Reading & Analysis: Who Owns the Pavement?

There is a stretch of pavement outside my flat that is one metre and ten centimetres wide. A wheelchair needs ninety centimetres. A parked e-scooter, lying on its side because nobody has ever put one down carefully, needs about a metre. The arithmetic is not complicated, and yet somehow it took the city four years to do it.

We are told that micromobility is the future, and in a sense it is. Short car journeys are the most wasteful journeys there are, and anything that replaces them deserves a hearing. But the argument that has been made for scooters is not really an argument about transport. It is an argument about who counts as a road user, and it has been settled quietly, in favour of whoever moves fastest.

Consider how the space was allocated. Roads were not narrowed. Parking spaces were not converted. The scooters were simply given the pavement, which was the one surface already spoken for — by pushchairs, by the elderly, by anyone with a white cane who navigates by a building line that an abandoned scooter makes meaningless. The pavement was chosen not because it was the right place but because it was the place where nobody would fight back.

Defenders of the scheme point to the numbers: injuries are rare, complaints are few. This is true, and it proves less than it seems. The people most obstructed by a scooter on the pavement are precisely the people least likely to file a complaint through an app. Absence of evidence has been read, as it usually is, as evidence of absence.

None of this is an argument against scooters. It is an argument against the habit of solving a problem by moving it onto whoever has the least room to object. Give the scooters a lane. Take it from the cars. The city has plenty of space; what it lacks is the willingness to take it from anyone who might send an email about it.