Maybe it's time to ban e-scooters in Ireland
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You are listening to The Big Tech Show with Adrian Weckler, sponsored by Deal. Deal lets you hire, manage, pay and equip anyone, anywhere. Visit deal.com slash bigtech. How does a guard actually pursue a scooter? It has clearly been difficult for Gardaí to pursue people either on scrambler bikes or on scooters. I know people sometimes bring the scramblers thing into this conversation and it's not completely separate. And obviously we've banned scramblers now, but there are way, way, way more scooters than there are scramblers.
Totally. And scooters are far more freely available. We can buy one within 200 meters here, I imagine, if we really wanted to.
Hello and you're welcome to The Big Tech Show with me, Adrian Weckler. Now, should e-scooters be banned? What once seemed like a real breakthrough in mobility technology around urban areas may have transmogrified into a category of device whose danger now outweighs its utility. We've seen some shocking figures from Temple Street Hospital, first reported by RTE, revealing that six children in the last three weeks were placed on life support because of e-scooter accidents. And astonishingly, half the kids are... in its intensive care in temple street are there because of injuries related to e-scooters so that's one part of the issue but are there other parts of the story that might mitigate for that well i'm joined by noel rock a former finagale td for dublin west no you're welcome into studio you were once the politician most identified with promoting e-scooters in ireland
It's many years later now because the period that you were doing that was 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. What do you think about them now?
Yeah, I think when I was talking about putting regulation and legislation in place for e-scooters, it was with a view to the fact that this was new technology that was clearly going to come on stream on streets in Ireland and indeed across cities. Were they on the streets when you started talking about that? Not really, no. I'd observed them outside of Ireland. They weren't really on the streets at that stage. You bought one, did you? I did. I bought one. I had to get it imported from Spain, so they weren't even buyable here. Was it a Xiaomi? It was, yeah, a Xiaomi M365. And it came from Spain, if memory serves correctly.
That was what, 2017 or so? 2017, early 2018. So you would have been one of the first people on... I mean, there were a handful of them on the roads. Yeah, there really were a literal handful of them on the roads. And at this time, were they common in the likes of San Francisco and the US cities?
Yeah, exactly that. So they were more common in San Francisco. And that's one of the places where I would have observed them in operation. And it was clear that they were cheap, that they were convenient, that they were environmentally friendly by virtue of being electric, and that they were going to inevitably become more popular here.
And there was this dream because I was really in favor of them around that era. And I remember writing about them. And the idea was to have this new mobility last mile solution, right? Urban cities gridlocked with traffic. Bikes aren't for everyone. So here you have a really small device. You might be able to take it on a bus. You could pack it away in your office if you were going into an office.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–7:39
2
Should Ireland consider banning e-scooters after recent Temple Street injuries?
7:39–8:48
3
How did e-scooters transition from a mobility solution to a public safety concern?
8:48–25:29
4
What went wrong with regulation and enforcement between 2018 and 2024?
25:29–27:07