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

The app is supposed to have an age restriction but it's easy to bypass and you're not supposed to have more than one person riding on one, which people routinely ignore

I hate seeing kids and teens speeding around dangerously on those fucking things and then just leaving them laying around on high-traffic bike routes because they don't give a shit since they treat the scooters as completely disposable

Fucking awful bazinga-brained Silicon Valley-ass idea and business model. 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 thonk

  • Nacarbac [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    15 days ago

    Agreed, but e-scooter rollouts have basically fuckall integration with the existing infrastructure/forms of travel in a city or with standard driving education.

    While they're great in theory, they should be being introduced as part of a massive overhaul of personal transportation infrastructure, education, and regulation... or at least some supervision with actual teeth behind it. But we're probably past the age of doing stuff like that, so as is it's just letting random companies step in to extract money while impinging on the rough grey area created by existing safety systems.

    Eventually that'll work itself out, sure, but in much the same way that we started mandating lockout switches on Giant Blending Machines after The Incident With the Giant Blending Machine.