Transport for London (TfL) has banned privately-owned e-scooters from its network for safety reasons.
It said the ban, which applies to all privately-owned e-scooters and e-unicycles, including those that can be folded or carried, is the result of safety concerns following recent fires on its premises and services.
It is legal to push your e-scooter across the road, if you want to
TfL said that in response to recent incidents of privately-owned e-scooters and e-unicycles catching fire whilst on its services or infrastructure it has undertaken further work to review the safety of the vehicles and their suitability for carriage on its network.
The review found that the incidents were caused by defective lithium-ion batteries that ruptured without warning, leading to fires that caused toxic smoke to be released.
‘TfL consider that if this were to happen again and fires occurred in an enclosed area like a Tube train or a bus, there could be significant harm to both customers and staff, as well as secondary injuries from customers trying to escape the area.’
Lilli Matson, TfL's chief safety, health and environment officer, said: ‘We have been extremely worried by the recent incidents on our public transport services, which involved intense fires and considerable smoke and damage. We have worked with London Fire Brigade to determine how we should deal with these devices and, following that review, we have decided to ban them.’
London Fire Brigade’s assistant commissioner for fire safety, Paul Jennings, said: ‘We have growing concerns about the safety of e-scooters due to the amount of fires we are seeing involving them, so we fully support TfL's ban of private e-scooters on public transport.’
TfL pointed out that while privately owned e-scooters remain illegal to use in public spaces, they are widely available for purchase and currently unregulated, ‘meaning they are not currently required to meet any minimum vehicle standards’.
It added that its trial of rental e-scooters, which is part of trials permitted nationally by the Department for Transport, offers the only e-scooters legally allowed on London's roads and uses vehicles that are ‘considerably more robust than the most common private e-scooters’.
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