A newly elected Wexford councillor has expressed her frustration over the E-Scooters
Catherine Biddy Walsh believes that most of the people using the EScooters do not know the rules of the road
Ms Walsh said people are afraid to go walking, she said, “The thing about it is that the e-scooter is a very different animal than the bike, a very different animal. You’ve got what is, the bike is an assisted mechanically propelled vehicle. The bike is solely mechanical. So anybody that uses the e-bike, and I know I’ve been talking to a lot of young people that are using the bikes, they know the rules of the road in relation to the bikes. The whole idea of the scooter is a completely different thing. You have to know the rules of the road relating to them, and the people, and I will say it, that
are using it at the moment, just don’t know them. And it’s not good enough to say, oh well the laws are there for them, they don’t know what the laws are. When they’re taking this mechanical,
that solely mechanical vehicle out on the road, they need to have helmets, they need to be on the road, they can’t ride tree abreast, they certainly can’t ride with a passenger stuck to the back of
us as well, and that’s what I’m saying, and that’s what I’m hearing about ”
She continued, “There’s only supposed to be one person and also you can travel at 20 miles an hour, or 20
kilometers an hour, it’s very fast, and I know that people walking down the main street every
morning and on the quay are afraid, and we can’t have that.”
Ms Walsh said, “It doesn’t matter what the rules are, we need to bring people along, and I know a young person who used to use the bike, now he’s using the scooter, but he needs to be told what the rules are in relation to it, and because just to introduce them without any consultation with the representatives on the council is not good enough in my opinion. The one question that I did ask at the meeting today was, who signed off on it here. Questions will have to be answered in relation to, you know, not just questions have to be answered, but going forward, what are we going to do to make it safe, or if they’re going to be here, how are we going to make it safer? And I think that every young person, I’m just talking about young people because they’re the people
that I’m seeing on them, and they’re weaving in and out of the footpaths as well, and there’s near misses, they might not be causing a huge accident, but the near misses are frightened
the life out of the people that are walking around the town. And I just think that a set of rules, an induction day, why can’t we have one of those, where the young person will be able to go and spend two hours actually learning how to… It’s not because they don’t want to, they just haven’t been told.
