Safety and sustainability

Safety and sustainability don’t appear to go hand in hand  

Sharing pavements with bicycles and e-scooters has become distinctly treacherous for pedestrians who require eyes in the backs of their heads.  

In what pedestrians mistakenly thought were 'safe-spaces' for themselves, instead it seems as though the system has been organised to fail pedestrian safety rather than enhance it as council would have you believe. Examples of what I think are reckless sacrifices of pedestrian security have resulted from an ideology of ‘sustainability' rather than practicalities. For example: walking in Queen Street one has to continually keep one’s eyes peeled for e-scooter riders driving erratically on the pavement, even though council spent a fortune building a cycleway – at the same height as the pavement so that two-wheeled riders can just ride anywhere. And they do!

Another example: having bus passengers board and disembark directly into a cycle lane is about as unsafe as having the bus doors on the right-hand-side of the bus opening onto incoming traffic.

If you’re on a bicycle or an e-scooter, you have no legal boundaries, you can drive anywhere you please at any speed (even above the vehicle limit), with no threat of a fine. And out and about you’ll notice, as I constantly do, that the cycle lanes are mostly empty of both cycles and scooters, because the scooters, in particular, are everywhere else. I also observe that the public scooters are more often used in the city by young joy riders, making me wonder if e-scooters are needed at all in the CBD. What happened to walking, and isn’t walking the healthy alternative if you’re 20-something, rather than standing like a statue on an e-scooter?

I would like to know whether people think e-scooters serve a real purpose in the CBD, and whether joy riding on busy sidewalks is something the council needs to address for pedestrian safety.

If you support making pedestrian areas safer for all, from cyclists and free-ranging e-scooters, check out RockTheVoteNZ.org.nz, click ‘contact' and tell us what ideas you would like us to take to the 2025 council elections.  

Grant Mountjoy, Rock The Vote NZ

First Published in the Ponsonby News, April 2025