The title is from the article but doesn’t really cover the breadth of changes proposed. The key parts:
The government is proposing to make it legal to ride e-scooters in cycle lanes. It is part of its work to “fix the basics” in the New Zealand transport system, with consultation opening today on two packages for rule changes.
In the first package, the government is proposing to:
- Allow children up to age 12 (inclusive) to ride their bikes on footpaths, helping keep younger riders safer and reflecting common practice;
- Introduce a mandatory passing gap of between one and 1.5 metres, depending on the speed limit, to give motorists clearer guidance when passing cyclists and horse riders;
- Allow e-scooters to use cycle lanes;
- Require drivers travelling under 60 kilometres per hour to give way to buses pulling out from bus stops;
- Clarify signage rules so councils can better manage berm parking.
The second package relating to heavy vehicles proposes:
- Some permit requirements would be removed so rental operators can move empty high productivity motor vehicle truck and trailer combinations between depots and customers without unnecessary delays;
- Driver licence settings would be updated so Class 1 licence holders can drive zero-emissions vehicles with a gross laden weight up to 7500 kilograms, and Class 2 licence holders can drive electric buses with more than two axles with a gross laden weight up to 22,000kg;
- Signage requirements for load pilot vehicles would be made more practical;
- Overseas heavy vehicle licence holders would be able to convert their licences either by sitting tests or completing approved courses.
re the question in your title:
the only proper standard for judging whether any particular class of vehicles should be sharing special-lanes, is traffic-flow.
IF the flowspeed of bicycles & e-scooters is similar-enough, THEN yes.
IF the flowspeed of e-scooters is limited to be frustratingly-slow for bicyclists, THEN you’re just manufacturing more bicycle-motorvehicle collisions, by forcing bicyclists out from the lanes where they had been safe.
( I’m from Canada, not NZ, but have seen enough idiocy in legislation, including that bicycling “expert” who pushed that bike-lanes be removed, because they increased the total-number-of-collisions …
… WHILE HE IGNORED THAT HAVING 5 COLLISIONS ON A 100,000-CAR/WEEK BIKE-LANE ROAD WAS BEING COMPARED WITH A 3-COLLISIONS/WEEK ON A 500-car/week side-road, the idiot…
CORRECT statistics-understanding MUST be required for anybody to have any input into legislation!
it is per motor-vehicle/bicycle potential-interaction that the understanding needs to be centered on.
Having 2x the collisions, on a road with 100x the cars, is a per-potential-interation drop of 50x, not a total-increase of 2x, as that activist was pushing…
unfortunately, he’s a published-author, so he gets carte-blanche sway in many gov’ts )
Anyways, please earn good results, & may the benefits of properly-evolved legislation enable your communities as much as possible.
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This was actually a concern I had when I read this. e-scooters potentially travel much slower than bikes.
Let’s pretend we live in a good society where we have bike lanes everywhere. So we have three speeds of traffic. Pedestrian speed, bike speed, car speed.
Now we’re trying to add a new one, e-scooter speed. Do you put them on the footpath where they are too fast and could flatten or kill someone, on the road where they are too slow and might get killed by a car, or in the bike lane where they might be traveling 10-20kph slower than the bikes.
It feels like the bike lane is the right place. Yes, bikes will occasionally come up against slower e-scooter traffic, but that happens to cars behind trucks and pedestrians behind 3-across groups with no respect for other pedestrians.
The alternative seems to be to create scooter lanes. But perhaps a better idea is that when the volume becomes a problem in certain areas, we create two-lane bike lanes to allow faster traffic to pass slower traffic.