get a handle on those then let's go after all the illegal e-bikes and e-scooters etc

I cycle without a motor and speed doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Ride in the centre of the lane and it generally makes you more visible and discourages dangerous overtaking. Also gives you plenty of swerving space if someone does overtake dangerously. Learnt a fair bit of that doing a CBT for a 50cc bike.

To be fair you've got a great point there. I was thinking more about a regulated speed. I wish I could keep up with traffic speeds to feel safer. Going 15mph in a 20mph is the worst. Cars still want to overtake but do so more dangerously because of the slight gap in speed.

I would have to question 30mph though only because I think some research would need to be done for safety. It's one thing being in something with crumple zones. It's another being on a stick where there is no expectation to wear appropriate clothing or anything. You have so much less suspension, size, weight or anything to give you some flex, even compared to a cycle or motorbike.

I say this thinking that e-scooters are for urban areas where the speed limit should be 20mph anyway. There should be cycling infrastructure to make use of but only if limited to 20mph alongside e-cycles being increased to that. Any higher would be dangerous to normal cycles. You can't expect to go 30mph on a cycle lane

I've driven a little around Portugal, and their roads were the worst I've ever driven on. Not just potholes, but the roads were often wonky and/or not flat (think like undulations like waves as you're driving along), missing road markings etc. The quality drop was really noticeable when you drove from Spain into Portugal. It was about 8 years ago so it's possible they've really got their act together since then, but I'm skeptical about how reliable their data is if Portugal is listed as the country with the 5th best roads in the world...

You missed a lot. There are so many things wrong with a statement like this.

1. A global comparison necessarily includes roads all over the country, the bulk of which being intercity motorways. Given that motorways and local roads are maintained quite differently, for a discussion about the viability of our roads for use with scooters then, which don't use these roads, such a bias renders this metric useless.
2. It won't include surfaces which are likely to be used by scooters, such as pavements and cycle lanes, let alone the availability of either.
3. It's also likely not to include negative cultural norms like:
   • Parking in cycle lanes
   • Parking on pavements
   • Double parking
   • The average size of vehicles and the visibility the drivers have

The biggest problem though is that it's just a bad argument. Having roads better than another place does not make our roads "good". At best it establishes ourselves on a spectrum of mediocrity. I saw this constantly living in Canada where people would talk about our mass transit as "better than what they have in the US" like that's something to be proud of.

Our roads are objectively shit. Potholes are everywhere and the pavements are literally crumbling. For a scooter, these are all serious hazards because of the wheel diameter. Those are objective facts, so lets stop with this "well at least we're better off than ${someplace slightly shittier}" because it ignores the objective shitty state right in front of us.