8 SEPTEMBER, 2024
Who: Charles Darwin University sustainable transport solutions expert, PhD Candidate in Law, Ferdinand Balfoort. Ferdinand is completing his doctoral dissertation on the topic of distributive justice, sustainability and shared e-scooters, focusing on the benefits and burdens of sustainable transport technologies.
Topics:
- Regulatory frameworks for sustainable transport solutions including micromobility (e-scooters and e-bikes)
- Benefits (pros) of micromobility technology (GPS, IoT, AI, Telematics) including sustainability, and burdens (cons) including safety, in context of stakeholders.
Contact details: Call +61 8 8946 6721 or email [email protected] to arrange an interview.
Quotes attributable to Ferdinand Balfoort:
“The introduction and deployment, and now operation of e-vehicles in Australia has been fairly poorly done, has not taken into account all potential burdens and benefits up front, especially not against any baseline of more emitting and more injurious types of transportation like private cars, and that there has not been enough stakeholder consultation effort to ensure that all public stakeholders have their say, including marginalised communities, vulnerable road users, urban planners, policy makers and so forth.
“The call for more regulations to be introduced may therefore be missing the point, because we still have not established the full universe of benefits and burdens.
“The media and policy makers tend to conflate personal (private) and shared micromobility, and the two sub classes of micromobility, both e-bikes and e-scooters, carry different benefit and burden profiles which can be significantly influential on public perceptions as per Balfoort’s Taxonomy.
“In this latest update we see a conflation of e-scooters (personal and shared) as well as e-bikes (personal and shared) potentially. These are four different types of e-vehicles with particular behaviours and impacts, and overlapping but different sets of distributive justice related benefits and burdens. By which type of vehicles were the noted tragedies of eight deaths caused?
“The more efficient and less taxpayer burdensome approach may be to regulate at the border, at the location where micromobility vehicles are landed and cleared for import. It appears to be more efficient to check on containers of e-bikes and e-scooters for personal and shared operator usage, and to hold importers and customs clearance agents responsible for importing illegal e-vehicles that are over engine and speed limits by design.
“For this to happen there would need to be a uniform regulatory framework in Australia across states, which as noted is not the case currently for e-scooters and e-bikes. Without this uniform standard regulatory framework, it would be too easy to import illegal vehicles in one state and transport these to another to arbitrage between regulations.
“If we do not take this step first at this juncture, including securing accurate data on the actual class and subclass of vehicles are the cause of the deaths, injuries and accidents, we will likely sub optimize law and regulations or potentially introduce them in the wrong location of the supply chain, with the end user, rather than the more efficient potential of regulating at the borders.”
Contact details:
Raphaella Saroukos she/her
Research Communications Officer
Marketing, Media & Communications
Larrakia Country
T: +61 8 8946 6721
E: [email protected]
W: cdu.edu.au
