E-scooters have often been identified as more dangerous than e-bikes, but that picture changes when they are compared on equal terms. A recently published study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows, in fact, that the crash risk is eight times higher for e-bikes than for e-scooters, calculated based on the trip distance with rental vehicles in cities.

This surprising result provides a better basis for cities to make decisions on how much to facilitate different types of micromobility. The paper is published in the Journal of Safety Research.

“Previous studies have often compared apples with oranges,” says Marco Dozza, Full Professor in Active Safety and Road-User Behavior at Chalmers. “They have lumped together e-bicycles with ordinary bicycles, and haven’t taken into account where, how and how much these vehicles are used—or whether they are rented or privately owned. When we took all these factors into account, we found that e-scooterists actually have a lower rate of crashes than e-cyclists.”

GPS data contributed to equitable comparison

The study is based on a unique data set from trips using rented e-bicycles and e-scooters in seven European cities: Gävle in Sweden, Berlin and Düsseldorf in Germany, and the U.K. cities of Cambridge, Kettering, Liverpool and Northampton.

The researchers analyzed 686 crashes involving e-scooterists and 35 involving e-cyclists. The high number of crashes involving e-scooters reflects that they were used much more frequently than e-bicycles. But their crash risk was actually much lower—regardless of whether the risk was calculated on the basis of the number, duration, or distance of the trips.

“When we calculated using trip distance, it turned out that e-cyclists were eight times more likely to have a crash than e-scooterists. It’s a result that surprised us,” says Dozza.

This is the first time that a study of this kind has been able to compare micromobility in such a detailed and equitable way, and from so many countries and cities. A key to being able to do the study in this way was the use of GPS data. This made it possible to measure what is termed “exposure”—which refers to how much a vehicle is actually used—with greater precision than previously.

All vehicles in the study were rented and used in city centers, which makes the comparison more equitable than previous studies that have often mixed together urban and rural settings, or mixed rented vehicles with privately owned vehicles.

Safety of e-scooters grossly underestimated

Despite their results, the researchers stress that they should not be seen as definitive proof that e-scooters are safer than e-bicycles. Uncertainties remain, such as under-reporting of crashes and differences in the way these vehicles are used.

“But what we can say is that previous studies have grossly underestimated the safety of e-scooters in relation to e-bicycles,” says Dozza. “This in turn could have consequences for how cities regulate and plan micromobility. In some cities, attempts are being made to steer micromobility towards e-bicycles, which are considered to be better because previous research has created the idea that all types of cycling are safer than all types of e-scootering,” he adds.

“Now that it turns out that isn’t correct, decision-makers may need to think again. The results might also affect consumers’ decisions if they have rented e-bicycles instead of e-scooters because they believed it’s safer,” he says.

According to the researchers, future analyses of crash risk should always include GPS data and precise information about how the vehicles are used. They would also like to see additional comparable data sets from other parts of the world; in particular, data sets that include more e-bicycle journeys in order to improve statistical reliability.

“With more detailed data, we can make better decisions about transport for the future. And to achieve that, it’s important that we compare apples with apples,” says Dozza.

More about the research

The study only compares e-scooters with e-bicycles, unlike previous studies where e-bicycles and ordinary bicycles were lumped together in the same group. It is also the first study to also include several other important factors in the comparison: ownership, geographical location, usage, and exposure.

• Only rented vehicles were included in the study.
• The locations were limited to highly urbanized city centers using geofencing.
• Usage type was further controlled by comparing e-scooters and e-bicycles from the same rental company.
• Exposure was investigated using three different measures: number, duration, and distance of the trips.

The difference in crash risk between these vehicle types was greatest when trip distance was used as the measure for exposure, when the crash risk was 8.3 times higher for e-bicycles than for e-scooters. But even when using the other two measures for exposure, the crash risk was considerably higher for e-bicycles.

The data in the study comes from GPS data from trips with rented e-scooters and e-bicycles in seven European cities in the years 2022–2023 and includes a total of 686 reported crashes with e-scooters and 35 with e-bicycles. Despite the low number of crashes with e-bicycles, the results of the study are statistically significant when the data from all the cities was weighed together.

A sofa is one of the biggest investments you can make in home decor, and the last thing you want is to make the wrong choice. A good couch will be with you for a decade, and it should not only be comfortable and look great, it should also have the versatility to adapt to your needs in new spaces and seasons of your life.

You should consider a modular sofa. That’s the kind that comes in individual pieces you can pull apart, put back together, and rearrange to suit whatever you fancy. Usually, you can change the color of the cover without buying a whole new couch. And when moving day comes, you won’t need a team of three or four well-built movers to get it out the old door and into the new one.

I’ve been leading our coverage of the Best Couches for years, and many of us on the WIRED Reviews team have tested more than our fair share of different variations on the living-room seat. Modular couches are the way to go.

Switch Things Up …

If you move or travel frequently, a modular sofa is easy to take apart. No more playing Tetris in the U-Haul, trying to figure out how you’re going to bring your old couch to your new place. And it’s also easy to reconfigure. Say you’re working from home and you get a new desk, and you need the chaise portion of your sofa to face a different direction. You don’t need a new sofa, and you don’t need to entirely rearrange your living room—you can just reconfigure your existing modular couch. Or maybe you get a new coffee table and you don’t like how long your couch is in comparison. Remove a seat. It’s that easy.

That’s what recently happened to WIRED Reviews team director Martin Cizmar, who bought a new house and found that his new living room is functionally narrower than expected because of a large air register on the floor. Because he had the modular sofa from Koala, he simply removed one of the seats to turn it into an L-shape and put the extra section up in his attic for possible future use.

Courtesy of Koala

Koala

Corner Sectional Sofa

While there are a lot of standard, rectangular, boxy options, you can also play around with different fabrics and silhouettes. One example is the Castlery Auburn Performance Fabric Chaise Sectional, a modular couch with a fluffy, spill-resistant bouclé fabric and a bubbly, modern silhouette.

Modular couches can also come in handy if you have unconventional living arrangements. Do you live in a seventh-floor walk-up? A modular sofa comes in many boxes rather than as one gigantic package—you might have more steps to deal with, but you won’t have to fork over extra cash for white-glove delivery, nor will you have to convince your friends to maneuver a sofa up several flights of stairs, cursing at the banister and scraping their knuckles on narrow hallways. No ruined friendships because you said “To your left” and they tilted the whole sofa in the wrong direction. No thrown-out backs or removing doors from hinges. I’ve gotten a few modular sofas delivered to apartments with stairs, and I was able to get them into my apartment by myself. (And, if your stairs be many, you’ll only need to persuade one friend to help you out—not a bunch of them plus a truck.)

…Again and Again

Photograph: Lovesac

Modular sofas offer additional flexibility when it comes to configurations. You can make them an L-shaped sectional, a U-shaped sectional, or a traditional straight line. You can choose deep seats or shallower ones, and there are a ton of different upholstery finishes ranging from durable pet-friendly performance fabric to chenille. You could get a sleeper sofa or one designed for small spaces. Most of them come with removable, machine-washable covers, and some even have extra bells and whistles—like built-in storage or a way to charge your phone. The Lovesac Sactional is fully modular—we’re in the process of giving it a dedicated review—and you can add StealthTech to it, which gives it speakers, a wireless charging pad, and a subwoofer. A home theater in your reconfigurable couch, complete with reclining seats? It’s more likely than you think.

Modular couches do tend to be more expensive than standard options, but the convenience often outweighs the initial investment cost. For a modular sectional sofa, I find that it’s better to go with, at the bare minimum, a standard three-seater sofa and an extra piece such as a chaise lounge. That way you can move things around, but you won’t be stuck with too many additional seats, and you should still have room for an ottoman or a coffee table. Of course, if you want to go with an oversized eight-seater, you can do that too. There are some truly gargantuan modular options available, like the Cozey Ciello XL. You can even opt for an outdoor sofa, like Outer’s Teak Outdoor Loveseat, which comes with a built-in cover to protect your patio furniture from the elements.

And while they do tend to be expensive, there are still some relatively affordable modular sofa options if you’re on a tighter budget. The Albany Park Kova has been an honorable mention in our buying guide for a couple of years, and it costs the same—or less than—similar couches that aren’t as customizable.

The long and the short of it is that a modular couch is largely similar to your standard, stuck-in-one-shape couch. You’ll still get a solid warranty. You’ll still get high-quality, high-density memory foam cushions, plush backrests, and comfortable back cushions. You still have the options for solid wood frames and stain-resistant fabric. But at the end of the day, if needed, you can change things up—something that’s only easy to do if you have a modular sofa.

If you’re in the market for a new couch, we’ve got plenty of recommendations in all shapes, sizes, and styles. You might also be able to visit a local showroom—or simply pester your comfy-couched friends about the brand they chose. (Let me know what it is in the comments!) And if you want the best of the bunch that’ll stand the test of time, you’ll consider a modular sofa.

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The government has published guidance for software engineers working in government departments on how they should use artificial intelligence (AI)-based coding assistants.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) AI coding assistants for developers in HMG document warns that if a production service is developed, maintained and deployed from a single environment, using AI coding assistants may introduce unacceptable risks.

“The closer a development platform and deployment infrastructure is to good practice, the less concern you should have about the specific use of AI coding assistants,” GDS said. It recommended that software engineering teams within government departments can “greatly reduce the risks of employing AI coding assistants in their development environment by working in the open and employing main branch protections”.

GDS’ guidance recommends software engineering teams in government departments also maintain the strict separation and audit of production secrets access and use multi-stage deployment, which needs to include sufficient test coverage and vulnerability scanning for continuous deployment in software development pipelines.

Due to the non-deterministic nature of the models underpinning AI coding assistants, the GDS guidance recommends that source code and build pipeline should never rely on a specific response to a prompt unless the software engineering team is willing to test these responses extensively and accept the risk of frequent breakage.

Publication of the guidance follows on from a four-month trial with more than 1,000 software engineers using AI to improve programme productivity.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) reported that the pilot shows that AI assistants has the potential to save government software developers the equivalent of 28 working days a year – almost an hour every day.

The boost in efficiency from this AI has meant that more than 1,000 developers who took part in the trial were able to build more software to support government-led digital initiatives. DSIT predicted that AI assistants could help the government build the technology it needs more quickly, targeting £45bn in savings to the taxpayer by making the public sector more efficient.

Developers and engineers across 50 government departments trialled AI coding assistants from Microsoft, GitHub Copilot, and Google, Gemini Code Assist.

The trial found widespread satisfaction with the tools among coders, with 72% of users agreeing they offered good value for their organisation. Over half of participants (58%) said they would prefer not to return to working without AI assistance, while 65% reported completing tasks faster and 56% said they could solve problems more efficiently.

The AI-based coding assistants were used to produce first drafts of source code, which could then be amended by government software engineers, or using them to review existing code. DSIT said only 15% of code generated by the AI coding assistants was used without any edits, showing that engineers were taking care to check and correct AI-generated code where needed.

Technology minister Kanishka Narayan said: “These results show that our engineers are hungry to use AI to get that work done more quickly and know how to use it safely. This is exactly how I want us to use AI and other technology to make sure we are delivering the standard of public services people expect, both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.”