It’s a multifaceted problem.

Scooters are definitely much more dangerous than bikes. They’re much harder to control and more likely to tip over. And that’s a problem.

And it seems highly likely that this guy was under the influence. Which is obviously a bad personal decision.

But also, there’s a severe problem with infrastructure. When you have actual good-quality infrastructure for bikes and scooters to use, crashes like this become much less likely. Yes, most of the conversation around bike infrastructure is about protecting them from cars, but quite a lot of what we’re building at the moment does a little to protect against cars while actually potentially increasing the risk of single-vehicle crashes or crashes between two active transport users. Still a worthwhile trade-off, but even better would be to build high quality, rather than mediocre, infrastructure.

In this case, the article says the guy “clipped a gutter”. When you have good bike path, there won’t be any gutters. At least not ones that you’re ever riding very close to. But then in this case it’s even worse. There wasn’t even a mediocre bike path. He was riding, presumably, on the footpath, with all of its bumps and cracks and lips. These things are uncomfortable and potentially risky on a bicycle, but are major hazards on the small wheels of a scooter.

This rider undoubtedly made some bad personal decisions leading up to the crash. But if our Council was doing its job properly and ensuring that there were high quality, reasonably direct, separated paths for people using active transport to get to any destination that they could desire, these mistakes would not have lead to his death.