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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

The only real downside to scooters is that our cities are completely designed around cars. Nobody complains about cars being in the way, messy, ugly, unsafe, or causing accessibility problems, but it's even more true of cars than it is of scooters.

The quicker we can get our cities redesigned to meet the needs of all the people who need to get around, rather than just car drivers, the better. The problems with scooters are the same problems bikes or skateboards have, but just more visible because so many people use the scooters. The only way we are ever going to find the political will to adapt cities for non-car uses is if enough people use alternate transportation to make it worthwhile, and that's going to make things messy for a while.

Imagine how awesome scooters would be if a city had as many scooter parking spaces as it did car parking spaces, and as many scooter lanes as it did car lanes...

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>Imagine how awesome scooters would be if a city had as many scooter parking spaces as it did car parking spaces, and as many scooter lanes as it did car lanes...

Right, exactly. Parking would take up a fraction of the space of car parking, emissions would be lower, etc. (They don't necessarily need to be dedicated scooter lanes either; bikes are moving at similar speeds and with similar risk, so protected bike lanes would work well for both.)

I could bike to just about anywhere I might want to go in the city I live in within about 35 minutes. I'm sure I'd be healthier, I'd be lowering my emissions vs. driving, and in many cases I'd get there faster than via public transport: the routes don't cover everything and bus/train service is infrequent enough that you often have to wait. I don't, because I don't feel safe enough on the streets here; they're designed with cars in mind, for high speeds. I wish we had infrastructure designed for bikes and scooters alongside the car infrastructure, because I would absolutely use them.

EDIT: And if you want to see what the alternative could look like, take a look at this video and think about how many cars you would need to move all those people: https://youtu.be/ynwMN3Z9Og8

I will always maintain that Los Angeles would benefit immensely by simply making one of the east-west surface roads stretching across the city a bike-and-bus only route! One of the first CicLAcia events was down the entire stretch of Venice Blvd from downtown to the beach. I have NEVER had so much fun biking as I did that day, and what a fun way to cross the city!

I never thought of this. Everything annoying about rental scooters applies to cars x1000. Not to mention the energy cost of moving a 2500lb vehicle and one passenger, vs a 60lb scooter and a passenger.

Yeah, it's amazing the outrage for a few bird scooters lying on the floor.

I don't "like" it but compared to everything that is wrong in most cities (dog poops, filth, pollution) .. a few devices here and there are nothing worth yelling.. and yet.

> The problems with scooters are the same problems bikes or skateboards have, but just more visible because so many people use the scooters.

I'm not so sure about this. I've never seen people leave their personal bike or skateboard in the middle of the sidewalk. At worst you may find some bike attached to a lamppost or something that will take up half a small sidewalk.

Scooters, however, are often left literally in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking the passage. This also applies to shared bikes without stations, but for some reason it seems to happen somewhat less often.

On a personal note, I've tried them a few times, and to me there are two main issues which made me stop using them:

1. We have many streets with cobblestones, and scooters are absolutely awful on those. Bikes are a pain, but somewhat bearable. It also doesn't help that most paths away from traffic have mainly cobblestones.

2. I feel really, really unsafe riding them. They have terrible acceleration, basically no brakes and don't feel stable at all. (I do ride a motorcycle though, so I may be biased). I don't feel these issues on bicycles. And I think this may explain at least some of the risky behaviour we notice around here: people loathe having to stop, accelerate or delicately manoeuvre around something.

They're also freaking expensive here compared to the shared bikes, so I much prefer the latter.

I think the scooters being left in the middle of the sidewalk is more a function of people being shitty, inconsiderate, and lazy. Unless the scooters self park themselves or people who dump them get shamed I don't see how that fixes itself.

Personal bikes/skateboards get locked up and put out of the way because people have an active interest to keep them from getting scuffed or damaged, but that factor isn't present for a rented scooter.

> I think the scooters being left in the middle of the sidewalk is more a function of people being shitty, inconsiderate, and lazy. Unless the scooters self park themselves or people who dump them get shamed I don't see how that fixes itself.

I wholly agree. I think it's just like trash on the ground, it mostly doesn't get itself there on its own.

But maybe companies should take the habits of local people into account. If you know people won't bother to leave them out of the way, maybe don't deploy your service there? Just as if you know people are going to trash your scooters, steal batteries or anything else, you won't enter that market because it will be too expensive. But I guess the latter affects the company's bottom line, whereas the former is, at worst, just bad press.

Scooters being dumped in the middle of a useful space is a function of there being literally nowhere to park a scooter. Sure, people are lazy and selfish, but they aren't so lazy that they'll continue to take the inconsiderate option if you give them a place to put the scooter.

I don't see anybody suggesting car ownership should be forbidden from cities where there isn't enough parking. Why is providing parking only the responsibility of scooter companies, and not car companies?

Cities adapt to meet the needs of the residents, and the needs of the residents can change. That change shouldn't be forbidden because of the current structure of our cities

> but they aren't so lazy that they'll continue to take the inconsiderate option if you give them a place to put the scooter.

You'd think so. Take a stroll through the streets of Paris and then see if you still stand by this statement.

Even when the sidewalk is narrow, you can leave your scooter against a wall, not across the sidewalk. You can maybe leave it 50 meters further, where the sidewalk is wider, etc. You know, try to be considerate of other people who probably don't want to have to push your scooter out of the way just because you didn't feel like taking 10 seconds to park it properly.

When the infrastructure is lacking, you can either be a nuisance and argue that it's the city's fault for not providing wider sidewalks or whatever, or try to adapt to the situation while the city does something about it.

Of course the cities have to adapt to the needs of their residents. But they usually are slow to do that. Now, even if I personally dislike those scooters, I won't argue for outright banning them. But at some point, I can understand people being frustrated with other people being an outright nuisance.

And guess what? Paris actually has laws on the books prohibiting this (randomly blocking sidewalks, or riding a bike or motorised vehicle on them). But they are rarely enforced. So people get angry. And I figure that just as cities have to change to suit the needs of their scooter-riding residents, they also have to adapt to those of their non-scooter-riding residents, too.

Now of course, the best solution would be the one which would content both parties, but politics being what they are, it's easier to ask to outright ban things. But, again, I don't think that's always the best approach and don't personally advocate for it. I actually think that it would be better to replace cars with electric scooters, and that they do need infrastructure which the city should build (and they're actually doing it).

But I can't condone antisocial behaviour by scooter-riders while the city builds said infrastructure. And yes, if people apparently can't be trusted to ride them in a way which doesn't endanger or incommode others, maybe outright banning is a solution. I think "this is why we can't have nice things" applies perfectly here.

Also, just because cars are a nuisance it shouldn't mean that we should accept any new nuisance. We should fight back against this, and the first step is to not worsen an already bad situation.

Exactly. Convert every fifth car parking spot to a scooter and bicycle parking, and the problem will go away.

> Scooters being dumped in the middle of a useful space is a function of there being literally nowhere to park a scooter. Sure, people are lazy and selfish, but they aren't so lazy that they'll continue to take the inconsiderate option if you give them a place to put the scooter.

I’ve seen devoted scooter parking in a few places including Stockholm and I’ve never seen any effect on the users’ habits of throwing them down wherever.

In my view, bikes have been around long enough that most people who are riding them, have some amount of experience, that affects their habits and expectations. This would affect things like route choice, courtesy, parking, and so forth. When a newcomer shows up, they're already surrounded by experienced cyclists. A bike also demands a basic amount of skill that has to be learned somewhere. When bike shares are introduced into a town, you don't have a bunch of people on them who are riding a bike for their first time ever.

This shouldn't be technically impossible with scooters, and would happen if people owned them and brought them into the transportation mix gradually. But it doesn't fit into the "startup bubble" business model that seems to drive their rapid ascent and equally rapid disappearance in most cities.

Also, at least until the recent trend of dockless rental bikes, you needed to physically chain up a bike to something unless you wanted it stolen.

Most of the things that one can reasonably chain a bike to are generally located on the side of the street to begin with; they may just out into the public right of way because of their size, but it doesn't usually block the whole street.

Dockless scooters have no such requirement and so it's not that surprising that people went with the path of least resistance and just dumped them in the middle.

Point 2 is true. Very few people can coast around with them. Either we need training + regulation or it will go away because too many dangers. And that's on walkways.. in France they're categorized as vehicles so they're forced to use roads and you don't want to drive anywhere near an unsure user riding at 20mph without any form of safety protection and feeble balance.

I wish! I remember years ago on Slashdot people were really hyped about this "Ginger" thing that was going to change how cities were designed. Then the Segway dropped and immediately all these science-loving, future-thinking dreamers suddenly turned into NIMBYs.

The car-centric view has such a stranglehold on modern culture. Even in places like NYC you'll find pedestrians and public transport users dumping on cyclists or electric scooter riders, as if they're doing even a fraction to destroy the livability of the city as much as cabs and other large vehicles.

Segway's big fault was that it was just way too expensive. These small scooters are eventually proving the dream, mostly because normal people can actually afford them.

Price was part of it but even the company thought that they really needed to be used on sidewalks and they spent a lot of money and effort lobbying for that to be legal. (Though to be fair bike lanes were less common in the US at the time.)

As opposed to these scooter companies that just YOLOed the whole sidewalk situation and figured they would be too popular to ban once the courts/city councils finally got around to deciding what to do.

Segway solved the wrong problem; turns out that being self-balancing wasn't important at all. The real problem was parking/storage at the stops of your trip. The "shared" aspect solves that problem, making them a lot more usable.

Completely agree. I mostly get around by bike or running and I doubt I'll use scooters very much, but I'm excited for these to come to the city. The more people there are using alternative forms of transport, the more people become aware of how insane it is that we allocate so much of our scarce space in the city exclusively to the needs of car owners.

Totally true... It's often hard to think this way as we grew up with cars always there and it's not something you are used to think that our cities are just a big space that is at the service of cars and that who tries to say that is seen as stupid frik.

While we should indeed think more that reducing the space used by cars is just giving better alternatives a way to prosper without bothering pedestrians.

But really, it's not easy. Last night I was listening a guy on TV (a journalist who consider himself a progessist) who was complaining about bike lanes and that he's against the implementation they're doing in Rome because it's just at the service of the scooters, like if people driving them were 2nd class citizens. Fuck this people!

it'd be relatively easy and cheap to solve this problem in a lot of cities by turning all the on-street parking into schooter/bike lanes. you can fit 2 lanes (slow & fast) on each side of the road. you'd eliminate both complaints about riding on the road and on the sidewalk in one fell swoop. and, you'd internalize the cost of parking to boot.

And people don't come into your city from the outside but maybe you're OK with that.

maybe at the margin, but unlikely enough to matter. in any case, either drivers will pay market prices for interior parking or park in the outskirts and ride transit into the city. either way, they could bring their bikes and scooters (or use these micromobility or ridehailing apps) for added interior range and efficiency.

There is no reason to rent out some of the most valuable real estate in your city for $1/hour. If people from outside want to drive in they can use a market-rate parking lot.

I have absolutely zero problem with cities putting whatever policies they want in place. And folks deciding whether to come into the city for whatever reason will make whatever decisions they want. (Which will often include cost of parking.) I'd also observe that a lot of on-street parking is allocated for local residents.

Not to mention the fact that on-street parking often makes stop-sign intersections very dangerous because the parked cars block all visibility, even when set back from intersections.

There interesting thing is the increasing number of cities which are designating pedestrian only areas. I think scooters become a pretty natural way to expand and connect these areas within cities, overall making for more human oriented living.

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