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 
They should either lower maximum speed those things go to 15 km/h or actually build road infrastructure for them, and ban users who leave them in the middle of the road, those things are a menace
I find the assumption that it’s the last rider who huck these things onto the middle of the road to be very odd and I genuinely have never seen it happen IRL.
Yeah, I’ve seen people who’ve never ridden them trash them, but never the riders.
I’m from a place where people leave older/children’s bikes unlocked on the side of the road all the time, and those don’t seem to end up blocking the path. Maybe it’s some scooter-hating prankster doing a psyop, but that seems to me the less likely scenario.
It’s not really psyop shit it’s just that there’s so many people who have entirely irrational big mad at the things that they kick them over even when reasonably parked or alternatively they will remove them from “their” space into the “others” space which end you at a slow moving game of increasingly damaged e-scooter ping pong across the street.
I dunno, where I’m at I constantly see people parking them in the middle of sidewalks, bicycle paths or just thrown on the dirt. Yes I see the riders do this.
So is there enough space on the sidewalk or bicycle path to park them without being obstructing?
Yes. They’re doing this in designated parking areas, where people also park their bikes and the like. These are large zones with plenty of space and clear signage. Next to these zones I’ll often see users of the rental e-scooters opt to throw them on the bicycle path or on the pedestrian path instead of walking/driving the last 5 meters to the spot put aside for their rental e-scooters.
Even if there was no space, I’d still complain about this however, since I do not see people do this with their own bikes and it happens to a much lesser extent with rental bikes. For whatever reason the system around rental e-scooters encourages irresponsible handling of the scooter.
A lot of cities have geofencing which restricts their speed along dedicated pedestrian corridors.
Idk about where you are but here they’re limited to 15mph. Which honestly isn’t fast enough to feel safe in the painted bicycle gutter with cars wizzing past at 50.
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“maybe we should get the government to prop up these silicon valley startup companies that dumped a bunch of scooters in our town without permission and ewaste them every 6 months.”
How about we ban these services and create appropriate last-mile infrastructure instead of basically just handing money over to do the work for lazy techbros.
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“if everything was gumdrops and candy we could have sensible transit infrastructure and a healthcare system that covers injuries but here in real life we have to privatise the sidewalks with unregulated scooters that don’t include a helmet and regularly injure people and bankrupt them with hospital bills.”
China’s transportation infrastructure and layout environment is very different from that of the west, with dominant public transit, relatively low car use, and significant usage of bicycles and other emobility systems. Inserting scooters into the mix is easier in that case.
Just dumping them onto sidewalks where they get in the way of pedestrians and wheelchair users, and then having riders only options being either getting sideswiped by cars in the road or bombing past pedestrians on sidewalks isn’t safe for anyone. Ceding the last semblance of public space in the west to private corporations is not acceptable and justifying it under the guise of “well it’s not like the government will implement a functional system so we have to let private companies do it” is a neoliberal talking point.
But we’re discussing them as they’ve implemented here, not in China. As they’ve been implemented here, they suck and make infrastructure worse for everyone else, not better.
This is just the dirtbike discourse from a few days ago all over again. Reposting this thread which I hope helps make some of the scooter-brained users here understand why people are against e-scooter implementation in public infrastructure.
Good urban planning isn’t when “you get to go fast on an e-scooter and any impediment to this is bad”. There’s a reason people are arguing for 15-minute cities instead of ceding roads to scooters and it isnt because they hate fun.
Read up on “Practice Theory”. A good entry point is Making Mobilities Matter.E-scooters have far more accidents than bikes. Rideshare e-scooters have a lifespan of 9-18 months, they are not sustainable. The alternative to an e-scooter is not a car, it is a bike or public transport. E-scooters can work, but as they are implemented in the west they don’t, which is why people critique them. Yes we should change our society, this doesn’t mean we should hand over the shattered remains of public infrastructure to techbro parasites.
If we’re going to have people riding these around cars, they should at least be required to wear helmets. I’m not trying to blame the riders at all but it is a dangerous mix to have something people see as a fun time out with friends, and people in their 3 ton Yukons looking at their phones.
And also the fact that these companies hold no responsibility for them results in all the injuries being treated in public healthcare with tax payer money so all the cost is offloaded to whatever country the tech company drops these in. Due to my work I have some info on how much these tend to busy up the ER on weekends when folks get hurt most and it isn’t hyperbole, it certaintly isn’t the same as bike accidents. It’s often facial injuries and stuff like losing teeth, things that could be completely mitigated with mandatory helmets.
Also they tend to make pedestrian lanes inaccessible to disabled people. Around where I live people leave them wherever, a person on a wheelchair is not going to get around with these things littered everywhere.
They need to be city/state run.
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.
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
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
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
lol you don’t interact with kids very much do you
Would they leave their e-scooters blocking random streets though
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.
Might’ve been bad wording on my part, wasn’t sure what to call them
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?
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.
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
That’s another problem entirely IMO, fact is kids are going to do stupid shit with whatever vehicle you give them.
Which is why the apps are supposed to be age-restricted
You occasionaly see one abandoned in a bush but usually people return them to the proper bike stands
So they’re not free floating?
Throw them all in the pit, I say.
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.
I don’t see piles of rentable bikes littering the streets
That’s because they throw them in the canals
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
Bikes aren’t motor vehicles
Right, so ban cars to remove their access to motor vehicles (getting run over by cars)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
Yeah those e scooters are wack. So are those like unicycle things. On a bicycle youre seated high up, and you have 2 big wheels and the bike itself. You’re much more visible.
On a scooter it just looks like you’re standing up at a glance so cars/buses/trucks are so much less likely to notice you.
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???
There are legitimate problems with escooters, around the tech bro start up approach of dumping them on cities without any prior consultation
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
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.
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.
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
European city with functioning public transport and bike infrastructure
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
On average, every Dane covered a distance of almost 14,000 km in 2010
Is cycling use that high?
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
Sounds like the problem is people driving cars, busses and trucks and being shit at it
looks like we’ve got a treat defender on our hands! letting kids die just so you can get your Transport Treats
(I’m joking btw, in fact I agree with you in this thread, just channeling UlyssesT)
NGL the electric unicycles seem dangerous regardless of cars and vehicles. I still think they’re cool as hell but I’m too much of a coward to try them at any real speed
my brother got one of the one-wheel things (set up more like a skateboard than a unicycle) and hoooo boy did he get hurt after a few months. They were perfectly designed to lure you into a false confidence and then fail when you leaned in too hard. He sold it after that accident and they were recalled a while later. The unicycle things are neat but it does kinda scare me how fast they go. Only seen a couple people being assholes on them though so let the thrill seekers do what they want I guess
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
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
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.
What do these things have over a bicycle
can’t scoot on a bicycle
You’re not helping the case for scooters here
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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
they did this to bicycles like a 150 years ago
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
Actually, there are also bikes you can use with an app but curiously you don’t see kids doing reckless shit with those,
I did watch two guys attempting to stunt on the big rental ebikes from one of these companies and they clipped eachother at speed and both ate shit like 5 feet in front of me lol. But they were older and also not in traffic, they were in a park
I am jealous of cities that have good bikeshare programs that don’t rely on leaving ewaste all over town
The rental bikes in my town are all boring old city bikes which I assume makes them much less exciting to mess around on
I also assume the city, which subsidises them, is too cheap to splash for fancy expensive ebikes
we used to have that. don’t want to dox myself but lets just say the rental scooter/bike mafia won out over the publicly funded system, and not by being nicer or cheaper.
I miss it so much
