"Battery technology means no one knows who to hate anymore"

As the e-bike category expands, so does the Doc's confusion

- Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

I got overtaken by a man on a scooter the other day. By scooter, I mean an electric scooter, the sort you stand up on, with tiny wheels and a battery under the deck. I'm assuming this scooter had been modified, and have a suspicion that before long it will burn its owner's house down. But in the meantime, it was buzzing along a bike lane at about 35kph.

Battery technology has unleashed a considerable degree of change on the roads. Once upon a time, and not all that long ago, there were three basic road users. There were pedestrians. There were cyclists. And there were motor vehicles. There were a few in-between categories, like mobility scooters and wheelchair users, but those three were essentially it.

Now, it's all a bit different. In cycling, the big change has been e-bikes. But, to make it complicated, there are at least four varieties of e-bike. There are legal, private e-bikes. There are public hire e-bikes (legal). Cargo bikes (legal). And there are de-limited e-bikes that aren't e-bikes at all, but electric motorbikes (not legal).

Modernity doesn't really end with cycling. We've got other new categories of battery-power road user - what I've come to think of as e-pedestrians. This is a trend that started in about 2001 with the Segway, the self-balancing two-wheeled thing that looked like it came from the future, but which we quickly dragged down to our level. After that we got the ludicrously named "hoverboard" which was just a daft electric unicycle without the slightest hint of either hover or board about it. Then we got the scooters.