A mishmash start to 2019
What a start to the year! It’s been a really slow “silly season” for the local media, with the result that much of the reporting has been taken up by news of the “unruly family” from Liverpool, which it turns out, are what we called “didicoy” in the North of England – described by the Collins dictionary as “a group of caravan-dwelling roadside people who live like Gypsies but are not true Romanies”.
Their antics have been pretty much the same as those people who occasionally took up temporary residence near our mining village when I was a lad, and we always breathed a collective sigh of relief when they moved on, as this lot will eventually.
But there won’t be any such relief from the ongoing debate about e-scooters, and the danger of using them to both their riders and other road users. It won’t get any real attention from the government until someone is killed. We got pretty close to that when a student in Dunedin reportedly rode through a red light and collided with a truck, but transport minister Phil Twyford isn’t interested in doing much about it.
My worry, and I’m sure it will start to kick in soon, is what this will do to ACC payments for small businesses and self-employed people. As of January 21 there had been more than 850 claims for e-scooter related crashes, costing the ACC well over $300,000 – and that’s only since the end of October – so this is fast becoming not just a public safety problem, but a financial one, too.
It must be worrying e-scooter provider Lime, too, as the company has offered to pay a slice of its per-ride levy to the ACC – but in return it wants a long-term licence to operate. Interesting times.
Meanwhile the government is throwing more money at electric vehicle use, which at the end of the day means those of us who can’t afford this expensive means of transport are going to be subsidising those who can.
Robin Hood in reverse?