Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 March 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

Road Traffic and Roads Bill 2021: Discussion

Mr. Will O'Brien:

On the regulations, to echo what Mr. Moller said, it is quite important to leave the power with the Department to constantly iterate and update these things in regulation. However, the three critical areas that you probably need to get right are weight, power and speed. Looking at best practices, we have the opportunity to cherrypick them. Looking at weight, in Germany and the UK, the maximum limit is 55 kg, not including driver weight. That is reasonable and allows for a degree of innovation on the current vehicle types. The sector is moving quite quickly so that if there are extra technologies that need to be added to the e-scooter that can add weight. On the power side, more than 500 W would definitely be required. Some countries have that. Austria has an upper limit of 600 W, Estonia 1,000 W, Finland 1,000 W and the US 750 W, which is quite common. On speed, 25 km/h as an upper limit is what is being done in the UK and a number of other countries. Moving towards how we are working with the disability groups, speed is a big concern, but with the geofencing technology, we have the ability to set specific speed zones in different areas in a city. You definitely would not want e-scooters going down pedestrianised streets, so we can block them off on our back end and ensure e-scooters do not go there. There are other areas where you might set a slow-speed zone as well. We are working with these groups regularly to bring these sorts of measures into our operations.

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