CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: E-Scooters on City Streets

NARRATOR: Anyone who has strolled through a downtown core lately has likely encountered them: sleek electric scooters, unlocked with a smartphone and abandoned, as often as not, wherever the rider's journey happened to end. Rental e-scooters have spread across North America in barely a decade, and Canadian municipalities now face a decision that is deceptively simple: welcome them, regulate them, or ban them outright.

NARRATOR: For transportation planner Gregory Hale, the answer is obvious. Hale points out that most car trips in Canadian cities cover less than five kilometres, precisely the distance a scooter handles with ease. Every rider who leaves the car at home, he reasons, means one fewer vehicle idling in traffic and one fewer parking space taken. Hale is particularly keen on what planners call the last mile: the awkward gap between a bus stop and someone's front door. Scooters, he contends, could make public transit appealing to commuters who currently dismiss it as impractical. He concedes that the early rollouts were chaotic, but blames that on cities making up rules as they went along, not on the vehicles themselves.

NARRATOR: Disability advocate Rosalind Achebe sees things rather differently. Achebe, who uses a wheelchair, describes sidewalks littered with toppled scooters as an obstacle course, one that able-bodied pedestrians simply step over without a second thought. For people who are blind or have limited mobility, she says, a single carelessly parked scooter can turn a routine errand into a genuine hazard. Achebe is also skeptical of the environmental claims. Studies, she notes, suggest many scooter trips replace walking or cycling rather than driving, and the scooters themselves often last only a year or two before being thrown away. She doesn't object to scooters as such, she insists; she objects to cities treating public sidewalks as free storage for private companies.

NARRATOR: Hale, to his credit, accepts much of this criticism. He favours designated parking zones, hefty fines for companies whose scooters block sidewalks, and technology that won't let a rental end unless the scooter is properly parked. Achebe calls these measures promising, but wonders who will enforce them once the novelty wears off and budgets tighten. Ultimately, the scooter debate may say less about scooters than about who our streets are designed for. A city that cannot keep a sidewalk clear for its most vulnerable residents is perhaps not yet ready to hand that space to anyone else.