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 disappointed at the hexbear/c/urbanism knee-jerk reaction to the revolution in personal transport that is happening. These things are so, so, so much more effective at combating climate change than replacing every single gas vehicle you see with a similar-sized electric-powered bazingamobile. Like there isn’t any actual substance to these complaints. They don’t make any sense. When you’re standing on a scooter your head will be higher than if you’re on a bicycle. What are you even talking about???
This is a European city with functioning public transport and bike infrastructure. I do think electric-powered or assisted vehicles are great for the elderly and the disabled but these things come off as pointless toys when there are already plenty of other ways to get around without a car
I assume this is where the split between US and European hexbears on the topic is coming from
Is cycling use that high?
Europeans love to jerk themselves off about how great their cycling and non-car transport is and then you read stuff like this
In major urban areas, yes. However, basically every middle class family still has one or two cars. You also have low-density rural areas where you have to use a car to get anywhere
I get what you’re saying, but the rental e-scooters aren’t that good for the environment. The companies use them for a while and then they’re just tossed into the trash.
There are legitimate problems with escooters, around the tech bro start up approach of dumping them on cities without any prior consultation
I think a lot of it is not well thought out. But on the other hand if we wanted these things to be good for the environment this isn’t how we’d go about it. They’re there to make money for the company, thats it, and some of them even fail at that. They’re often more or comparably expensive to getting a “rideshare” in a car from a driver, which is insane.
I’m all about scooters and ebikes, they’re no silver bullet but they’re a hell of a lot better than electric cars… but there are a lot of companies doing their damndest to make the problems with them worse not better. At least they mostly seem to have swappable batteries now, and seem to be built a little sturdier. The companies that tried to do this with consumer grade scooters were throwing them out like every 30 goddamn days.
A disposable e-scooter produced by some techbro to get dumped in a city with a somewhat cohesive pedestrian/bicyclist network isn’t “so much better for the environment” because the alternative isn’t a car, the alternative is a bike. A ride-share e-scooter has a lifespan of about 9-18 months and then it’s kaput. It’s not good.
Yeah I mean I think that too but USian treat demons do not want to do physical exercise, we must accept this, a better world simply is not possible along these lines
average hexbear user