The tyranny of mobility scooters

I live in a small cathedral city in southern England. The chances of having my mobile phone snatched from my hand by an opportunistic thief, or my Rolex watch wrenched from my wrist by a brutish thug are still mercifully small. But another menace to life and limb has recently emerged here: the mobility vehicle mob.

It is almost 47 years since the first modern mobility vehicle was delivered to a customer in July 1978. In the past half-century, they have become a now ubiquitous nuisance on our streets and pavements. Originally intended to aid those genuinely unable to walk, such as the elderly or physically handicapped, mobility vehicles have become merely an easy means of transport for the lazy and terminally indolent. These are the people who are perfectly able to walk but are simply too idle to move under their own steam.

I first became aware of the misuse of these vehicles a decade ago, when another Sussex town where I then lived was terrorised by a whole family of able-bodied mobility scooter users. They lived in a converted former public convenience and sped around the streets and pavements at high speed, using their vehicles as high-velocity weapons to force pedestrians out of their way.

Since then, the army of scooter users has become a veritable horde, blockading the streets and obliging pedestrians to leap nimbly aside to avoid being struck by their cumbersome vehicles as they glide by.

The able-bodied scooter users are doing a disservice to those genuinely in need of vehicular assistance by appropriating their scooters for lazy use. Whether holding up road traffic or barging us walkers out of their way on the pavements, those who misuse scooters are just another manifestation of an increasingly sedentary and selfish society.

They are also a visible sign of our national demographic decline. A country with a significant section of the population preferring to ride rather than move their limbs is one that has no future and is clearly on the way out. Many of the users are grossly obese and in need of a good long walk.

Yet the problem is insoluble. No one would wish to introduce an scooter licensing system or a sort of health means test under which only the old or disabled would be permitted to purchase these vehicles. Such a system would be both impractical and a further erosion of freedom in an already over-regulated community. The road ahead for the lazy and the selfish to ride roughshod over the rest of us looks wide open.