In this article, we are going to share with you 7 electric scooter safety tips that everyone should know. From over 10 years of riding the electric scooter experience, Linkseride team sort out below 7 riding mistakes that our riders made, and we’d like to share with you how to avoid them to keep safe during riding.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #1 CHOOSE THE RIGHT STANCE
So typically there are three writing stances.
- The 1st one is rightfoot forward, which is considered goofy.
- Left foot forward, which is considered regular.
- And side by side, which is considered dangerous. I don’t recommend ever riding side by side with your feet like this, because when you break or accelerate hard, you just, you don’t have any stability on the scooter, and it could lead to you going over the handlebars. We’ll get to that later.
Now, which foot forward you use is not dependent on whether you’re regular or goofy foot when you’re skateboarding, but rather which side of the street cars are parked on. The biggest risk you have is that the car doors open as you’re actually riding past them. when you’re riding and you have your right foot forward because that’s the side of the cars are on. When the car door opens, and you want to get out of the way, then your shoulder and the side of you are the things that are most exposed.
Imagine that now you’re riding with your left foot forward, so you’re kind of turned this way. If you’re going to try to get out of the way, you’re going to be leaning like this, and look at what is exposed to the car door. All your vital organs and everything that you basically don’t want to have hit, is going to be exposed as you’re trying to get out of the way. So that is why I recommend riding with your right foot forward, because you can kind of like tuck into a crouch position, meaning that you can throw your shoulder into that car door if you have to hit it, rather than your chest.
That’s not going to be very fun. Whereas this, you might still be able to walk away from that type of accident. Probably the easiest thing that you should know to do while you’re riding is just not lock out your knees. So what you want to do is just have a slight bend in them. It’s also safer so you don’t risk injury to your own legs when you hit an unforeseen bump. But then also, if you’re riding with your legs locked out on really bumpy terrain, you can actually have that kind of vibrating brain massage, and that leads to blurred vision.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #2 BE CAREFUL WHEN BRAKING
The next thing we’re going to cover is proper breaking. And breaking is something that I see people doing wrong all the time.
When you’re on a powerful scooter, especially one with two brakes, it’s actually pretty easy to go over the handlebars if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re breaking really hard. So there’s two techniques to breaking.
- The first one is being in the right position when you hit those brakes hard. This looks weird while I’m like stationary, but when you’re actually breaking, your momentum is going this way. So really what you’re doing is you’re counteracting the forces that are pushing you forward, and you’re trying to stay back. And the reason that you’re doing that is because you’re trying to actually keep that back tire on the ground. When you break hard, if you’re not putting your weight back and down, the forces are going to throw you over the handlebars. That’s something that you don’t want to have happened.
- The other half of breaking properly, especially if you’re trying to get the least amount of breaking distance as possible when you are in an emergency situation. When you squeeze the breaks, you want to get as close as possible to locking out the tires without actually locking them out. That is going to get you the minimum breaking distance, which is the best when you’re in an emergency situation. One of the tests that we do here at ESG is the breaking test, where we go from a little over 50 mi an hour down to zero in as little distance as possible. And we measure that in feet using race logic racing equipment. So you know you got it when you put very little pressure on the stem while breaking, your wheels are close, but not fully locking out, and your rear wheel doesn’t lift off the ground.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #3 PAY ATTENTION TO THE TERRAIN
No matter how good of a rider you are, you’re still at the mercy of your terrain. If you think what conditions are slippery, you’ll be surprised at how slippery these other conditions can be. If we take dry pavement as the baseline, 100% traction, what pavement will give you about 85-90% traction.
As we go down the list, it gets worse and worse.
- Dry metal isabout 63% traction
- sand is 55 %
- wet metal 48%
- dry leaves 35%,
- wet leaves, the worst of all, 28% traction. (That’s 1/4 of the traction that you’d have riding on wet pavement.)
The bottom line is, if you’re on sand, wet metal, dry leaves or wet leaves, don’t turn and don’t break. Try to avoid them. But if you can, wait till you get to the other side before you slow down or turn.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #4 OFF-ROADING
There’s a common misconception that electric scooters are for off-roading, and while some electric scooters can handle off road terrain, the real issue is with the jumps. What’s OK is when you’re on the roads and you’re taking speed bumps at speed, or hopping off the occasional curb, that is a little bit of pressure.
The key here is to avoid any jumps of one foot or more. This will cause too much pressure on parts of the scooter that are not built to handle that much force, and you’ll end up with at best a broken scooter and at worst an injury to yourself.
Now, what is OK is, when you have train like this, where you know, the ground is sandy, but it’s pretty solid, you need to be careful, but it’s not a ton of jumps. Most scooters, you can actually traverses train without too much problem.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #5 CHOOSE THE RIGHT HELMET TYPE
It goes without saying that you need to wear a helmet. But what a lot of people don’t know is that different types of helmets are meant for different speed of crashes.
- A bicycle helmet is only rated for crashes up to 20 mph.
- The next level up is a BMX style helmet, but those are also only rated for crashes up to 20 mph.
- If you’re going to go over 20 mph, or if you’re prone to falling, then you’re going to opt for a motorcycle style helmet. This is an open faced variety, and the 4th type of helmet, the one that we always recommend, and the ones that we wear ourselves, are the motorcycle style helmet with full face protection. So when you fall, and you will, when you hit the front of your face, you will still have a face.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #6 CRUISE CONTROL
The next thing you’re going to pay attention to is the cruise control. So for the first couple weeks of owning an electric scooter, I highly recommend not having that function turned on if possible on your scooter.
A lot of times, there’s no audible or visual indicator that it has activated. So you might be going up the hill, and you’re pulling hard on the throttle a hundred percent, right? So you rolling up to that stop sign, you got the trigger all the way pulled down. You let go of it, right?
Thinking that your scooter is going to slow down naturally and come to a stop. But what actually happens is, because the cruise controls activated, it’s thinking you want 100% throttle. So you’re letting off. The scooter is now cresting the hill, so it’s now shooting forward, and you’re super caught off guard. That happened to me a bunch of times, and it’s not something that I recommend anybody doing.
Electric Scooter Safety Tips #7 USING BOTH HANDS
One thing that we all need to remember is to keep both hands on the handlebars at all times.
On bicycles, you see people all the time riding without hands. You cannot do that on electric scooters. With bicycles, that front wheel tends to stay very stable and straight. Scooter wheels are smaller, and they tend to wobble. And so you don’t want to get the wobbles. That’s how people fall.
If you need to wave at somebody, give them the the winky face, or, you know, shrug a shoulder at them. And if you think you need to make a turn and you want a signal, would I recommend is signal with your foot. So if you’re turning right, put a right foot out. If you’re turning left, put a left foot out. Do it safely, but that’s a lot safer than putting than taking a hand off the handlebar and getting the wobbles and falling.
I hope this blog help you learn from my mistakes and safe riding all the time.
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