I’ve been thinking about bike vs scooter a lot lately too. Austin is overrun with scooters and I used them for a little while before finding the electric Uber Jump bikes. They seem superior to scooters in every way in Austin, which makes the 20:1 ratio of scooters to bikes a bit baffling.

But I can see your point in SF where I use to walk 5 blocks from my apartment to the muni train and then another five blocks from the train to the office. Scooters would have been ideal there.

The e-bikes have one massive advantage in Austin - you can take them on the Butler Trail that runs the width of the Austin along the river. You can get almost anywhere of interest very quickly on one of the jump bikes.

There’s also no useful bus or train transport in Austin (I thought SF was bad) so you’re not using the small transport to move small distances between larger transport as often.