car kills scooter users

we should ban the scooters

Okay seems like the actually dangerous thing in your story was the car??? Kids should be able to do dumb shit without having to worry about being turned into tomato paste.

> scooter boldly states on the front of it "do not ride on the sidewalk"

> only ever see them used and stored on sidewalks

Local city by me has had frequent problems of people throwing them into a river. My opinion on this is the two wolves meme.

We have this argument all the time concept vs implementation. Scooters seem like a great idea but when implemented by SV tech bros it ends up being a nightmare. I was in Austin tx for the eclipse and those lime scooters were everywhere. The was a dozen lying on the sidewalk in front of Amy's ice cream. Scooters abandoned on the grass in front of the capital. I even saw one on the the east-side interstate by the tesla factory. Its a shame Austin didn't just do the scooters themselves. City employees would drive around with a pickup truck and keep things tidy. Make the first three hours of use free so everyone can use them.

The anti scooter opinion on hexbear is really fucking weird to me, real ranting "the kids these days!!" type shit and just really weird in the context of the rest of Hexbear's opinions on public transit. Like the electric scooters cause some wires to cross in y'all's minds that just breaks something

Just this week in Vantaa, Finland three 12-year-old girls piled onto one of those electric scooters you subscribe to with an app and proceeded to get run over by a car at a crossing, killing one of them

Children killed BY A CAR but let's ban the scooter?

they treat the scooters as completely disposable

idk chief maybe they can like idk charge a deposit? this isn't a situation to be like "we've tried nothing and im out of ideas, ban scooters"

almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

they are one of those ideas that almost works, except when they fall short it's a shit show. i pedestrian a few miles a day and, in theory, one of those would be awesome for getting around and expanding my range of daily meandering. except the transportation infrastructure here is a contested shit show of homicidal cars pushing everyone else into unprotected bike lanes that suddenly become storm drains or delivery parking, or up onto narrow sidewalks that won't allow two normal humans passing each other to do so without one stepping off.

so on the sidewalk, i get insecure bicyclists doing the slalom around pedestrians and then these random toys whizzing along silently. when they are functioning. we've had like 3 rounds of companies come in with them and within weeks i see them littered in front yards and across sidewalks, beat to shit. because i mean who really wants to push one somewhere once it tries to extort you for more money and you're nearly there?

i think the technology might work here more easily if cars and all non-emergency vehicles were banned from existence, and then all the nice wide roads could be partitioned out and shared among the rest of us.

Surprised at the negative comments tbh. Imagine if a bike share program encouraged people to leave the bikes flat on the ground, wherever? The business model is a net negative for urban centers and needs to be at least reconsidered in several aspects.

Honestly I’m wondering if the people disagreeing even live with this problem? Finland has excellent cycling and transit infrastructure. Scooters are not the only way people can be car-free here.

The scooters also just go too fast in my opinion, and should not be silent. It is easy for uncoordinated people to ride the scooters silently through busy sidewalks at like 25 km/h.

Even just in normal use they are dangerous, there doesn't seem to be any helmet laws(nor would they be useful considering the buisiness model) and theres absolutely no built in bell or signal for the rider to use, while also being almost entirely silent, when even bikes make enough noise to be heard without earphones in.

Even in suburban or literally rural areas you get menaced by these fucking things now, its ridiculous.

They're so much worse than bikes. The design encourages you to be reckless and they're not nearly as easy to control as a bike. The wheels are too small to handle uneven ground well so you could hit a bump you didn't see at 25-30kmh and eat pavement. And I've seen several people walking their personal e-scooters that have run out of battery. They're too heavy to kick push like a normal scooter whereas an ebike is still a bike if it runs out of battery.

American infrastructure and society is straight up hostile to 2-wheelers.

One of my hobbies is when a scooter is blocking sidewalk access, like would block someone using a power chair or a mobility aid or a stroller or anything, i pick them up and bodily throw them on to something concrete that isn't in the way. Seriously considering just carrying an angle grinder in my purse and sawing the cursed things in half whenever they're blocking public right of way.

I hate them so much. A bunch of bazinga shitheads just drop-shipped them all over the country to colonize and monetize one of the last remaining public spaces.

Anyone know where the tracker on those bad boys are? Asking for a friend...

My friend had some ideas on repurposing their motors...

I like the scooters, but I recognize that intermingling them with pedestrians and bikes causes problems. My solution is that cars should be banned from every downtown area and those roads reserved for personal electric vehicles like scooters, ebikes, hoverboards, etc, thus encouraging the use of better urban alternatives to cars but keeping them separated from pedestrians (who should be protected from all vehicles) and bikes (when they have specialized infrastructure that is built for them that the other stuff doesn't work as well on).

Furthermore, speed limits on the e-transport should be enforced based on the tier of safety gear the rider is wearing - so like no helmet up to 5 kph, bike helmet up to 20, and motorcycle helmet at 20+ as an example. You could give each tier its own road lane too by repainting the old car roads with 2-3 e-vehicle lanes per old car lane.

Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don't see kids doing reckless shit with those, almost as if electric scooters were uniquely terrible

So what do you figure the magical compound in E-Scooters is here?