Recently I wrote about the fact that Ireland needs enforcement of the rules around electric scooters, not a ban. I’ve been taken aback by how quickly the conversation has escalated since. The Taoiseach is now “leaning towards” an outright ban and the Garda Commissioner says he would “absolutely” support one. Perhaps more surprising is public sentiment largely being against a ban, deeming it unfair on honest commuters and simply lazy by government. I’ve been mailing several TDs and councillors with mixed responses, leaving me wanting to do some of the work for them.
So here it is. A cross-European framework for safe electric scooter use that Ireland could champion rather than retreat from. It has four parts. A new EU vehicle category for electric scooters, mandatory third party insurance costing tens of euro rather than hundreds, a light-touch registration system modelled on drone registration, and a set of standardised riding rules. Italy and Germany have already built most of the pieces. But it’s important to note that none of this works without increased levels of enforcement. That was true when I wrote the last piece and it’s true now.
Create a new EU vehicle category for electric scooters
What is an electric scooter? That was the fundamental question put to Shane Ross years ago that the Department of Transport struggled to answer, and Europe hasn’t done much better since. Across the continent, both privately owned electric scooters and public shared schemes operate in a bizarre grey area where a product can be purchased in the aisle of a toy shop and ridden alongside cars and buses.
Ireland did eventually define a “powered personal transporter” in 2024, and fair play, it’s a decent start. But it’s a national definition in a single market, which is exactly the problem. A study commissioned by the European Commission has already recommended a dedicated vehicle category for personal mobility devices, or PMDs, rather than cramming scooters into moped rules. That’s the direction I’d take, with one EU-wide definition regardless of private or public ownership.
My version of that PMD definition looks like this. A maximum weight of 25kg, a motor rated no greater than 450 watts and a factory limited top speed of 25km/h, which is already the norm across most of Europe. Ireland currently caps legal scooters at 400 watts and 20km/h, so harmonising upwards slightly would bring us in line with our neighbours rather than leaving Irish riders on technically illegal imports. Interestingly, the Commission’s study goes further and suggests scrapping power limits altogether in favour of an acceleration cap, which is a smarter way of measuring how a scooter actually behaves on the road. It also gives a little headroom to reduce the number of electric scooters deemed completely useless by new laws.
Additional requirements around braking, lighting, bells, CE marking and safety standards should be baked into the same definition, along with anti-tampering rules so speed limiters can’t be removed with a YouTube tutorial and ten minutes. Retailers would only be allowed to sell scooters that meet the standard. More on that shortly.
Mandatory third party insurance for electric scooters
Should electric scooters require insurance? Yes, and it’s already happening elsewhere in Europe. Italy recently made third party insurance compulsory for electric scooters this month, with annual premiums starting from around €25. For private ownership, the responsibility falls on the owner of the scooter. For shared schemes it falls on the operator, and Germany has just gone a step further by making rental operators liable for accidents involving their fleets, including badly parked scooters blocking footpaths.
Naturally, this insurance product would not be like car insurance. We’re talking about a micro-policy in the region of €25 to €60 per year, linked to the scooter’s ID number, which I’ll discuss next. The overall idea is to protect the vulnerable road users that electric scooters share space with. A pedestrian knocked down by an uninsured scooter today has almost no route to compensation, and that’s the gap Germany’s new law was written to close.
Ideally, I’d like to see this being somewhat of a state-run operation, to avoid it becoming another terrible private insurance product. And again, without enforcement this is worthless. But with modern databases and roadside checks via a simple QR code, identifying riders lacking required cover is not a massive ask.
An ID system that isn’t over the top
Every legal electric scooter should carry a registered ID, but full number plates are overkill. Italy has gone down the plate route with an adhesive registration marker, and Germany’s insurance plate system works but would be quite difficult to retrofit here. A solution similar to drone registration would work well for Ireland and could scale across Europe.
The model is simple. An online database where every electric scooter must be registered, linking the device ID, the owner and the insurance policy. Riding without the sticker and matched registration would be illegal. The sticker includes a QR code that Gardaí can scan, making roadside checks a ten second job rather than a paperwork exercise. The same system works for shared scooter fleets, where devices are simply tied to the operator instead of an individual.
This is the piece that makes everything else enforceable. Right now a Garda who stops a rider on an overpowered scooter has limited options and no easy way to establish what the machine even is. An ID system turns “sure what can we do” into a fixed penalty notice.
Standardised rules across Europe
There are some fairly obvious rules that could be applied across Europe too, and most of them already exist in Irish law. They just aren’t enforced.
Retailers must only be allowed to sell road-legal electric scooters, full stop. The loophole where non-compliant machines are sold “for use on private land” must be closed, a problem I highlighted back in 2020 before legal scooters were even on the table. Ireland’s minimum age of 16 should apply EU-wide, and it should apply to riding, not just buying.
Helmets are where I’ve shifted. I never liked the idea of mandatory helmet usage after reading about the impact it had on cycling in Australia, where participation dropped off a cliff. That said, the recent headlines are hard to ignore. Hospital admissions of children with traumatic brain injuries from e-scooter incidents in Ireland are up 50 per cent year on year. Perhaps mandatory helmets for under-18s is enough, but it’s no longer a hill I would die on if mandating helmets for all riders became the standard.
The rest is general cop-on that’s already in Irish law and simply needs teeth. No passengers, no carrying items, no phone in hand, zero tolerance on drink riding, and clearly defined areas for usage, which is basically anywhere bikes are allowed and nowhere pedestrians walk.
What happens to the scooters already out there
Overpowered scooters will need to be removed from the roads. Many of these were purchased from retailers “for private land usage”, and while that loophole was a poor, the buyer is ultimately responsible for what they ride on a public road, whether we like that or not. Anyone on a compliant scooter today has nothing to worry about, since a harmonised spec would sit above Ireland’s current limits rather than below them. The only route back I can see for overpowered machines is a premium insurance product, priced to reflect the added risk, that legalises them once registered and inspected. I’m not convinced insurers would touch it, but the door shouldn’t be welded shut without asking.
There’s a carrot in this system too. A scooter carrying a valid ID should also be passing quality control on its battery. The NTA currently bans e-scooters from public transport over lithium battery fire risk, and it’s a blanket ban because there’s no way of telling a certified battery from a dodgy import. Registration fixes that. A registered scooter with a certified battery could be welcomed back onto the train and bus, and that matters because a scooter you can carry aboard is a fantastic last-mile mode of transport, exactly the behaviour we should be encouraging.
Ultimately, a ban is the easy headline and the lazy policy. Paris banned shared scooters and Prague followed this year, yet privately owned scooters kept multiplying because bans don’t answer the actual question of what these machines are and who’s responsible when things go wrong. Italy and Germany answered it. They classified the vehicle, insured it, identified it and made someone liable for it. Nothing in that list is beyond Ireland, and most of it could be lifted almost verbatim.
I’d rather see Ireland lead on this than watch the Government reach for a ban because enforcement was never seriously attempted. Honest commuters shouldn’t lose a genuinely useful, clean way of getting around because the State couldn’t be bothered distinguishing them from a lad doing 60km/h on a footpath. Classify, insure, register, enforce. It’s not complicated, it’s just work.
Disclaimer: The featured image for this article was created using AI.
