Lime Scooters are good fun until someone breaks a leg

People are falling over themselves to go for a ride on the new Lime Scooters but who pays when disaster strikes?

Reluctant to put a downer on the whole “We’re a World-Class City and thus need to be overun by green e-scooters to prove it” vibe but, even for Brisbane, this latest roll-out is a bit of a dog’s breakfast.

I’ve seen two falls and half-a-dozen near misses at South Bank, the CBD, Fortitude Valley and inner-east Coorparoo as riders on the Lime electric scooters nearly hit a runner, walker with pram, two bewildered tourists, a car and an elderly woman with a small, slow dog, both seemingly arthritic.

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So, just trying to clear up … if someone smashes into you on a Lime scooter and you survive, who do you sue – the rider, Lime Scooter founder Travis VanderZanden, the local authority where it takes place, or the Brisbane City Council/Queensland Government for allowing e-scooters to be thrown in the same crowded space with pedestrians, tourists, runners, elderly walkers and small children?

Like quite a bit of public policy these days, it doesn’t seem to be very well thought out and communicated to the public.

Key word there: communicated.

The law says e-scooters can only be ridden on footpaths, not on roads or on-road bike lanes, never faster than 25km/h (they can do nearly 30km/h), only by one person and always with helmets and not by kids, which is why you see them ridden by kids and on busy roads and without helmets or with two people at a time.

Yesterday a dad and a kid were doubling on a e-scooter, alongside traffic, down the hill of busy Vulture Street, no helmets.

Vulture St, people! It was like witnessing evolution in action.

A Lime user crosses the street in Brisbane’s CBD in Brisbane. Picture: AAP/Albert Perez

E-fans say, “Oh hush, all you anti-fun nanny-state-lovers, chill out, let the great and wonderful market decide, get onboard and embrace the disruptive change agent”, or whatever bullshit term they have for it this week.

They claim it’s a solution to urban transport woes but that is La-La-Land stuff without protected dedicated bike lanes.

Problem is, Brisbane’s never truly grasped what a network of protected dedicated bike lanes even looks like. It’s like we sent a bureaucrat to Copenhagen to study Denmark’s incredible cycling culture and kilometres of protected linked infrastructure, and he came back and recommended buying two tins of paint from Bunnings and painting a white line on the bitumen of some of Brisbane’s streets and calling that skinny strip of tar to the left “the bike lane”.

I asked a copper mate what he thought of the introduction of e-scooters: “What, you reckon we haven’t got enough to do?” A bloke at coffee yesterday was a little more forthright: “Don’t care what the little green e-pricks do, as long as they don’t run me over.”

Malgorzata Pasieczna rides a Lime scooter past a rack of CityCycles. Picture: Peter Wallis

Now, we have to forgive him his negativity and blasphemy, as he’d just been sidewiped by a Limey who was riding, vaping and holding his mobile phone. (I suspect it was the e-cigarette/e-scooter combination that got to him.)

It’s all so reminiscent of Toad of Toad Hall (Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows), who says in his speed-drunk way when new technology (the motor-car) arrives, seduces him and converts him into a reckless speed demon, “Poop-poop!” – and then promptly crashes.

Yet, readers, I’m not a naysayer. No, no. Who can afford these days not to be seen as jumping on every new disruption trend no matter how badly thought out – or risk being attacked by the e-mob?

So, e-scooter verdict? Like most things in life, it’s fantastic fun until the first fatality. Then it’s fantastic fun for the lawyers.

AND ANOTHER THING …

They’ve given us the slip, these two magnificent word arrangers, but to be fair, they deserve a rest.

Mary Oliver, one of America’s most acclaimed poets, died last month aged 83, and Russell Baker, columnist with The New York Times, died at 93.

Both Pulitzer Prize-winners. Both much-loved. Oliver, described as one of nature’s finest ambassadors, was simply The Bomb.

She taught us how to look at trees … and life, and ourselves, afresh.

Plenty of new releases come and go from my bedside table but Oliver’s slim books of poems stay put.

The keel to my tall ship.

At the end of a day, feeling a little bruised and agitated, you can open anywhere and something falls out and your brain cools: Ah, yes of course, you think, all that was rubbish.

Here’s what matters. Oliver with “Instructions for Living a Life: Pay attention./Be Astonished./Tell about it. There’s a rare interview she gave in 2015 on Krista Tibbett’s remarkable On Being.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Russell Baker. Picture: AP

Over at the Times, Russell Baker, journalist, columnist and author, managed to combine whimsy, truth and wit to win the first Pulitzer for commentary awarded to a humorist.

A journalist who came from poverty to cover everything from crime to the White House, his writing was universal with the lightest touch in the vein of those crafted yet seemingly casual essays of E.B.

White in The New Yorker. Yet always with a punch.

This 1974 take on growing old and shopping was reprinted by the NYT: “Staring at 90-cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for the price, putting it back … Old people at the supermarket make you wonder about all those middle-aged people you see jogging the streets to preserve their vascular systems for another 50 years. And about all the people of all ages all over the country who are eating less, drinking less, smoking less, driving safer, and in general looking for a deathproof safety suit to get them over the peak years and down into the valley of old age fit to enjoy the fruits of their abstention and labour. Will anyone care when they get there? … Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming.”

Last night I dug out his 1983 memoir, Growing Up, which won him a second Pulitzer Prize for best biography, and at 2am was still reading.

What will we do without them?

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