Don't ban the scooters. Build the streets they need.

This is an opinion piece by George Christou, founder of ITS Cyprus. It reflects his view, not a finding of the Road to Zero Cyprus observatory.

Parliament has spent the past months debating whether to ban electric scooters from Cypriot roads. A total ban was proposed, then rejected in favour of a higher minimum age, tighter speed rules and mandatory helmets. Municipalities are impounding devices. The Ministry of Transport is consulting on giving police the power to seize them on the spot.

I understand where the anger comes from. Anyone who has walked Limassol's seafront on a summer evening has been startled by a scooter passing too close and too fast. That experience is real and it should not be dismissed.

But I do not agree with banning them. And I think the debate has the arithmetic backwards.

What the numbers actually say

Forty-five people died on Cyprus's roads in 2025 — the highest toll in five years, and a 10% rise on 2024. Cyprus now records 46 road deaths per million inhabitants.

Of those deaths, the European Commission's breakdown attributes roughly 44% to car occupants, 21% to powered two-wheelers, 18% to pedestrians and 9% to cyclists. Personal mobility devices — the category e-scooters fall into — account for about 1%.

One per cent.

Sixteen motorcyclists died in 2025. Of the 27 people killed by mid-August that year, fourteen were travelling on two wheels.

Now apply the logic of the ban proposal consistently. If a mode of transport should be prohibited because people die in collisions involving it, then the case against cars is more than forty times stronger than the case against scooters. Nobody is proposing that. Nobody should — cars are not the enemy either, and a society that needs to move cannot simply outlaw the way it moves.

That is precisely my point. We do not make road safety policy by ranking modes of transport by body count and banning the one at the top. We look at where the risk is concentrated, ask what is producing it, and change that. The moment you accept that argument for cars, you have to accept it for scooters too.

The thing that is actually killing people is speed and separation

The International Transport Forum — the OECD's transport policy arm — put it plainly in its Safe Micromobility report: "the novelty of e-scooters should not distract from addressing the risk motor vehicles pose for all other road users."

That sentence deserves to be read twice by every legislator in Cyprus.

Roughly half of everyone killed on Cypriot roads is outside a car: on a motorcycle, on a bicycle, or on foot. Over 60% of our road deaths happen on urban roads, well above the EU norm. These are not people dying because e-scooters exist. They are dying because our streets were built to move cars quickly and were never redesigned for anyone else.

An e-scooter rider on a Cypriot arterial road has no crumple zone, no seatbelt, no airbag, and nowhere protected to ride. Neither does a cyclist. Neither does a pedestrian crossing four lanes with no refuge. The device is not the hazard. The absence of anywhere safe to use it is.

The ITF's recommendation follows directly: create a protected, connected network for micromobility, and where vulnerable road users must share space with motor traffic, hold speeds to 30 km/h or below. Below roughly 30 km/h, a person hit by a car will usually survive. Above it, survival becomes a matter of luck.

This can be done quickly — Seville proved it

The most common objection is that infrastructure takes decades. It does not.

In 2006, Seville had 12 kilometres of separated cycle track and a cycling mode share of 0.5% — a city essentially identical to Cypriot cities in its car dependence and its climate. The council built an 80-kilometre segregated, connected network in about eighteen months, reaching 120 kilometres by 2010, for roughly €32 million.

Daily bicycle trips rose from around 6,600 in 2006 to 68,000 in 2009. Mode share went from 0.5% to nearly 6%.

Two design decisions did the work. The network was built all at once rather than in disconnected fragments, so the whole city became reachable immediately rather than in twenty years. And the space came from car parking lanes, not from pavements — so pedestrians gained rather than lost.

That second point matters enormously for Cyprus. Our scooter conflict is overwhelmingly a pavement conflict: riders on footpaths, because the road is terrifying and the footpath is the only surface left. Every complaint from a Limassol shopkeeper or a Paphos resident about scooters on the promenade is, at root, a complaint about the absence of a third option. Give riders a protected lane and most of them will use it. They are not on the pavement because they enjoy dodging pedestrians.

Rules are not the enemy — bans are

I want to be careful not to argue against all regulation, because the evidence does not support that either.

Helsinki introduced speed limits and night-time restrictions on rental e-scooters, and researchers found a substantial fall in e-scooter-related facial injuries afterwards — up to 88% in some months. Speed governance works. Night-time limits on rental fleets work.

So I have no objection to the age limit, the helmet requirement, the lighting rules, or enforced speed caps. Those are Safe System measures: they reduce crash energy and improve visibility. They belong in the mix.

What I object to is treating enforcement and prohibition as the whole policy while the infrastructure question is deferred indefinitely. Cyprus is currently choosing the cheapest half of the solution and calling it a plan. Confiscating a scooter from a teenager riding on a promenade does nothing about the fact that the road beside that promenade is unsafe for anyone not wrapped in steel.

What I would do

Build a connected network, fast, and build all of it. Seville's lesson is that a fragmented network fails and a complete one succeeds. Pick Nicosia, Limassol and Larnaca and commit to a continuous protected network within two years, not a pilot lane that ends at a junction.

Take the space from parking, not from pedestrians. This is the political fight, and it is the one worth having. Pavements are already too narrow. Kerbside parking is the only realistic source of road space, and reallocating it is a decision, not an engineering problem.

Make 30 km/h the default in urban Cyprus. Not a sign — a design speed, enforced by geometry: narrower lanes, raised crossings that act as speed tables, tightened corner radii so drivers physically cannot take a turn fast.

Clear the kerbside of rigid obstacles. Our own collision dossiers repeatedly show utility poles standing directly at the back of kerb, with no obstacle-free strip beside the lane. For a rider who runs wide, that pole is the difference between a fall and a funeral.

Then enforce. Once there is somewhere safe and legal to ride, pavement riding becomes genuinely unreasonable and enforcing against it becomes fair. Enforcing now, with nowhere else to go, is punishing people for the state of our streets.

The uncomfortable part

Banning e-scooters would let us feel that we had acted on road safety while changing nothing that actually kills people in Cyprus. It would remove about 1% of the problem and leave the other 99% exactly as it is. It would be a policy about visibility and irritation, not about death.

Forty-five people died last year. Half of them were outside a car. Not one of those deaths is prevented by a scooter ban.

We should be honest that the fight is not really about scooters. It is about whether we are willing to take road space away from cars — and that is a much harder conversation than the one Parliament is currently having.

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Sources

• European Commission road safety figures for Cyprus, 2025, as reported by the Cyprus News Agency and Politis
• International Transport Forum (OECD), Safe Micromobility (2020) and 10 Recommendations for Safe Micromobility
• European Commission National Road Safety Profile — Cyprus
• Interreg Europe and Transportation Research Part A, on the Seville cycle network programme, 2006–2010
• Research on legislative restrictions and e-scooter injuries in Helsinki, Finland