Technology often arrives far ahead of our ability to deal with it.

The latest example is a cute e-scooter with lime-green accents.

If e-scooters are on the road, puttering along at a maximum speed of 24 km per hour, motorists will try to pass them, with possibly disastrous results. If they're on the sidewalk, it's very dangerous to pedestrians.

So, as flattering as it is for the City of Waterloo to be chosen to experiment with e-scooters, councillors should have said no.

But the city already approved a partnership with Lime, a company based in San Francisco, to have small motorized scooters available along a route connecting Waterloo Park, the University of Waterloo, and the David Johnston Research & Technology Park. It's the first pilot project of its kind in the country.

The idea is that for a dollar or two, you can grab one, unlock it with a smartphone app, and zip off to your work, class or meeting.

There aren't going to be any docking stations, you just leave them wherever, when you're done.

Robin Mazumder is a doctoral student at University of Waterloo, where he studies how the urban environment affects mental health.

"Before we dump e-scooters all over our cities, we need to think about the implications they have on society's most vulnerable," he said in his blog.

E-scooters are intended by the manufacturer to be used in bike lanes. That's fine, but many cities don't have much in the way of bike lanes. When that happens, the scooters go on the sidewalks. That's dangerous.

While visiting the Spanish city of Madrid recently, Mazumder spent a lot of time walking.

"I was almost hit numerous times" by people who were driving their e-scooters on the sidewalks, he said. One scooter came straight at him. He had to jump aside at the last minute.

"Pedestrians have enough challenges with avoiding getting hit by cars on the road; they don't need the added fear of being hit on the sidewalk by someone riding an e-scooter," Mazumder wrote.

"The sidewalk is one of the few places we can move in our cities without the need to be hypervigilant."

In another trip to California, Mazumder noticed some other problems: For example, e-scooter users tend to have difficulty controlling the speed of the vehicles when they're going downhill. As in Madrid, they tended to go on sidewalks because there isn't good cycling infrastructure.

In Los Angeles, discarded e-scooters were "everywhere," meaning people with mobility issues using the sidewalk would have a hard time moving around them to get where they were going.

"It's almost like litter on the sidewalk," Mazumder told me.

Waterloo is proud of its reputation as home for the most innovative minds in Canada. It's easy for its leaders to get swept up by the latest cool idea.

But unless the city takes the time to build proper separations between cars, pedestrians and the wheeled vehicles that are somewhere in between, like bicycles, skateboards and scooters, it's just a matter of time before someone gets killed. And that isn't cool. At all.

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ldamato@therecord.com

Twitter: @DamatoRecord

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