A first-time rider’s guide to electric scooters

Closed shoes. Nothing else you wear makes as much difference. Sandals and flip-flops leave your toes out in front of a wheel and come off exactly when you need a foot down.

Nothing loose or long. A trailing strap, a long scarf, a wide trouser leg and a bag swinging off one shoulder can all find a wheel. Put a bag across your body or on your back, and tie back long hair if the wind is up.

Ask at the stand about a helmet before you set off.

Do not throttle from standing still. This is the most common first-ride mistake and the one with the most startling result: the scooter steps forward out from under you while you are still working out where your feet go.

Instead: one foot on the deck, hands on the bars, and push off the ground with the other foot the way you would on a kick scooter. Once you are rolling — walking pace is plenty — bring the second foot on, settle it behind the first, and only then feed in the throttle. Gently. Treat it like a dimmer rather than a switch, and the handover is smooth enough that you barely notice it.

Keep your feet one behind the other rather than side by side, knees soft, weight central. Side-by-side feels natural right up until the surface changes, and then it stops working.

Brake early and gently, and give yourself far more room than you think you need. Early braking is the habit that makes everything else safe: every stop becomes a gradual one, and you never ask the machine for everything at once.

Use both brakes together and squeeze progressively rather than grabbing. A front brake used hard on its own, on a small wheel, is how people go over the bars. Shift your weight back a little as you slow — hips back, arms relaxed — and the stop stays flat and undramatic. Try one deliberate stop as soon as you are moving, before you need one.

At any real speed you steer with your body, not the bars. Lean into the turn and let the bars follow; wrenching the handlebars on a short wheelbase does something sudden and unpleasant. The faster you go, the less the bars should move.

Look where you are going, not at the deck. A scooter goes where you look, so staring at your feet makes you wander, which makes you stare harder. Lift your eyes to where you want to be in a few seconds and the wandering stops on its own.

Small wheels do not like edges. Slow down before a kerb ramp, a slab join, a drain cover or a patch of broken paving — not on it. Braking while a wheel is crossing an edge is what turns a bump into a problem.

Keep your knees soft and let your legs absorb it rather than your arms. Stay off the throttle across the join, cross it square rather than at a shallow angle — a shallow angle is how a front wheel gets steered for you — and pick the throttle back up once both wheels are through.

These are built for one rider. Two people on one deck have nowhere to stand and no way to put a foot down. In a group, ride single file and leave a bigger gap than feels necessary — the person in front has beginner brakes and may use them without warning. Do not ride alongside someone to talk to them; stop and talk instead.

The places worth riding in Beirut are places people walk. Give way to anyone on foot: they will change direction without looking, and children will do it twice. Pass wide and slowly, and where a space is too crowded for that, get off and push. Nobody minds a scooter being walked.

Stop. Come back to the stand and tell us. We would genuinely rather that than have you push on through a ride you are not comfortable on — a rider who has stopped enjoying themselves is a rider who is about to make a mistake.

It is usually fixable. Sometimes the scooter is wrong for you and the gentler one is right; sometimes you picked somewhere busy and flat car-free paving solves it; sometimes you need a moment standing still to start again without an audience. None of that is unusual. Come and ask.

Learn somewhere flat, paved and closed to cars. That description fits our Beirut Souks stand on Ajami Square, Beirut Souks better than anywhere else we operate, which is why it is where we send people who have never ridden before.

You will find us on Ajami Square, on the walkway outside JouéClub. The Souks are paved, level and closed to cars, which makes this the gentlest place in the city to get the hang of a scooter — there is nothing to dodge and nowhere you have to share with traffic.

Do a few slow laps of the walkways, until starting, stopping and looking ahead have stopped being three separate things you are thinking about. Then go and find the sea.

Where to go next, from every stand, is set out in the guide to the best places to explore Beirut by scooter.

Take the Basic. Not because it is the cheaper one, but because what you want on a first ride is a scooter that gets up to speed gradually rather than one that answers the throttle immediately. Easy to ride, great for first-timers and the waterfront. It is the one we hand to riders who tell us they are here for:

The quicker one will still be there afterwards. Plenty of people take the gentler scooter out once, come back and swap, which is a much better order to do it in. Both scooters and both prices are on the scooters and prices page.

And tell whoever hands you the scooter that it is your first time. It changes which machine we give you, where we point you and how long we spend showing you the brakes. There is no prize for pretending otherwise.