
A proactive approach to e-scooter safety - deegles
https://onezero.medium.com/demystifying-e-scooter-safety-one-step-at-a-time-956afcf12d75
======
btrettel
Interesting that they found cyclists are more likely to run red lights than
scooter riders. Here's what a near collision between a cyclist and a scooter
rider (who ran a red) looks like from the perspective of a cyclist (me):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_DGR7isB4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN_DGR7isB4)

Over the years I've been amazed by the arguments other cyclists have used to
justify running red lights. The "physics" argument mentioned in the article
isn't convincing to me, because a cyclist's kinetic energy is lost relatively
quickly to drag and friction anyway. Stop pedaling. How long will you coast?
Probably not very long (i.e., over 100 meters) unless you're going downhill.
Seems to me that cycling requires constant energy input and stop lights and
signs aren't likely to contribute much to energy expenditures. (Maybe I should
do the math...) Edit: I did the math here and the energy from stopping was
higher than I expected:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257938)

I think the time saved from running reds is much lower than most red light
running cyclists believe, because anecdotally I observed that red light
running cyclists tend to go fairly slow. I can recall keeping up with or
catching cyclists who run red lights despite never running them myself.

I think cyclists as a whole need to stop running red lights. Yes, there's a
double standard here, as most drivers seem okay with speeding if they're doing
it, but can't tolerate rule-breaking from cyclists. But we shouldn't give
drivers excuses.

~~~
bdamm
There’s been some pack of the napkin research on this, and the conclusion is
that a cyclist stopping at every intersection and then speeding up to 20mph vs
a cyclist that doesn’t stop and just cruises at 20mph burn 500W vs 100W.
Unfortunately I can’t find a link right now but based on my own experience I’d
say that is spot on. Stopping and resuming at every stop sign or stop light is
far more taxing, so much so that many people wouldn’t even be able to do it
and maintain a better than walking reasonable pace through a city.

~~~
scrumbledober
I think the reasonable alternative then is to walk, not to dangerously run
through intersections when it's not your turn.

Edit: I will admit that I rarely come to a complete stop at a stop sign. It
definitely is a considerable inconvenience to get back up to speed, but a lot
of safety precautions are inconvenient.

~~~
foxyv
The problem with walking is the same issue. Unless the lights are timed for a
walking pace you will almost always have to wait 3-8 minutes at a light for
your turn. Walking in a place with a lot of crosswalks is excruciatingly slow.
Especially since a lot of crosswalk signals will only add you in on the next
cycle of green rather than let you cross on a green right away like a car or a
bicycle.

------
alasarmas
In my opinion, the reason why small-wheel (wheel diameter ~6 in / 15 cm)
e-scooters are dangerous, is their small wheels. The front wheel can suddenly
stop on a a pothole, crack, storm drain, curb, etc, and the rider's momentum
will fling them headfirst into the ground. I do recall reading some reports
that if the front brake locks up, the same can happen, but I don't know if the
risk of that is greater than on a bicycle.

(edit: bad metric conversion)

~~~
dkarl
You are right about the wheels. When a big cycling charity ride — thousands of
people — crosses railroad tracks at an angle, there are always multiple people
who catch a wheel in the tracks and take a spill. For bike wheels you need
that special condition of a narrow groove the right size, but for the tiny
wheels on the older scooters, it's much easier for almost any angled
imperfection in the pavement to grab your wheel or simply knock you off
balance if you don't take care to hit it right. Anecdotally, it's something
you have to be constantly aware of on imperfect city streets, and I took a bad
spill when I hit something on the street that I didn't see in the dark.

That said... the biggest danger is always collisions with cars, which is the
same danger you face on a bike, and the danger the article concentrates on. I
almost got hit on my bike by a car turning right across the bike lane just
yesterday, and the outcome was a matter of luck, not a matter of what vehicle
I was on. The article mentions the "Three E’s of Traffic Safety: engineering,
enforcement, and education" and I think we need more of all three. The driver
who almost hit me (I caught up to him and spoke to him) was an older man who
looked to be from out of town and probably had no idea he needed to check his
blind spot when turning right, because that simply wasn't a thing until the
advent of bike lanes, not when he was learning to drive and maybe still not in
the town or city where he lives.

EDIT: You're also right about braking. The wheels skid easier than bike
wheels, and it's harder to keep your weight back and down so the braking force
gets transferred to your body.

~~~
anonymou2
The danger is actually the bike lane, because it puts you in the drivers blind
spot, that kind of accident is so common it even has a name, it is called
right hook (in right driving countries). It is easy to learn to avoid
collisions with cars while driving a bicycle, one of the main lessons is do
not ride on the bike lane, specially in intersections you should be in front
of the other driver not on its side.

~~~
hannasanarion
This is only true for poorly designed intersections where an unprotected bike
lane abruptly terminates and mixes with traffic. There are many intersection
and lane designs that make right hook crashes nearly impossible.

~~~
anonymou2
The well designed bike lane does not exist, the whole idea of segregating by
type of vehicle is wrong. And this is so because it contradicts the principles
of traffic engineering. It is not done for safety but for political reasons.

~~~
hannasanarion
Do you believe that banning big rigs from city streets is similarly wrong?
What about separating walkers from cars with traffic, do we need to ban
sidewalks and extend the automobile lanes all the way to the structure
facades?

------
burlesona
It’s pretty easy to observe escooters are roughly equivalent to bikes in terms
of speed and visibility, and generally in terms of behavior as well. The
biggest variable seems to be whether they ride on the sidewalk: I rarely see
bikes on the sidewalk anywhere, but scooters seem to use it in many cities.

Just as with bikes the main problem is cars. Road networks designed as car
sewers make life miserable for any non-car in close proximity. The single most
important way to fix that is to lower the speed of the cars. Practically
speaking you can only do that if you have a network of both streets (low speed
shared use) and roads (high speed exclusive use), such that cars can get to a
road and then go fast, rather than going slow everywhere.

But in North America what we have is worse, we’ve designed everything to be a
“stroad,” where houses, shops, schools, everything, are directly attached to
high speed car sewers and nothing else. That’s the most dangerous
configuration you can make. The cars need and want to go fast, but they never
know when someone is going to pop out of a driveway or into a crosswalk or
there will be a bike in the road etc.

The number of scooters isn’t really creating anything new, it’s just
highlighting the problems of Stroads by putting a lot more people into the
life experience of a cyclist.

------
carapace
> I am now convinced that the more appropriate question may be “Are our
> streets safe?”

Ya think?

It's insane to mix car traffic and people.

It was deliberately normalized by a systematic campaign of propaganda. (This
is true, it really happened: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam
Ruins Everything)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM)
) We went from "speed demons" to "jay walkers". Fast-forward several decades
and more Americans have died from cars than from wars. (The rest of the world
_also_ has horrific death rates from cars but more time of war.)

> These clips make the civil engineer in me cringe.

As well they should. We're looking at a system that is, inadvertently but
fundamentally, designed to kill people.

> One potential solution is to add a bike box to increase visibility of
> cyclists and scooterists.

And that's the Stockholm Syndrome, if you will, causing cognitive dissonance
leading to blatantly illogical statements from otherwise sane and intelligent
people.

Anthropologists point out that _every society_ succeeds at getting it's
children to act like it's adults. Part of this is the normalization of
whatever weird stuff your society/culture has going on. I'm reminded of what
the New Guinea man said the missionary, "If God didn't want us to eat people
He wouldn't have made them out of meat."

Putting car and non-car traffic on the same road is our cannibalism. "Once you
see it..."

~~~
llukas
> It's insane to mix car traffic and people.

It is not. Non-car traffic just needs to be prioritized properly, that is
being more important than car traffic. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonerf)

~~~
carapace
Okay _those_ look pretty decent, especially if they are designed with bollards
and doglegs and such, so you can't get up to a dangerous velocity around
people. It's still _a little_ insane, you're still going to get e.g. kids on
bikes getting crushed by multi-ton metal horseless wagons, but it's not as
insane as e.g. the clips in the article.

~~~
llukas
See also this: [https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-
liabili...](https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-liability-in-
the-netherlands/)

------
dijit
FWIW there is a law in Sweden that prevents any assisted motor transport going
over 20KM/h, which is pretty normal cruising speed for a cyclist.

There is definitely a different perception here regards to safety because of
it I think.

However, people are absolutely awful at parking these things. They're almost
more dangerous stationary; because people just leave them in the middle of the
walkway or cycle path sometimes.

~~~
agumonkey
20km/h is a lot for newbies. I've seen a few users who couldn't drive their
scooter safely. Curves taken too late and too wide. Also they use the roads
freely and it's even worse than motorbikes.

~~~
dijit
20KM/h is a lot for newbies? really? I don't think that's true, how do they
handle bicycles (which easily exceed that).

~~~
agumonkey
apple and orange, a bicycle is nothing like an e-scooter and people are still
learning them.

I swear you see people running into you even though the corner was 5m large..
they just mishandled the inertia and it wasn't an emergency turn. They had
plenty of time they were just confused about the physics of it. Contrary to a
bike, it's a tad harder to lean into the curve

------
mark-r
It's a mistake to only consider fatal accidents. I fell while roller skating
last year and hit my head. I had to be rushed to the hospital for brain
surgery, and spent over a month there recovering. It took over 6 months to get
back to work.

Obviously this experience has nothing to do with E-scooters, but it does point
out how easy it is for a minor accident to mess up your life.

~~~
moron4hire
I'm glad you were able to recover, eventually. I hope it wasn't with too much
change to your life :(

This is why I drive. All arguments aside about how cities "should" be, I don't
live in one where I can magically waive a wand and make things exactly like I
want them. And a permanent brain injury (or a major hand/arm injury!) would be
really bad for my career.

So I also don't actively practice contact-martial-arts anymore.

~~~
mark-r
Thanks for the well wishes. I think the health care professionals genuinely
expected me to have more long-term issues than I ended up having. Early on
they told me the key is to be serious about the therapy, and I was.

------
mech1234
I was really hoping to see statistics regarding fatal accident per mile in
comparison to other forms of transport, guess I'll have to dig deeper for it.

Makes sense that scooters would be roughly similar to bicycles though.

------
olliej
I don’t think they’re particularly dangerous, the problem I have is them
littering footpaths and thoroughfares (they frequently block most of the plaza
in front of the BART station I use.

Then there are idiot riders going on and off the footpath essentially playing
chicken with pedestrians - I had one this morning going the wrong way on the
road scoot onto the footpath immediately in front of me while I was crossing
the road, pushing me back into traffic.

So it’s a combo of the companies littering the l scooters everywhere, and the
riders being idiots and having no consequences for said idiocy.

~~~
hannasanarion
Just curious, what is your opinion on street parking?

Since you're so mad that a public scooter for rent takes up 3 square feet of
public space, you must be absolutely furious that a private car can take up
300 square feet.

------
EugeneOZ
I have a bicycle and e-scooter, so I can share how it "feels" (I strictly
follow rules and never cross the road on a red light):

* Scooter is more safe than a bicycle (for a rider). In case of collision it's trivial to step off from the scooter - moving your body from the bicycle takes much more time.

* Bicycle is more maneuverable - bigger front wheel gives much more control.

* You need less of your attention to drive a scooter, so you have more "CPU time" to monitor the road situation.

* Making stops is significantly easier on scooter, so you have less temptation to quickly cross the road in a second before the red light.

* Speed should be limited on scooters and it should be "sealed" somehow to prevent "jailbreaking" \- after a few days you'll stop "feeling" max speed on e-scooter and you'll want it to go faster, even if you are already faster than any bicycle. It's really dangerous for pedestrians.

* By the previous reason, e-scooters should be restricted to bike lanes only.

* You have higher chances to sweat when walking, than when riding e-scooter. For some travelers it's important :)

Overall, e-scooter is a great tool to deliver you from A to B, but bicycle
gives much more satisfaction from the process of riding itself.

~~~
notJim
> Scooter is more safe than a bicycle (for a rider).

Weird, I feel the opposite. You can't really just step off a scooter when its
at any decent speed (I accidentally tried when the brakes failed on one… would
not recommend.) Scooters feel way less stable, and have really weak braking
compared to bicycles.

~~~
leetcrew
I guess it depends on what a "decent" speed is. all the rentals where I live
top out just under 15mph. it's awkward to dismount at that speed, but it's not
a big deal; you just end up running for a few steps.

~~~
notJim
Ha yeah, I literally attempted this and ran "a few steps" before face-
planting.

~~~
EugeneOZ
Still better than face-stopping some truck.

------
jandrese
No matter what the evidence says people will be decrying how dangers those are
because they are perceived as a nuisance. Ultimately they move too fast for
sidewalks, and too slow for streets making them a problem in either location.
Bike lanes would seem to be the best place for them, but that comes with all
of the issues with bike lanes in the city.

~~~
danielbln
What are those issues? Shouldn't every city strive to create as many bike
lanes as possible to improve non-car transport?

~~~
jandrese
Delivery vehicles parked in the bike lanes. Cars cutting off the bike lanes at
every intersection. No traffic light sensors in the bike lanes. Bike lanes
that are poorly connected because they're being retrofitted into the city
peacemeal and don't cover the major thoroughfares. These have been discussed
to death in other articles, I didn't want to sidetrack this conversation with
another digression.

~~~
MereInterest
At the risk of following the explicitly marked sidetrack/digression, those all
sound like issues based on the assumption that only car traffic matters,
rather than any issue inherent to bike lanes.

~~~
bluGill
Until the police enforce other rules the reality is only car traffic matters.
Bike lanes and the like are a cheap distraction to shut up a few noisy voters
and look green.

------
TrueDuality
Washington, DC doesn't seem like a great sample city from my experience. I
don't have any empirical data but travel quite a bit and the density of
scooter deployment in DC is significantly less than in cities such as Austin,
TX. This is based exclusively on my ability to find / use these scooters and
the density I've seen on the maps they provide.

I suspect there will also be cultural elements to each region they're deployed
in that will have a significant impact on injuries (New Jersey
drivers/scootees are wildly more aggressive than Minnesotan drivers/scootees).

Once again this is all anecdotal but trying to infer anything from one city is
likely going to be just as flawed for any meaningful conclusion.

~~~
jmull
> Once again this is all anecdotal but trying to infer anything from one city
> is likely going to be just as flawed for any meaningful conclusion.

Well, DC-based data is quite relevant to DC. You're providing reasons to do
similar work in other areas, not reasons to dismiss this work.

~~~
TrueDuality
The article is attempting to infer general safety data from a single
intersection in Washingtion, DC. In that context I hold by my statement. Even
for Washington, DC in general it likely isn't representative.

------
gameswithgo
We have a ton of these in Austin. If they just dropped the allowed max speed
by ~25% it would be a lot less horrifying to have them flying around.

~~~
danielbln
Here in Germany all scooters have to be capped at 12.4mph. What's it in
Austin?

~~~
TrueDuality
They used to be able to hit 30mph when they were first deployed. They've
reduced the max speed a couple of times and I think its now limited to about
15mph.

~~~
hannasanarion
Lol what delusional bullshit is this? There aren't any electric scooter models
that go above 15 and there never have been. Maybe the $2000 ones can get up to
20, but that's it. The Xaomi m365 that most rental companies have been using
since their inception can go up to 15, and they all add a limiter that keeps
it below 12.

------
notJim
Portland's Bureau of Transit did a 120-day study of scooters here which has
some interest bits of information. The PDF is here:
[https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/709719](https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/709719)

Findings include that injuries did rise, but most didn't warrant a hospital
visit. There were no deaths during the study period.

Another interesting finding is that scooters strongly prefer riding on cycling
infrastructure, especially neighborhood greenways and protected bike lanes,
and are unlikely to ride on the sidewalk when those are present. As the degree
of protection increases, however, more people ride on the sidewalk.

------
jerome-jh
No mention that e-scooters lack braking power to be safe. Many only have a
rear brake, which is much less efficient than a front brake for stopping, for
any vehicle. But having a front brake on a scooter would be very unsafe as
well, because it would be too easy to flip over the front wheel. E-scooters
cannot be made safe beyond 10mph/15kph.

Ever wondered why bicycles have large wheels?

------
isuckatcoding
What do you guys think about e-bikes? I feel like they are a good compromise
between bikes and these escooters

~~~
mikestew
I own two scooters (cheap Xiamoi, pricey Boosted Rev). Between the two of us,
we have two mid-upper range e-bikes. I've ridden both extensively to work and
elsewhere. My conclusion is that e-bikes are the future.

Scooters are easy to ride, but hard to ride _competently_. If you know how to
ride a bike, you're unlikely to fall off unless you hit something. Not so on a
scooter. I hit a manhole cover on the way to work one morning, and ended up
standing next to my scooter with a broken helmet in my hand, while not being
100% sure how to get to work (I'm fine now). I fall of bicycles only when I a
patch of black ice, or something solid.

I can load my bicycle up with front and rear panniers, a trunk, and carry
enough to do some shopping. Scooter: whatever fits in the backpack.

Scooter: hands on the handlebars at all times. If you get good, you can
carefully choose the smooth spots in the road to take a quick second and
scratch your nose. Bicycle: go ahead, take another sip of that coffee from
your handlebar coffee cup holder while you cruise down the trail. Hell, take
_both_ hands off the bars to zip the jacket up.

I love my Boosted Rev, it's well made and a hoot to ride. But it's a
recreational vehicle. It's the impractical Lotus Elise that has room for two
people and a messenger bag, but what fun to drive. For real transportation
work, the bike comes out.

~~~
dopeboy
I own an ebike (Ancheer) and a escooter (Xiaomi) as well; cool to see your
analysis here.

You're dead right about ability to handle bumps. With my scooter, I will watch
the road in front of me very carefully to scan for rough areas; there's a fair
bit more of cognitive load. And this is even with air tires. I might disagree
with on what's the future; there's two things that make them so amazing:

\- Their ability to coexist with pedestrians. I'm very easily to weave in and
out of traffic on sidewalks and maintain my safety and that of those around
me. It's a lighter foot print with much lower clearance.

\- Portability. I can fold it up, take in an uber, take it in a train (without
doing the excuse me dance in and out). Bikes, electronic ones especially,
aren't there yet.

------
JoeAltmaier
I wonder if those stats should be normalized for velocity. Bikes can go 20MPH,
scooters less, pedestrians 1-3.

Velocity means less time in the intersection. But it also means less time to
observe their approach, less time to react and less likelihood to even know
you are going to have to react.

~~~
hannasanarion
It doesn't mean less time in the intersection if the cyclist is starting from
standing. Bicycles are slow to get up to speed, motor vehicles, cars and
e-scooters, will always get through the intersection before a cyclist will.
That's why they run red lights so often: cold starts take more effort and time
and can be less safe than running it.

------
chrisstanchak
I lived directly in the scooter epicenter. Mission Beach, CA.

They are dangerous if not throttled down and geofenced from walkway.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQv6YP5UGV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQv6YP5UGV8)

------
huebomont
Of course they're not, and anyone concern-trolling about e-scooters while
accepting cars as a normal and irreplaceable part of our streetscapes isn't
really concerned about safety.

