Why Cities Can’t Agree on E-Scooter Speed Limits

If you’ve ever traveled between cities with an e-scooter and noticed that the same vehicle suddenly feels capped differently depending on where you are, you’re not imagining it. Speed limits for electric scooters vary enormously from place to place — sometimes between neighboring cities in the same country — and the gap isn’t a few miles per hour at the margins. It can be the difference between a scooter that feels like a brisk bike ride and one that feels like it’s stuck in molasses.

This isn’t an accident or an oversight. It reflects something genuinely difficult: nobody has actually figured out what the “right” speed limit is, because the right answer depends on variables that differ wildly from city to city.

The Core Tension

At the heart of the disagreement is a tension between two things that pull in opposite directions. Higher speed limits make scooters more useful as actual transportation — competitive with cycling, useful for longer trips, genuinely able to replace car journeys for some people. Lower speed limits reduce the severity of collisions and make scooters feel safer to share space with, whether that’s pedestrians on a sidewalk or cars on a street.

Every city setting a speed limit is essentially picking a point on this trade-off curve, and where that point should sit depends heavily on local context. A city with extensive dedicated bike lanes can reasonably allow higher scooter speeds, because scooters and faster-moving vehicles are physically separated from pedestrians most of the time. A city where scooters are realistically going to share sidewalks or mixed-use paths with pedestrians has a much stronger case for lower limits, because the consequences of a collision in that environment are different.

The Infrastructure Problem Underneath the Policy Problem

This is probably the most underappreciated point in the whole debate: speed limit policy is often a proxy fight for an infrastructure problem that nobody wants to name directly. A city that hasn’t built out cycling infrastructure is, in effect, being asked to set scooter policy as if its streets were designed for a transportation mode that doesn’t really have a dedicated place to exist yet.

Lowering the speed limit in this situation is sometimes the only lever available to reduce risk, even though it makes the scooters less useful. Raising the speed limit without addressing the underlying infrastructure gap shifts risk onto pedestrians and scooter riders alike. Neither option actually solves the problem — they just distribute the consequences differently.

This is part of why speed limit debates often generate more heat than light. The actual disagreement is frequently about infrastructure investment, but it gets fought out as a debate about a number, because changing a speed limit is administratively easy and changing infrastructure is expensive and slow.

The Enforcement Reality

There’s also a practical issue that rarely makes it into policy discussions: speed limits on personal electric vehicles are notoriously difficult to enforce in any meaningful way. Unlike a car, there’s no license plate to ticket, no easy way for an officer to verify speed in the moment, and limited capacity in most cities to dedicate enforcement resources to this specific issue.

What ends up happening in practice is that the speed limit functions less as an enforced rule and more as a manufacturer-side constraint — through firmware that caps the vehicle’s top speed, particularly for shared fleet vehicles where operators have a direct relationship with regulators and a clear incentive to comply. For privately owned scooters, the limit is often more aspirational than actual, which creates a strange situation where the rule exists primarily for the vehicles that are easiest to regulate, while having limited effect on the broader population of devices on the road.

Speed Limits as a Communication Tool

One thing that does seem to matter, even when enforcement is weak, is the signal a speed limit sends about how a city views these vehicles. A city that sets a relatively low limit and pairs it with genuine investment in safe infrastructure is communicating something different than a city that sets the same limit purely as a defensive, liability-driven decision with no accompanying investment.

Riders, operators, and the broader public tend to pick up on this distinction over time, even if it’s never stated explicitly. Policies that feel like they’re part of a coherent plan tend to generate more cooperation and less friction than policies that feel like an isolated reaction to a single bad headline.

Is Convergence Coming?

It’s tempting to assume that, given enough time, cities will eventually converge on something close to a standard speed limit, the way many other vehicle regulations have converged over decades. There’s some reason to think this might happen at the margins — extremely high or extremely low outlier limits do tend to get revisited over time as cities learn from each other’s experiences.

But full convergence seems unlikely in the near term, because the underlying variable that actually matters — the physical environment scooters operate in — isn’t converging. Cities are investing in infrastructure at wildly different rates, and as long as that’s true, the “right” speed limit for any given city will keep reflecting that underlying reality rather than some abstract universal standard.

For anyone operating across multiple markets, the practical takeaway is less about hoping for harmonization and more about building flexibility into vehicle design and fleet management — because the variation in speed limits between markets is likely to remain a permanent feature of doing business in this space, not a temporary inconvenience waiting to be resolved.