[Hwang Misun's Crisis Escape – Season5]Why Do E-Scooters Feel Unsafe on...

The New Risks Created by Small, Fast Mobility

[Image credit: AI-generated by the author]

[By Hwang Misun, Columnist, Korea Lecturer News] Urban mobility is changing quickly. In the past, the main users of the road were cars, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians. Today, new forms of mobility such as e-scooters, e-bikes, and shared mobility services have entered everyday life. It is no longer unusual to see e-scooters near subway stations, university areas, office districts, and narrow urban streets.

E-scooters are convenient. They allow people to travel short distances quickly, connect easily with public transportation, and take up little parking space. In that sense, they have become one of the representative personal mobility tools of the smart mobility era.

Yet many people feel uneasy when they see e-scooters on the road. Why is that? Is it because e-scooters are inherently dangerous? Not necessarily. The more important question is where they move, and who they move with.

An e-scooter is weaker than a car. It is small, light, and offers little physical protection. When a crash occurs, the rider is directly exposed to impact. At the same time, it is much faster than a pedestrian. When an e-scooter passes close to people walking, pedestrians may feel startled or unsafe. It may look similar to a bicycle, but its movement can sometimes be less predictable. It starts and stops quickly, and it can slip through narrow spaces with ease.

This in-between position is the core issue. On the road, an e-scooter is vulnerable. On the sidewalk, it can feel too fast. On a bicycle lane, its movement may not always match the steady flow of bicycles. In one space, it is not fully protected. In another, it may feel like a threat to others. In the end, the risk of e-scooters comes less from the device itself and more from the mismatch between speed and space.

For a long time, we have thought of roads mainly through clear categories. Roads are for cars. Sidewalks are for pedestrians. Bicycle lanes are for bicycles. But e-scooters blur these boundaries. They are not as large as cars, not as slow as pedestrians, and not exactly the same as bicycles. That is why it becomes difficult to decide where they truly belong within the existing road system.

We see this often in daily life. An e-scooter passes quickly beside pedestrians on a sidewalk. On a narrow street, cars and e-scooters share the same space. Near a bus stop, people getting off, people walking, bicycles, and e-scooters all mix together. No one may be intentionally creating danger, but the flow suddenly becomes unstable.

The problem is the difference in speed. Pedestrians move slowly. Cars move quickly. Bicycles and e-scooters sit somewhere in between. When speeds differ, people find it harder to predict one another’s movements. A driver may notice a small scooter too late. A pedestrian may be surprised by a scooter approaching quickly. The scooter rider may feel pressured by cars on the road and, at the same time, must avoid pedestrians on the sidewalk.

When different speeds share the same space, risk increases. This is not only an e-scooter issue. It is one of the central safety questions of future mobility. In an era where autonomous vehicles, conventional cars, buses, bicycles, e-scooters, and pedestrians all move together, the coexistence of different speeds becomes more important than the speed of any single vehicle.

That is why the e-scooter issue should not be reduced to a simple argument that they are dangerous or should be banned. What we need is more careful space design and speed management. Some areas require lower speeds. Some require separated mobility lanes. Some must clearly prioritize pedestrians. User education matters, but creating a structure in which people can move safely matters even more.

E-scooters represent a new possibility for urban mobility. They can connect short distances efficiently and fill gaps in public transportation. But for that possibility to become safety, cities must design both the space and the speed order in which these devices operate.

Future transportation will include more and more types of mobility. The important task is not to reject new mobility, but to ensure that different speeds do not collide in the same space.

An e-scooter is not a dangerous object by itself.

The city has simply not yet fully learned how to accommodate its speed.

The safety of future mobility does not begin by blaming a mode of transportation.

It begins by understanding where and how different speeds mix.

Columnist Profile

Hwang Misun is a disaster safety instructor who has conducted on-site safety education for citizens and students. Based on repeated observations of “stoppages” and “congestion” in real training environments, she interprets disasters not as individual failures but as structural and spatial problems. Her work analyzes everyday risk in hospitals, schools, public transportation, and performance venues through the lens of movement flow, bottlenecks, guidance systems, and exit functionality. She is currently conducting research on evacuation structures using microscopic pedestrian simulation.

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