I totally agree, let's make them legal...However, just like bikes, they have no business being in the town centre which is pedestrianised zone.
As sure as night follows day & accidents to those walking will of course happen.
IMO cyclists & pedestrians do not mix well
Indeed, there was a sign outside a nest of e-scooters today, stating they should only be used where you can legally ride a bicycle. Which isn't on the pavement.
Stafford isn't big enough for a scheme like this to be anything other than an experiment, so we need to first ask, an experiment to answer what?
Whether 'Ginger' will be out of pocket by the end of it? seems like it needs little consideration. It will. Whether privately owned e-scooters could become legal beyond private property? is the more interesting and further reaching question.
The initial thesis must be "this form of transport can be incorporated into the commuting 'eco-system' (sort of thing)." The experiment tests this thesis.
Where does it sit in the hierarchy?
It's not a road vehicle, surely we can all agree on that - people are already not inclined to ride e-bikes on the highway, and provision for cycles of any description is pretty woeful and more importantly unlikely to get any better any time soon, so no one with even half a brain is going to jump out of their car and on to an e-scooter if they have to join the queues on the A518.
If this form of transport is not going to be allowed on the pavement, then it is already dead.
There are things you could do - currently for example, cycle lanes need to be 1.5m in width, making it impossible to create separated cycle lanes on most footpaths; make scooter lanes half of that and you could make a massive network.
The 15mph limit is undeniably excessive, but it's probably just based on existing e-bike legislation, and they are road legal - restrict e-scooters to 8mph and they're now in line with mobility scooters that are already legal on pavements, and you're still travelling at c. x2 normal walking pace, extending your 'range' by a factor of 2, Baswich to Town Centre in c.15mins.
Obviously these possibilities will come to nothing because ultimately we are not allowed nice things because
so they might as well just pack up now.