It’s a fire that hasn’t really taken hold, isn’t it?

Micromobility holds huge potential to dramatically change the personal transport landscape, but the wood is still damp and no-one can realistically claim that it is yet burning as brightly as it needs to.

Much but not all of the kindling is there: some promising new vehicles and innovations, sporadic but growing levels of deployment, an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem of interested groups and organisations, and incrementally more favourable societal attitudes.

But in all honesty we still as a nation seem to be fumbling with the matches, and the big logs are not even smouldering: healthy but not spectacular attendance at this 5th Micromobility UK conference, low public awareness, selfish NIMBYism, backward-looking politics, disjointed planning, faltering sales, and a discouraging dogs dinner of regulation.

In that context, this event was a vital bellwether, an opportunity to sample what’s uppermost in people’s minds.

It was cracklingly lively, for sure. Talks were talked and panels panelled on germane topics (including investment, standards, accessibility). People were generally in violent agreement on a range of things that are happening, might happen and ought to happen. And LiMA’s first public outing helped consolidate awareness of our existence and attract a few new members.

But there were things unrepresented and unvoiced: questioning why we almost exclusively conceive of ‘tiny’ and ‘bloated’ vehicles and little in between; a far-sighted view of where smaller vehicles as a category are going and how they will change patterns of mobility; and engagement from those who wield most power – i.e. few of the big commercial players showed up, and no notable politicians.

From LiMA members’ point of view, probably the most salient discussions – and arguably the thing that will have the greatest long-term impact on many of our aspirations – hinged on what the vehicular rules and limits are, and what they might become.

In numerous contributions, various irritations and contradictions were pointed out – the walking-pace restriction on mobility scooters, for instance, when the far less stable stand-up electric scooters can (in trial areas) go much faster; or the enforced slower speed of EPACs when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that 20mph will become the norm on most urban roads. In short, this historical patchwork quilt we inhabit is, as one person nailed it, “a mess”.

The debate did drift into being somewhat self-flagellatory though – as LiMA chipped in to murmuring approval: “If we applied the same level of scrutiny and constraint that we are talking about applying to micromobility to all vehicles, all cars would be illegal.”

It did not feel like anyone articulated a comprehensive vision for a new framework to fix all this which will not – when the current round of legislative rumination becomes reality – inevitably expose a new set of obstacles to optimal mobility.

The problem is that new legislation formulated solely on the expedient basis of vehicles, features and technologies we see in front of us right now risks repeating the mistakes of the past. All those things can and will change, in ways we cannot entirely foresee. On the present course, in 20 or 30 years we could well be looking again at outdated and unfit-for-purpose rules.

In the last audience contribution at the conference, LiMA issued a plea for an overarching new, consensus-based regulatory framework founded on objective, unchanging factors that would least likely become outdated or need to change.

So we suggested, and intend to pursue, dialogue among our members and with allied groups and organisations, to find agreement around these factors and how they might best be applied, with a view to putting to Government a widely-shared vision of where we should be heading.

LiMA proposes that that could most sensibly begin with lethality (the capacity of a vehicle to cause damage, broadly correlated with kinetic energy) and idiocy (the perennial propensity of a small proportion of the population to act recklessly).

Physics and the existence of idiots are eternal.

But both can be (and in other spheres are) controlled.

©Brendan Hill, 2025