Safety problems of personal mobility devices

Abstract

Personal Mobility Devices are most often used for commuting to or returning from work, school, university, commuting to offices, as a connection with public transport, for social and recreational purposes. PMD are also used to move around office corridors, exhibition and industrial halls. The key challenges for such forms of travel are infrastructure affordability, speed limits, weather sensitivity, lack of luggage and passenger space, battery charging, developing a favourable business and operational model. There are also significant concerns about legal compliance and challenges related to the safety of pedestrians and other road users and, recently, epidemiological safety. This article aims to present some aspects of safety in relation to the use of personal transport devices both from the perspective of road traffic and from the perspective of epidemiology. The work is descriptive and presents four current and therefore important issues regarding personal transport devices. The first is the legal framework for defining and using PMD, the second is the research on the popularity of these devices in Poland, and the other two relate to selected safety issues of their use.