John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his presence in the Chamber to address this. I will go through a few preliminary issues that are raised in the Bill. I join my colleagues in welcoming the fact they are covered. I welcome the Bill and the effort to address many long-standing issues. I have some constructive observations to make, specifically on the place of e-scooters in the Bill.

I welcome the insurance database provisions. They are long awaited and another piece of the infrastructure we need. I also welcome that additional information will be sought from drivers who seek to be insured in other cars. I agree with the provisions on driving instructors with regard to criminal records. I also take Deputy Carey's point that there could be some kind of a clause whereby people could go before an independent committee to explain, for example, that they have a criminal conviction from 20 years ago, or whenever, and to ask whether there is any way it can be overlooked as it is the only criminal conviction they have. The Minister knows there is a problem with waiting times. I know Covid does not help. The number of times not being able to do a driving test has cost young people jobs are too many to enumerate. I am sure colleagues would agree with this. It is something that needs to be taken into consideration.

The Minister knows my position on electric bikes. I am very supportive of any technology and any micro-mobility innovation. The Belgians are the leaders in this regard. We are a bit slow coming to it. I have seen at first hand from friends and family members who have opted for e-bikes that the number of car journeys they have managed to displace already, very early in their ownership, is considerable. However, there is the issue of the cost. It is like many other energy initiatives that have come from the Government. People have to have a lot of cash in the bank. A good e-bike costs approximately €2,500 or €3,000. To avail of the scheme people have to be able to put that down to get the rebate back.

I have raised this with the Minister, ministerial colleagues in my party and the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, in advance of the budget. I will raise it again in the context of next year's budget. In Belgium there is an incentive whereby 100% of any money employers spend on e-bikes, whether purchasing an e-bike for an employee because it will displace a car journey to work or on e-bike infrastructure such as shelters in the workplace or shower facilities, can be written off against tax. With regard to the cost to the State, we could set aside a modest budget in the first year but there is no major cost to the State in doing this. The private sector would lead on this and the public sector would follow. Under such an incentive, employers would purchase e-bikes for their employees. This would be pretty radical. It would mean free electric bikes for workers. What a great legacy for the Minister to leave behind. At the Velo-city conference in the convention centre two years ago, one of the speakers was Belgian. His company pays him so much per kilometre for using an e-bike to go to work as opposed to his car. We are in the shadows still with regard to electric bike technology.

I want to make a point with regard to BusConnects. Recently, Dublin Bus was in my constituency. The deputy chief executive officer of the National Transport Authority was there a year and a half ago. BusConnects was a desktop exercise when it came to newly developing parts of my constituency such as Ballycullen, Oldcourt and Firhouse. The routes that are planned pay no attention to the developments that have taken place there. It needs to be revisited. It is already out of date because it did not take account of development.

With regard to scramblers, the former Deputy, John Curran, and I led the way in the previous Dáil with a Private Members' Bill on scramblers. I am glad the matter is finally making it to the floor of the House again. I want to say to the people of Tallaght, and one of the previous speakers mentioned it, that legislation takes time and to become law it has to be good and well teased out. We are introducing this and it will give the Garda powers to confiscate and destroy scramblers being used in an antisocial manner. I also want to say how mindful I am that this is the stick and there also has to be a carrot. Other initiatives are being taken by the Department of Justice and the Minister of State, Deputy Brown, to try to incentivise younger people to use these in a more pro-social manner. This includes getting local authorities to identify places where scramblers can be used responsibly, encouraging younger people to learn how to maintain them and to learn all of the safety requirements.

I have spoken privately to the Minister about e-scooters. Unlike Deputy Kelly's conversation with the Taoiseach yesterday, we will not breach in public what we said. We have had conversations about it. I introduced an e-scooter Bill. I also produced a significant micro-mobility document. It might have been used in programme for Government talks. I certainly submitted it. It is about as comprehensive as any party could produce. It has quite an emphasis on electric scooters. However, I do not think the Minister has listened.

There should be a stand-alone Bill for e-scooters and I will explain why. I am hugely enthusiastic about them. They have the power to displace the car in a number of instances. They also hold huge possibilities for schoolgoing children if they are introduced in a proper way. In the UK a shared scheme was introduced for a period of 18 months or two years. It did not legalise private ownership. This is the choice facing us as legislators. I am strongly in favour of e-scooters. I have tried several of them. I have been on Segways and e-bikes. I notice hoverboards are also included in the legislation. I have not tried one of them yet.

I have seen how e-scooter technology and their construct and build have improved exponentially over the past three or four years in the shared sphere but not those that are privately owned. I could buy an e-scooter on the Internet and it would not be governed by any technology. Its speed would not be governed when it arrived here. It would be up to the Garda to govern it. As I see it, the choice that faces us is between a free-for-all random system of private personal ownership that only the Garda can police and a shared hire scheme for an initial period exclusively with no personal ownership. This should have been introduced a year and a half ago as it was in Britain because of restrictions in public transport ownership. E-scooters took up a lot of the slack, to the extent that police constabularies in the UK leased some of them to assist them in policing.

One of the choices is a free-for-all random system of private ownership with no standard build, no branding and no control over purchase. In this there would also be no real control over speed. It would be the Garda that would have to police it. It cannot be governed and people can get around it. There would be no geo-fencing and I will come to this. This could lead potentially to chaos, litter, nuisance on the streets and all of the negative things we hear about e-scooters internationally. We ought to be learning the lessons from this.

The other option is a shared hire scheme. We started it with bikes through Dublin Bikes. It branched out and expanded into private businesses also offering bikes. It has been very successful although sometimes the bikes can become like litter on the streets because there are not enough docking stations for them. The shared hire model offers us geo-fencing. This is the technological ability to exclude scooters from footpaths and pedestrian zones. They are governed by GPS. An example I used on the radio during the week is that if someone is going along St. Stephen's Green and wants to take an e-scooter down Grafton Street but it is excluded because it is a pedestrian zone the e-scooter will slowly come to a halt. People will have to dismount because they just will not let them go there. Giving local authorities the power to regulate this will mean they can map the areas where they do not want e-scooters to be operable, such as outside schools, supermarkets and public parks or along areas of footpath and perhaps even some greenways. They can be excluded technologically. What we would also get is e-scooters built to a particular standard so they are robust and comfortable.

In Berlin, when people using the e-scooter scheme were polled, 50% of them said that prior to the scheme they had never in their lives got up on an e-scooter. This is what we are facing. Some of the shared schemes provide tutorials and people cannot get on the e-scooter until they have taken a tutorial.

A speed of 25 km/h is too fast. In the UK it was 15 miles per hour which is about 20 km/h. Some 20 km/h is perfectly fine because these will be competing for space in cycle lanes and on footpaths. It is not illegal to cycle on footpaths here.

This should have been introduced last year and it should be a separate, stand-alone Bill. Let us introduce a shared scheme, the hired scheme, let it bed in and let the public build up confidence in it. The geo-fencing also means that if I hire an e-scooter, I must return it to a particular spot or I will not be allowed to hire and will have a black mark against me with the company from which I am hiring.

Let us use their innovations as opposed to ungoverned and unfettered technology that could cause chaos in the streets. Chaos is probably too big a word to use but people could be put off the idea of electronic scooters very early and they have a very exciting place to play in micro mobility in Dublin and in every town and county. I know we agree on that. I thank the Ceann Comhairle.

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