Lee Breen lives green; his day job is running a landscaping company that uses push mowers, hand clippers and organic compost. He says that the City of Fredricton, (New Brunswick, Canada) should be encouraging non-polluting forms of transportation. But even though he was skating at the edge of the road, wearing a helmet and actually using hand signals, he was arrested last summer for breaching a local bylaw that prohibits the use of "a sled, toboggan, wagon or skateboard on the streets of New Brunswick's capital."
So... rollerblading, rollerskating, rollerskiing, powerbocking, stilt-walking, "magic-wheel"-ing, unicycling, cargo-biking, mono-wheeling, kick- or motor-scootering, etc. along the side of the road are all fine? Most of these forms of transportation create just as small a profile as a skateboarder. Some of them are less stable, to boot!
The issue of skateboard bans has - I believe - nothing to do with public safety, but rather a perception of a public nuisance. Using a skateboard on the sidewalk can easily become a nuisance - both to the boarder and to pedestrians - much like using a bike or being a jogger (or any of the above-listed alternative modes of transport), since it operates at a speed that is an order of magnitude faster than walkers.
Finally, I feel that a ban on using a skateboard as a mode of transportation is about as dumb as banning the use of personal re-usable bags at a store as a means of goods-schlepping.
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