The problem that people have with e-scooters is that they're new & different. So many people (and local governments) hate change and do what they can to control it. Officials and luddites alike complain about the problems that cars cause (like congestion, pollution, drunk drivers, etc). However, when the free-market offers a solution to the problem that consumers (locals and tourists alike) love, the folks who want to run our lives and tell us what we can and can't do, try to regulate them as much as possible (potentially killing the business or hurting the adoption).
Like most things you can get to the bottom of it if you follow the money (aka taxes). Cities (like SF) will offer e-scooter licenses (aka medallions) so they and their cronies can make these companies kiss the ring, limit the supply and take a big cut of the profits (which will ultimately hurt consumers... aka us).
New and different is fine, inconsiderate and inconvenient is not.
A lot of the bad behavior on the road is the same as cyclists in the area, except these scooters are a lot faster than the beach cruisers and fixies you regularly see.
Side note, sidewalks are generally pretty terrible for people in wheelchairs... cars pulled in across in driveways, curbs without transitions (think of anytime you put the front wheels of your stroller on the curb and lift the back up... how does someone in a wheelchair execute that same move?... they can't), roots, the general disrepair that many sidewalks suffer (terrible in Venice).
However, this does not solve the problem of parking. It would seem prudent to make sure there is clearly marked parking for the scooters, with fines or whatnot when folks don't follow it. This would be made a great deal easier if scooters have to be registered with plates, and more work without it - especially if you want to confiscate the bike.
Helmet laws arguably does not work very well for bicycles.[1][2] Don't make the mistake of thinking it will work better for scooters (if you can't back it up).
Still not sure why I'd chose this over a bicycle. A bicycle gives me daily exercise and doesn't need a battery to operate. Also, it runs well on ice and in 20 cm of snow when winter commuting. I guess that's more than you can say about scooters.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWhMEkMtLy0
[2] https://www.vox.com/2014/5/16/5720762/stop-forcing-people-to...
I do that all the time with my scooter. (I don't have an electric one, just a normal push scooter).
Portability is a huge advantage that scooters have over bikes. I take my scooter literally everywhere I go, anywhere in San Francisco. It is actually 100% of the time.
And If I don't want to scooter home, I just call an Uber and put it in the back.
That's a good thing. But leaving it locked outside and walking ten meters into the bar works fine.
> I don't have an electric one, just a normal push scooter
How far do you commute on that thing? Yesterday I rode 15 km to a lake to meet some friends. When leaving I felt like riding more so I took a 30 km detour to a natures reserve before I began pedaling home. The freedom bicycles give me is why I truly love them so much. No electronic black box with limited range stopping me, just simple mechanics and my legs.
Another great thing is that it can carry the things I need to take with me (usually a lot). Racks and panniers are awesome and takes carrying the load off my body.
And yeah, I get to exercise while having fun.
Also a folding bike is a much worse riding experience than a full size bike but bike theft is absolutely endemic in my city.
Maybe I should try an e-scooter, some of my colleagues have them.
Yeah, the evidence is actually pretty compelling that requiring bike helmets is a net negative to society. It's unfortunate how little it gets questioned.
This isn't about cities not favoring alternate modes of transportation but the realities of our daily lives. From distance to job, some time cause by having to change employers, to have so many things to do and little time to get them done. So once you start adding on the weather, the needs to carry stuff, or changes to your schedule, alternate modes quickly fall by the way side.
my issue with escooters is not the tech but the items highlighted in the article but I am not nearly as forgiving. I am not sure I want them in the bike lane and you know someone will ride on sidewalks. throw in no helmets or enforcement of requirements for one and its a recipe to hurt both riders and pedestrians. plus when people don't own it they don't respect it. not for all people but there are more than enough who just act out wrongly. there are stories of people dumping them in rivers, dumpsters, and even just breaking them. In a perfect society...
Secondly, make sure you wear natural fabrics. Lycra and polyster and all of the artificial fabrics stink a lot worse than cotton or wool.
That's the one time when I won't use my bike. Rain worries me as the rim brakes on my city get really weak, so I slow down a fair bit, but I am scared on snow and ice. Fortunately we don't get much where I live.
I've biked to work in ice and snow quite a bit. It does run, but I wouldn't say it runs well. I usually opt for the bus if the weather is that bad.
I like riding in the winter because the bike roads are usually less congested. :)
This is my biggest complaint about shopping carts too. That they are left all over the parking lot in parking spaces, propped on curbs and so on. You don't even have to walk back to the store! Cart racks are never far away. It's a huge pet peeve.
But I've never blamed shopping carts or thought we shouldn't have them because of it. I blame lazy/inconsiderate people. How do we solve this problem?
And it sometimes brings out the good in folks as well. I've often given someone smaller change for their freshly-emptied cart and had folks simply pay for my cart when I was searching for change. (This was especially so in the US as I don't use the metal carts nearly as often here).
Some also have small cash deposit (routinely spoofed with a similar-size token, but that doesn't matter, the tokens cost about the same as the coin). Maybe adding one of these and a reward prompt ("Did you park nice? Well done!")?
When I see people leave a cart in the wrong place I pick it up and put it where it belongs. Hopefully they'll be watching me. Sometimes you can only do what you can do in that moment.
You would be amazed what people will do for a small amount of money.
This article goes even further to declare the aesthetics dopey. really? they look just fine thank you very much.
It must be a literary habit to latch on to some minority negative opinion, so as to establish trust, then to argue the positives.
Someone is doing some really good submarining. Bird, most likely.
Promoting a negative opinion seems risky though. After all, isn't the dork factor widely regarded as being what killed the Segway?
Do you have any examples of when the "negative submarine" has been done successfully?
The total outlay for a 1.5M Bird trip is a buck 90, and you can use one if you've ever ridden a push scooter or bicycle as a child.
They're banned from the streets and sidewalks are a joke locally. I think they would be an awesome way to commute if you have bike lanes to share?
Bike lanes could be a better place for them. But a lot of the riders I see are tourists or scooter novices. A busy urban bike lane is not the right place to learn a new mode of transport.
Drivers are aggressive to the point that I nearly got ran over on zebra crossings multiple times.
Sidewalks are okay for pedestrians, but the (nice) "tables outside" culture paired with the (arguably nice as well) "everything is sheltered from sun and rain" attitude leading to lots of pillars/narrow ways it's nearly impossible to ride a bike/scooter.
The escooters aren't banned from sidewalks, but I don't know what the alternative is here. They're too slow to be on the roads and like you suggest, we don't have dedicated bike lanes throughout the island.
That said I know of people who can commute to work through the PCN and I'm so jealous of them.
The joke is that a scooter comes with a Bluetooth speaker, playing EDM music at full volume.. and that joke is somewhat based on the situation here.
There were a number of really bad accidents as well, those scooters can be really heavy. Run over a kid or an old woman, bonus points for driving off afterwards, and the bad rep is hard to avoid.
I like the tech, the climate here would be quite ideal for these things. Unfortunately there's no good place to ride them so far..
The one in the article are limited to 15mph, a colleague of mine rides one limited to 60km/h (37mph).
Not really, but yeah: it's "native advertising".
People also take a wide berth around the scooters so they congest sidewalks even if leaned to one side.
If they come back I hope they do it by replacing the stupid bike docking stations with scooter docking stations. Scooters are a better fit for that model. Pay homeless ppl to return them to the docks and solve two SF problems at once
The sidewalk hazards I _do_ encounter (in the Mission), are tent encampments, open drug use, and (occasionally violent) crazy people.
I'd much prefer we prioritize those issues.
I love it.
They will be outlawed if people ride them on the sidewalks. If not, I’m confident they’ll catch on everywhere.
Right after the bit about how he agreed to the terms, we see a photo of the author riding the scooter on the sidewalk.
I mean, the mods quit Brighton beach (UK ( so I've not seen a excess of rear view mirrors lately. (the used market may still be saturated..) [1]
phones are beacons, [2]
potentially we could be broadcasting centimetre accurate position and velocity
I like the idea of roadside computing cabinets downloading local trip data and doing the hard lifting but basic stuff like flow scheduling
how about this beacon tells you its stopping distance, driver reaction time, gear and acceleration limits and expectations of driver style?
I am convinced that there's so much more to learn about elementary ergonomics, about human vision not computer vision and about what open the market will pay to attach devices to vehicles that already challenge budgetary constraints for most new purchasers.
I absolutely would pay say $500 device capable of displaying correctly where I am regarding the other road users and their intentions or probable because they're on the work run same as always. for a glance
[3] I don't drive any more, but I would have claimed in my twenties that I drove to work at a incredibly predictable pace. I doubt it could be so smooth with the traffic today, but in suburban and rural areas, well a big pothole at a dirt crossing sure will affect the movement of hazards. Where LIDAR may not travel, "local pilot's license knowledge" I reckon could save a great number of lives. The sudden steering wheel input and deceleration and acceleration around a big pothole would well warn fast coming vehicles to not take that lane as free, if not then used for turning right across a middle lane, so stay on the hard shoulder instead)
I want to glance at the road between my handlebars at a projected map of data,
(only when i am glancing down. The other day I saw the Canon Eos 1-v 35mm film camera linked being discontinued. This and the wonderful Eos 3, had eye focus point tracking. I remember reading the brochures and thinking BS, but nope, I remain convinced that you are going to get better results if you have dark eye colour, not pale blue like mine
[0] my brother is a professor of transport research, whose tutor literally created the formal discipline (kinda Djikstra for transport, but sadly despite his traffic following equations being important, my brother and I should have either subscribed to better peace pipes, or lived when computing wasn't infant and so our interests not so separated. he is a Cambridge alum, I'm just either the commercial enemy or PPE impenetrability, oh i i did my best to not get the green corduroy jacket and lecture physics on Open University... I go on because I know nobody deserving a real professional commercial successful (meaning completed, delivered, used. I honestly think the nearest he came to a product launch was resolving traffic light sequencing in Tokyo in the early eighties, if you wanted to hire genius safe in the certainty should suddenly genius demand credit, the last thing you ate was poisoned, to my bro you go. I think it is because the litany of failure is so incredible. once he started reciting funded closed European programmes and projects. long minutes in, i realised he was reciting alphabetically by the conurbation and chronologically since, well he knows or once did, each and every one.
I couldn't plug my brother enough,
byt my excuse for doing so here, is the fact that I can write books how to get value from him of the order Google was paying for some feted guys tangled up in that uber unpleasantness. The fact may be that cases like that keep my always almost retired brother out of big business. AFAIK his refusal rate is in immeasurable range off p=1. I would drop my life to move that needle and get the world itself a result. (at least I can't imagine deaths in my brother's vision of transportation future) Not would, I guarantee you devotion, as far as the best alignment of a exceptional pitch with what makes a exceptional mind tick that has resisted professional commercial scrutiny for half a century. I would do anything to have him on my board if I was in the field. Not being funny, were the closest in a combined century, but I receive nothing. Silence. Zero... the air itself approaches 0K if i broach commercial transport research. Sure he could be just under NDA. Just NDAs I know displease his academic mind how rattle snakes regard dingoes. But you can take my limitless effort to broach any possibility as my word. Any time. Whilst age permits,be ideal..
[1] as in mods and rockers, see Quadrophenia, especially if you haven't, especially for
[2] this immediately worries me about"throwies" and how much this matters for potential unintended regulation consequences
[3]
CANON EYE TRACKING I WISH TO CONTROL ON STREET HUD OF ROAD USERS A series of tiny infrared LEDs (light emitting diodes) shine harmless infrared energy onto your eyeball as you peer through the viewfinder. Light sensors record the infrared reflecting off your eye and calculate the focus point. A computer in the camera then examines this data and decides which of the focus points is closest to that point and selects it. If the camera is in AI Servo mode then it will also adjust focus automatically based on that selected point.
