Menace on the Streets

In Canada, micromobility vehicles like e-scooters, e-bikes, and e-skateboards are appearing faster on the streets than the government can create and enforce laws. For Maclean’s, Caitlin Walsh Miller reports on the inconsistent, unenforced, and sometimes contradictory safety regulations across provinces and cities; the surge of injuries and emergency-room visits in hospitals and pediatric trauma centers; and the lack of parental awareness around how fast e-scooters can go.

The micromobility revolution, as its proponents call it, has destabilized all that, and tensions have ramped up. There is a specific, anger-provoking anxiety that comes from being startled by something, or someone, that comes unpredictably and illogically out of nowhere, especially if they almost knock you off your feet. I cycle year-round in Montreal. The streets here don’t feel lawless, but my guard is up. Last fall, I watched three teenagers—two doubled up on an e-scooter, one on an e-bike—blow through a changing light. The e-bike was a heartbeat away from smashing into a truck, while the e-scooter riders lurched to a stop on the other side of it. They shrieked with laughter. That same week, a few blocks over, a man on an e-scooter turned the wrong way onto a one-way street at full speed and knocked my husband off his bike. The scooter guy was furious, astonishingly, with him. In Edmonton, dog-walkers have complained of silent, scofflaw e-scooter riders scaring their pooches from behind. In Mississauga, Mayor Carolyn Parrish called the devices “chaotic” and “ugly,” and the city’s e-scooter pilot program a “crazy experiment” and “an ongoing battle.”