Antoni, a 76-year-old man who knows Barcelona well, was preparing to cross the other day at a pedestrian crossing on Diputació Street. As he usually does, he made sure that the traffic light was green and when he put his foot on the white line of the zebra crossing, a speeding scooter ran over him and knocked him to the ground. The skateboarder fled, while other pedestrians helped Antoni. An ambulance took him to the hospital and there they gave him several stitches in his eyebrow and right hand. After more than a week of treatment, the bruises from the accident are still visible.
Antoni is outraged, rightly so. He is the umpteenth victim of the impunity that prevails in relation to the circulation of these motorized vehicles. There are more and more scooters and more mishaps without anyone remedying them. The apathy is alarming, and administrations are shaking off their responsibilities, as we saw last week with the theft of copper cable.
Antoni’s indignation is shared by the vast majority of the population of the large cities of Spain. This was reported by the recent LlyC-La Vanguardia observatory on citizens’ perceptions of means of transportation. The anger with the scooters is unanimous and the demand for regulations that put an end to the current law of the jungle is clamoring. We are facing a serious problem of coexistence that we want to cover up.
Many City Councils, such as Barcelona, ??have their own ordinance on the regulation of scooters pending reform while waiting for the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) to approve a regulation that it has been drafting for more than two years. That awful! Nor was it about drafting a new Constitution. And at the head of the DGT is Pere Navarro, one of the people who knows the most about the subject. But not even he knows how to unclog the norm while accidents and accidents increase.
This long-awaited regulation will clarify from what age you can ride these scooters so that it is not at the discretion of each City Council. It will also impose the obligation to wear a protective helmet for skateboarders.
But the standard should also require at least two more things. The first is an identification of the scooter beyond the technical characteristics of the vehicle that has been required to be carried since last January. This documentation is insufficient and, therefore, the use of a license plate should be imposed, as is the case with motorcycles or cars. Not in vain is a scooter a motor vehicle that travels at 25 km/h (this legal limit is theoretical, because many go faster). This way, if the scooter runs a red light, goes faster than it should or flees, the cameras could penalize it by capturing the license plate. And finally, the rule should incorporate the obligation of accident insurance for cases like Antoni’s.
“The basic problem is that people have tried to equate the scooter with the bicycle when they are two totally different vehicles. To begin with, it is difficult for a bicycle to travel through the city at 25 km/h or more,” explains mobility expert Alfons Perona.
Now that we are about to start the campaign for the European elections, it would be good if some candidate remembered this conflict that most of the continent’s main cities are suffering and makes the EU reconsider so that it defines homogeneous regulations, because until now The decision has been made to let each country and city do what they want. We need to put order once and for all, or tomorrow you could be the one who is overwhelmed by the current impunity of the scooter.
