Why Government-Supported Electric Scooter Regulations Fail: How can value Sensitive Design help to Examine Stakeholder Needs?

Congestion, air pollution, noise and injuries caused by traffic are just some of the transport-related problems that cities around the world are working to solve. Urban transport planners are looking to electric scooters as a possible alternative to motorised private transport, and to the car. However, cities are not prepared to deal with this new type of vehicle, and e-scooter users are not able to adapt to any rules, as currently in most European countries the vehicles are not even categorised. Therefore, with the increase in the use of e-scooters, it is up to legislators to develop new rules for urban transport users, and, in addition, there is still a need to understand the dynamics of socio-technical transitions involving e-scooters to develop the necessary adaptive governance processes. The aim of our research is to use the results of the Value Sensitive Design (Friedman et al., 2008) approach to formulate recommendations for promoting the integration of e-scooters in urban transport. To this end, exploratory research was conducted, in the first phase all relevant stakeholders were identified. In the second phase, a focus group and online survey method were used to identify the values. In the third phase, legislative policy recommendations were developed based on the findings of the first and second phases. As a result of our research, we found that the main challenges currently identified by respondents would be the categorisation of e-scooters, the development of appropriate infrastructure and the education of all transport stakeholders. The implementation of these new use case rules will be the subject of future research.