Electric scooters: A good idea?

In “The Salmon of Doubt” Douglas Adams wrote "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

I suspect I am just about to illustrate the great man's statement, as I am pushing my 9th decade and so I should be suspicious anything invented since 1975.  (This not exactly true as we accepted the home computer, the Internet, eMail and desktop publishing, but do not get us started on mobile phones.)

Tier, an electric scooter company (https://www.tier.app/), is now offering its scooters in the centre of Heidelberg, Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. The three city governments hope this will encourage more people to leave their cars at home. It’s a fairly simple idea. You download the app and when you are one of the many European cities where Tier is active you find the location of the next scooter; once on board you start your trip using the app and away you go. Costs: 1€ to book and 15 cents a minute for your journey. Payment is via credit card or PayPal. 

Tier electric scooters underway in Oslo ©Tier

I am not taken with electric scooters. Don't get me wrong I can see the attraction. One can nip across town like a downhill mountain biker flowing downhill, swinging round obstacles with no effort and arriving perhaps windblown but sweat free even in the 35°Celcius or more heat we've had in Mannheim this summer. It is a cool concept in every sense of the word. 

However cost,  safety, carbon dioxide production and other street users are factors that need to be taken into account. To start with cost: buses and trams in Mannheim are frequent during the day and a trip from the main railway station to the heart of the shopping streets costs 1.40€. Next Bike also offers hire bicycles that cost 1€ per half hour. You could, of course, walk that costs nothing at all. These have a rack to carry shopping or a baggage unlike the electric scooters where one needs a rucksack to carry luggage. Where do you leave the scooter at the end of trip, so that passersby do not fall over it? The Next Bikes can only be left at one of the many stands in the metropolitan area.
The safety aspects give me the willies. Taking Mannheim station as an example if one wants to go into the city centre, one needs to know where the cycle paths are and it is not that obvious. Traffic in the Mannheim city centre is busy and I would not be happy mixing with cars, motor bikes, buses and delivery lorries on what I suspect I would find is an unstable vehicle, especially when the recommended way to indicate you are going to change lane is to stick your left or right leg out. To a certain extent cycling in heavy traffic is also difficult, but I would feel safer on a bike than balancing on a metre long narrow board especially as I need to wave my legs about. How are the scooters crossing tram lines? There are a lot of tramlines in Mannheim.

There is the suggestion that the scooters use less energy and generate less CO2 than petrol or diesel engined cars both in their manufacture and daily use.This is true for manufacture, but electric scooters are not as environmentally friendly as they seem. The scooters are picked up daily, taken a central workshop, charged, maintained and returned to those places where it is thought they will see the most custom. I suspect the van or pickup moving the scooters is a petrol- or diesel-powered vehicle.

As a pedestrian I am not over happy about the prospect of a silent fast 70 or so Kg packet (rider plus vehicle) sneaking up on me on the footpath. Now I know that riding on footpaths is verboten - forbidden, but so is using a mobile phone while driving. As a occasional (very occasional) motorist I am also not too happy about the thought of a speed king or queen zooming up the footpath in front of our house as I am backing the car out across the footpath onto the road.

E-bikes for the over 60s

As we wrote recently, we borrowed two e-bikes over the Easter weekend to take part in a course for whiteheads in Mannheim organised by the Police at the Jugendverkehrsschule (Road Safety Centre for Children). We spent the Easter weekend cycling with electrical assistance around the neighbourhood. On Tuesday afternoon nine e-bikers met and listened to a policeman who himself has no car and uses an e-bike for transport on:

• legal aspects of e-bikes in Germany, 
• e.g. maximum allowed speed, 
• pedal assisted rather than electrically propelled
• no need for a licence plate or insurance placard 
• helmet not proscribed but very highly recommended
• motor position
• Most useful of all for us was the statement that if one hires an e-bike as one leaves the hire station one should securely mount the bottom on the saddle and both feet on the pedals before starting pedalling to keep control of the bike. It is difficult to keep control of the bike standing up with one foot on a pedal.
• discussion on helmets and the Swedish head airbag system.

The police officers then checked the positioning of our helmets on our heads -

• one finger between eyebrow and front of helmet
• the down straps should be vertical
• maximum two fingers space between chinstrap and neck. 

We went out to the test track where he cast an eye over the various bikes. The Road Safety Centre has a model road layout with roundabout and we were soon pedalling round the track weaving our way through slaloms, cycling tighter and tighter circles and braking to order. This went on for three quarters of an hour before we retired to the classroom again to drink a cup of coffee and do the written road safety test normally done by school children. We passed the test.
We then got on our bikes for a half hour ride round very quiet suburban roads with a policeman front and back.
We can recommend this type course highly especially if one has not cycled for some years. If your local or regional police do not offer this course then check out your local bike shop or the local cycling club to encourage them to organise this type of course.

Flow gently sweet cycle traffic (with apologies to Robert Burns)

Cycling in Heidelberg is not all nudge tactics to improve behaviour as described yesterday. The city fathers and senior planning staff meet regularly for a trip around the city and campus with representatives of the cycling community, where the cyclists can discuss actual problems with the evidence before them. A recent trip looked at parking facilities at the university library, bollards that not only restrict four wheeled traffic, but bikes with trailers as well and speed limits for motorised traffic amongst other matters. All in all the group examined twelve sites in Heidelberg where cyclists have problems and improvements were promised.

Five minutes more that could save your life - the Plus 5 campaign in Heidelberg

Thirty percent of all journeys in the centre of Heidelberg are made by bicycle. In comparison the figures for Mannheim - ten km away - are 12 to 15%. Many of these journeys to Heidelberg University and/or the university clinic. The main university campus and the university clinic lie on the north bank of the River Neckar, to the west side of the main road from the Ernst-Walz Bridge. About 7500 cyclists cross the bridge on summer days. There are narrow cyclepaths on both sides of the road. The bridge is also busy with motorists. It is only possible to cross the main road by waiting for two crossing phases of the traffic lights at the northern end of the bridge, so there is a great temptation to cross the bridge on the cyclepath on the left against the flow of traffic. This is against the law and in spite of the findings of German insurers that riding the wrong way along a cyclepath is six times more likely to give rise to an accident. The Police, the City of Heidelberg, the University and the University Clinic have worked together to reduce the number of collisions largely due to the impatient riding on cyclepaths on the wrong side. The police have been active in giving out warnings, putting up posters at hot spots, rewarding those who cycle according to the law with current buns and publishing an Internet site (www.aktionplus5.de in German). One of the main themes was the idea of adding five minutes to one's journey, so that riders could travel more leisurely and show more consideration to others. All of these measures have been effective. During the period the campaign was running in the second half of 2014 accidents fell by 11%.
Interestingly enough the Plus 5 team showed another side during the dark months in the winter. Cyclists' lights were checked in November. The methods used were drastic: If a cyclist was underway with inadequate lights, he or she was given the choice of chaining the bike up and walking or letting the air out of the tyres to push the bike home. Whether these harder techniques will be used in future on those who insist on cycling the wrong way on cyclepaths? It's hard to know.

Are bike lanes invisible?

Like most regular cyclists I find my way blocked by oafs who park in painted stripe bike lanes: post vans, plumbers, shoppers, coaches, long distance buses, etc and I could go on and fill the whole blog with moaning, but I won't. I have learned to ignore these types who are too idle to walk ten metres when there is a perfectly good spot opposite the shop. Remonstrate and there's a good chance they will punch you or run you or some other cyclist off the road. It is not worth the high blood pressure. Forget it! These people have no idea and no manners. There was bike shop owner in Bolton who used to park his delivery van on a cycle lane on a busy main road in front of his shop. I am pleased to say that he is no longer there and the shop is shut.
What I didn't realise is that bike lanes are also invisible to city transport planners. The City of Mannheim, Germany is building a new tram line in the north of the city which has necessitated shutting 5km or so of track for six weeks during the school holidays. The service is now being covered by buses. At the end of the interruption passengers need to change from the tram to a bus and sometimes wait until one appears. The bus tram interchange at the southern end is by the Mannheim University Hospital just north of a bridge over the River Neckar which is also a main route for cyclists leaving the city centre to get to the northern suburbs and to the hospital. The cyclepath runs on past the site of the temporary bus stop. Unfortunately the road rises over the bridge and then drops past the hospital, so most cyclists let the pig out, i.e. speed up, as they drop down the slope. The two photographs below show that collisions and disturbances are pre-programmed. These were taken on a Saturday afternoon when there are fewer passengers. There are more during the week. Notice how the little hut has been cunningly placed to reduce the amount of space available on the footpath. The red brick area is the cyclepath.

Cyclepath (red)

The bus and tram arrive and the passengers cross to reach the bus, ignoring the cyclepath.

Safer tram lines part II

VBZ, the Zurich transport authority has carried a long term test on its tramline modification to make tramlines safer for cyclists in operation for about a year now and has found that the rubber inserts work well, but they are not stable enough for long term use. (See our blog from 9 November 2013.) Further work will be carried out to develop a more stable filling.

An excellent article on cycling in cities

can be found under: http://mosaicscience.com under "City cycling: health versus hazard".

Good Ideas for Bikes in Cities: Illuminated Biking Gloves for dark nights

Irene Posch,  a Viennese designer (www.ireneposch.net) has developed a pair of cycling gloves with integrated LEDs on the back, conductive areas on the palm and finger ends and a small battery. The  five LED lights are in the shape of an arrow. Clenching the fist causes the LEDs to light up. They will greatly improve cyclists' visibility on a dark night. A good idea. The gloves also have conductive areas on the fingertips that allow for touchscreen use. However, we’d recommend that you not use your phone while on a bike. It is bad enough that motorists continue to use mobiles while driving.
Kits are available to modify a pair of knitted gloves from:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/172316800/diy-kit-biking-glowes-as-featured-in?ref=related-0

Unexpected Hazards

When cycling past a line of parked cars in Germany, it's obviously necessary to watch for folks opening car doors to avoid being "doored", but German motorists have invented a variation that makes life even more difficult for the innocent cyclist abroad: It is usual in Germany to put small children in car seats behind the driver on the left hand side of the car. When the car is parked, the driver will get out, open their own door even wider or the rear door to get little Hans or Edeltraud out of the back seat. This brings with it three potential dangers:
The parent  is only concentrating on getting the child out and does not notice the two wheeled technicolor dream bearing down on the car.
When Hans or Edeltraud are freed from their seat they spring out into the road.
If this activity is happening on the other side of the road passing motorists can swerve out to avoid the open car door and/or little Hansi or Edeltraud.
All we can do is advise cyclists to do is keep a watchful out when passing parked cars, but you do that anyway, don'tcha?

Rescue points

Both of us suffer from untreatable ‘Cartomania’, a little researched complaint involving the collection of maps, large, small, old and new. So yesterday I saw a new 1:30 000 cycle touring map of our local area and immediately succumbed to temptation. A couple of months ago, after the Neil, had had a chance to browse the Südliches Ried:Bergstrasse/Rhein-Neckar produced by MeKi Landkarten GmbH (www.meki-landkarten.de) (well it was his birthday), I got my chance too to see what was new. There were our old favourites south into Mannheim or northeast towards Bensheim and the Odenwald, together with new sections of longer distance cycle routes like the World Heritage Route (Welterbe-Radtour) as well as clearer information about cycle possibilities on the fringes of our day tour stamping ground like Ludwigshafen. New local train lines which take bikes, either free or for the price of a child’s ticket, have brought these more distant locations into consideration. We live in the Rhine Rift Valley, a roughly 40 km wide lowland sandwiched between the hills of the Pfalzerwald on the west and the Odenwald on the east. North of the big cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen it is basically an area of farms, small towns and forests, providing many cycling opportunities. People do use some routes as part of a commute to a station or employer and many others cycle in their free time. What is fairly immediately striking as the map is opened out is the area of forest or woodland. Our three local provinces of Hesse, where we live, Baden-Würtemberg to the east and south and Rheinland-Pfalz across the Rhine to the west are all much more wooded than most of the UK. The forests are not on a US or Canadian scale, true, but there are many kilometres of routes through the forests, cool in summer and offering shelter in autumn and winter. Some forests are almost all coniferous, others incorporate section of red oak, beech or chestnut trees. Most of the forests occupy stretches of glacial sands or dunes and were originally used for hunting by monks or local dukes in the middle ages. Now they provide timber, habitats for birds and other wildlife such as deer and ever increasing numbers of wild boar, plus of course green lungs for city dwellers. The cycle ways follow mostly gravelled roads made for foresters, often laid out as a grid and where GPS devices frequently cease to function. Route finding can be difficult and if there’s a diversion (timber operations, mud baths, fallen trees) we’ve often struggled to get back on track. We’ve occasionally speculated on forest rides in the dusk or in definitely spooky darkness about what to do when truly lost, ill or injured. Now we know that in Hesse at least all wooded areas and some other remote sites have a series of rescue points, marked on the ground and on large scale maps. In situ these are signs with a white cross on a green background with location and a number. On the MeKi Landkarten they are shown by a green oval with a number. These spots are known to local police, ambulance and emergency services and can be reached by their vehicles. Initially they were set up in case of accidents to workers in the forests but may be used to rescue the public generally. ADFC advice to any group with a rider ill or injured is to use a mobile phone to contact number 112 to alert the emergency service and give location of nearest rescue point. If necessary a party member can reach the rescue point and guide emergency services to the injured party. Outside mountain regions where rescue kit may be found at huts, passes or survey points this idea was new to me and may be of interest to others who may cycle in remote areas in the UK where access is difficult or to people who actually operate emergency services. Location by mobile phone has been used to rescue many people in difficulty I know but knowing an access point by road may also be useful.