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

  • itappearsthat
    ·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      6 months ago

      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?

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        6 months ago

        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.

      • itappearsthat
        ·
        6 months ago

        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.