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 
honestly this is more carbrained than people who fetishize their giant stupid truck. so carbrained that the car, which was solely responsible for crushing the body of a child, is just not even in the picture. cars cease to exist as noticeable objects, they are simple facts, they are of the world itself.
the car is a force of nature, an act of God, the scooter is hubris of mankind.Yes although to be fair to doublepepperoni, the other complaints mentioned are not contingent on this strange take.
A car is just the worst case scenario, but these things are routinely involved in other types of accidents as well
People riding them drunk, falling and fucking themselves up.
You could say "don't ride them drunk then", but when there's zero oversight that's what's going to happen.
People riding them drunk, falling and fucking themselves up.
This happens with bicycles pretty regularly too.
You could say "don't ride them drunk then", but when there's zero oversight that's what's going to happen.
What oversight exists for bicycles?
What oversight exists for bicycles?
Helmet laws; 200 years of largely safety-focused design refinements; significant safety regulations regarding things like brakes, lights, where they can be ridden...
None of these things apply to scooters, which is why the injury rate for scooters per distance travelled is roughly 115/million trips vs 15/million trips for bicycles.
The scooter company apps don't let you rent them after midnight for exactly this reason.
what solution for scooter regulation is not worse than the problem? Scooter access and methystikovalian lifestyles are basic a human right. Do we abolish scooters? Fill the streets with cops?
methystikovalian
How can this be a human right if it's not even a word?
Are they prone to accidents on their own?
Where I am, they are a lot more stable than they feel while riding for the first time, they're very bottom-heavy, and limited to 25 km/h.
Anyone capable of hurting themselves on a scooter could easily do the same on any kind of foot-powered transportation.
Small front wheel + standing position makes them very vulnerable to hitting tiny obstacles and sending the rider over the bars head first into something typically hard and unmovable.
Bicycles on the other hand have a much larger front wheel typically and can roll over obstacles that would take out a scooter operator.
I saw some guy take a tight turn on one at full speed and hit a speed bump. He flew like 10ft in the air and hit the pavement with an audible slap. I asked him he wanted me to call an ambulance but he refused and just limped off moaning.
take a tight turn on one at full speed and hit a speed bump
seems like a user error to me
Yeah humans tend to do those a lot, hence why we implement safety measures to protect them from their own folly
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.
Ding ding fucking ding.
I keep thinking about something I read on this site a few months ago, paraphrasing here:
I should absolutely be able to walk around staring at my phone with headphones in. Even at my most distracted, I am more aware than a child, and children should be able to walk around without getting murdered by a driver
If a child is killed by a car, that is the responsibility of the driver and the infrastructure. Not the child or their behavior. That is something that shouldn’t be able to happen.
Separated bike paths that are more extensive than the road network. Being on the same path as cars has to be the most difficult, annoying, slowest, way to get to your destination. Pedestrian barriers along most car roads. Tight roads with low speed limits so if a collision does happen no one dies. Make rental scooters and bikes free to use so that children don’t feel the need to save money by piling onto one scooter.
The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.
The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.
We're not talking about the US here, there's an excellent system of public transport in place. Kids can just take the bus.
The infrastructure in Vantaa (Helsinki region) is very good compared to most of the world. There are plentiful separated bike paths. Most likely these girls were doing something dumb considering it was three girls on the scooter. The police are considering charging the driver with “aggravated endangerment of road safety” which implies that they were likely doing something to make the driver upset (not that it excuses murder).
I guess I’d have to see the exact road where it happened, but infrastructure doesn’t work if people go out of their way to use it incorrectly e.g. riding scooters on the road where only motor vehicles and bicycles should be.
The solution to this isn’t taking away one of the only methods that children have to get places on their own.
Bicycles still exist. Electric scooters are uniquely dangerous and stupid. They cause a lot of problems in urban centers while not adding any significant benefit over the bicycle.
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.
Kids should be able to do dumb shit
They shouldn't have access to motor vehicles to do their dumb shit on
Your complaints are indistinguishable from those levied against bikes. Multiple kids have been piling onto the same bike since forever. It's even made its way into Boomer/Xer nostalgia bait about riding around your neighborhood with your first love on your handlebars. I guarantee you the death rate is higher for kids on bikes than for scooters. I say this as somebody who loves being a cyclist and uses a bike for literally all of their chores.
And yet people don't play around with rentable bikes in the same way for some reason
Yes they do what the fuck are you on about. We did all kinds of stupid shit on bicycles as kids, I'm astonished I didn't have more broken bones as a kid.
I don't see piles of rentable bikes littering the streets. You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands
seems like designated areas to leave rented machines & some kind of penalty for leaving them where-ever is more in order. which also fixes the absurdity of a truck going everywhere a scooter person has at the end of every night to pick them all up-charge-relocate
Yeah, the current implementation utterly reeks of lazy tech bro mentality
Ngl the fact that they don’t have designated return spots is one of the reasons they’re useful. There’s no way in hell my apartment complex is going to install bike share racks outside each building, the scooters are useful precisely because other people will just leave one in the parking lot where I can take it and I can ride it all the way home.
If my city was forced to put up return racks I guarantee the closest one would be by the bus stop, a 10 minute walk away.
functioning within the fantasyland where something that isn't completely necessary for the techbro company to make a 'profit' is done at all, i think we can dream bigger than the inconveinient way things are already set up. more frequent drop-offs than bus stops, more frequent bus stops, drop-offs at common destinations we know lots of people will use them: public buildings, multifamily residences, etc.
also obviously this could only actually work as a publicly owned and organized system
People don't return them because proper scooter stands don't exist lmao. Bike share systems actually have physical infrastructure showing where you're supposed to return the bike. I worked for one of these scooter companies, "proper parking" was just somewhere on the sidewalk that isn't obstructing traffic. These are solvable problems, not something inherent to electric scooters.
I'd be happy if people left them on the side of the road but no, it's always on the road where they often proceed to fall over and block the path even more
You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands
So they're not free floating?
That's another problem entirely IMO, fact is kids are going to do stupid shit with whatever vehicle you give them.
I don't see piles of rentable bikes littering the streets
That's because they throw them in the canals
It really seems like your complaints are about kids doing kid shit but you know that is stupid so you launder them through complaints about newfangled contraptions
My main issue here is the business model, not the e-scooter itself
I think easy access to essentially disposable motor vehicles incentivises stupid behaviour. If these were their own scooters I assume they'd treat them with more respect
Would they leave their e-scooters blocking random streets though
We can agree this is an issue, but in my area at least this is also a large problem with the dockless rental bikes.
Where I live I've seen a couple of abandoned rental bikes but typically people seem to use them properly. The people that use them seem to be mostly adults, though whether this is because of the app being more effectively age gated or the bikes being adult-sized, I'm not sure
I also assume a bike is just less attractive for random joyrides
Edit: they're also less available, since you can only get them from docking stations spread around the city that you're also supposed to return them to
My main issue here is the business model, not the e-scooter itself
I don't think the e-scooters business model is losing out on 2 paying customers as they pile 3 at a time onto one and then also those customers getting killed. I know they're all run by bazinga tech companies but even that one's too far
They do though??? They absolutely do. Children in particular. Fucking around on bikes is like one of the top things children do.
They might do it a bit less with the rented bikes than the rented scooters but that’s just because most kids have their own bikes
Bikes are considerably slower, especially when ridden by children and also obviously don't move under their own power on level ground. It's weird that people are in favor of giving children access to motor vehicles in this thread.
The term "motor vehicles" has long been used to refer exclusively to cars, trucks, and motorcycles. You can't extend this to electric-powered personal transport vehicles like bikes/scooters/skateboards/unicycles and keep the same scary connotations.
You don't think theres a significant difference between unpowered personal transport(or assisted power bikes) and those with electronic motors that move entirely on their own power?
Not risk wise. I think more people want to use them because they don't have to put in the physical effort. Which is good. But then with greater scale you see greater quantities of bad behavior. Cyclists are relatively rare in most US cities.
No I think there’s very little difference between unpowered personal transport and those with electronic motors allowing them to go 15 miles per hour, which at least here is what the scooters are limited to.
You don't think a kid can find a steep hill if they wanna go fast
Might've been bad wording on my part, wasn't sure what to call them
E-bikes are not slower than e-scooters. In fact that’s my biggest complaint about the fact that my city only has scooter rentals and no bikes, the bikes can go faster and are way easier to ride.
I don't think doublepepperoni wasn't talking about e-bikes though, just regular rental bicycles. At least those are super common around here because they're subsidized by the city while I've barely ever seen a rental e-bike.
Right, so ban cars to remove their access to motor vehicles (getting run over by cars)
Local city by me has had frequent problems of people throwing them into a river. My opinion on this is the two wolves meme.
the people are probably doing it because of the other negative externalities of the scooters, not just cause its fun to throw heavy shit in the river
You'd wager wrong. People do this because the e-scooters are parked on the middle of bike paths, pedestrian paths, etc. making the city less traversable for everyone involved. Since the companies that rent them do nothing about this, people have taken the only solution available to them: Destruction.
Base, superstructure. The scooters are disposable techbro bullshit that clogs the few remaining public spaces. They belong to no one and no one feels any ownership or responsibility towards them. If you use them they're disposable, if you don't use them they're trash and an unwanted obstacle. They're not public transit infrastructure, they're shitty techbro "innovation" and everyone treats them as such. There are no ethical scooters under capitalism.
The issue is your society.
I think we all agree here. The concept though? No. The "concept" in this faulty society is that of a wasteful techbro scam that is rolled out with little oversight, that makes the current public infrastructure unsafe to use for all others. E-scooters have far.more accidents than bikes. They have a lifespan of 9-18 months and then they're trashed. They take up space on what little public area that's left, making cities even less walkable.
Sure in a rational society rollout and implementation of e-scooters would be done in conjunction with public infrastructure and be well-regulated, but this is not a rational society. We can dream up all sorts of scenarios where this could work fine, but the practical ones are faulty, which is why they receive critique.
> scooter boldly states on the front of it "do not ride on the sidewalk"
> only ever see them used and stored on sidewalks
spoiler
there is essentially zero bike infrastructure in this city, no one feels safe using the scooters on the road
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.
You got to love the silicon valley innovation of "what if we were just lazy and didn't pick up the products after people were done using them?"
in a way they took the shopping cart return problem and blew it up a hundred thousand times
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
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
nah dawg they are super annoying as it is the people who ride them are the problem. as someone who bikes everyday, statistically i will have to deal with some scooter dbag dude (always a dude) not following the rules and making the road unsafe for everyone, whether it's pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers. never once heard them use their bell or signal.
Bicycles are far easier to control, and they are designed for speed with 10x larger wheels. It is much harder to weave dangerously through crowds on a bicycle because of its length. The Lime scooters are electric, so it takes zero human effort to do all of the above which creates the perfect storm for people to do dumb things on them, with more ease than a bicycle.
There’s also the problem that there is not really a good place to place the scooters so they get littered everywhere. All this for something that doesn’t advance us past the bicycle.
I'm honestly not the biggest fan of most of these electric-powered street vehicles: e-scooters, unicycles, hoverboards, Segways, etc. They all seem like gimmicky, potentially dangerous novelty gadgets to me and pretty unserious as forms of transport
Yeah, sure, some of them are certainly portable in a way a bicycle could never be but they seem about as practical and safe as rocket-powered rollerblades
An ebike is still usable with a dead battery. Ebikes are far easier to control and handle uneven terrain far better. Zero cargo capacity on a scooter. If you want a smaller form of mobility than a bike onewheels, EUCs, and electric skateboards are all smaller and superior to scooters.
Aren't at least some of those things pretty accident-prone as well, some even more so than scooter type vehicles?
I don't know, the ER doctors on the news made them sound like diabolical death traps and skull pulverizers
I can try to square that circle for you. Here's my (I think pretty reasonable) take on scooters:
Right now, with city infrastructure the way it is, they're terrible. There's nowhere to ride them safely, they get left on sidewalks and bike paths, they're just extremely dangerous right now, whether you're riding one or just being around them.
But. They don't have to be like this! Get rid of cars, put racks of scooters next to train stations and bus stations, have a bit of societal education about how to ride them safely, and boom! Great solution to the last mile problem! If there are convenient places to park them people won't leave them on random sidewalks. If streets are full of scooters instead of cars, and if we get some rules of the road engrained in the public consciousness, then they won't be dangerous, either for the rider or surrounding pedestrians and cyclists.
They could be (and should be) a great innovation, but their current implementation is so, so fucking bad, and leads to serious danger and accidents.
anti scooter opinion on hexbear is really fucking weird to me
Do you live in an area where scooters create issues?
Scooters are a solution in search of a problem if you live in a place that already has other sustainable means of transport (separated bike lanes, reliable public transit). Vantaa is one of those places. The scooters do not solve a problem that exists here.
People ride these things on the sidewalks all the time, it’s fucking annoying. Maybe there is a way to improve them like reducing their speed limits and adding noises like EVs have.
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.
and then all the nice wide roads could be partitioned out and shared among the rest of us
hell no, if we get whole ass yankee wide roads with no cars, i expect a return to laissez-faire road rules. fuck a bike lane if there's no need to cordon cars away, pedestrians get to walk/run & weave however necessary to get where they're going. and i really could care less if that means cyclists and electric motor riders have to move slowly to negotiate that
You do not want this in practice, trust me. It's not fun and it makes so people revert to cars because it's then the only mode of transport that makes them feel safe.
the precondition is no cars. i don't see how people would be incapable of sorting and handling themselves without lanes and stringent rules
I assumed that. You can see your imaginary scenario play out in plenty of areas and it doesn't go to well most of the time. People are going from point a to point b and that means they're trying to go with some speed. If you make the traffic environment uncertain/unsafe then you get collisions and tensions. This isn't black&white, there's times where mixed-use with poor signage can be a good idea, but it's mainly for recreational areas that make it clear to all that they need to be aware of their surrounding. As general traffic planning it's not a good go-to.
once it tries to extort you for more money and you're nearly there
Oh is that how it works, yeah id be throwing my escooter into the river too if it just stopped working and was like PAY ME
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.
I assume people who live in the US are more forgiving towards any alternative to cars which is understandable.
They should only really go at brisk walking speed at most
Allowing the scooters to be left on the ground is completely down to (lack of) regulation in the municipalities. the same scooter company in the same country in:
- city A: completely banned
- city B: allows scooters to be "parked" (read: abandoned) in any public space
- city C: requires scooters to be parked in designated, painted bays, out of the way of bike lanes and street crossings
In city C people get fined up the ass for parking anywhere else (you have to take a photo of it parked to end the trip) and you basically never see a stopped scooter outside an official bay.
Anywhere you see parked scooters inconveniencing people (Berlin is so bad locals have started hanging them from streetlights), the local politicians made terrible choices.
American infrastructure and society is straight up hostile to 2-wheelers.
I'm from Northern Europe and so far it seems there's a split in opinions between US and European commenters which is interesting
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 especially awful on twisty urban sidewalks and footpaths where you'd have trouble maintaining equivalent speeds on a bike
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.
I may have gone too far in a few places with how I worded the post. I assumed the hate for these things was universal
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.
I would love a city that banned them and only allowed a municipally run bike share system.
We we could figure out how to re-flash the awful things again we could seize the means of propulsion. Shame they seem to have mostly fixed the firmware security.
Anyone know where the tracker on those bad boys are? Asking for a friend...
My friend had some ideas on repurposing their motors...
Dunno, but at least on older versions it was easy to pull the batteries.
The first gen ones, you could just re-flash the firmware and have a free scooter.
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.
It's a fine enough intermediary solution, but you've just replaced car-centric infrastructure with scooter-centric infrastructure. When people are against cars it's not specifically the "car" part it's the way motorized vehicles make the infrastructure worse for all. Replacing cars with scooters isn't really a good idea.
What you see most other places is that they convert wide roads to large pedestrian crossing and bicycle lanes and then on a longer timespan narrow them down to create small green spaces, resting areas and public utilities like repair stations, kiosks and public toilets.
Roads cannot be completely eliminated from a modern city - too many public transits and emergency services rely on them. I think shrinking every city street down to two car-size lanes that can accommodate a motorcade of firetrucks and ambulances in a big emergency is viable though, and as long as that road's there it makes sense to give people sustainable individual transportation that can take advantage of it. Yes, the city should be designed such that anyone can walk anywhere, and public transit should be widely available, but individual transportation is an awesome luxury and I believe that it is possible to do it sustainably if you don't insist on giving every single person a ton of steel to sit in.
Sure. I thought you were advocating for keeping roads as-is, but just for scooters.
