There I was, sitting at the busy intersection of Sacramento and Ashby in Berkeley, when I saw two boys that couldn't have been more than 8-10 years old fly by on Bird Scooters. And I thought to myself, some kid is going to die.
These scooter companies suck, I wish they'd all go away. If they weren't all going for hypergrowth, they'd be less of a menace. I can see the boon for commuters on the last mile, but when I weight that against how they endanger children, encourage illegal usage of sidewalks, ruin pedestrian experiences, and don't provide helmets - I think the industry is in need of a reckoning.
They also totally wrecked the coastal street/"boardwalk" in San Diego. As a pedestrian, you're constantly looking over your shoulder for drunk idiots on scooters.
I understand your frustration, but that’s a remarkably similar response that people had to automobiles first being introduced. Not to imply you’re a Luddite clinging to your horse drawn carriages or anything. Just that these concerns aren’t new.
The unfortunate reality is that nothing has solved the last mile problem for public transportation as well as these scooters have.
Say you want to go to the store two miles away and don’t have a car. What are your options? Walk for an hour round trip, take a slow bus if you’re lucky enough to have both where you are and where you’re going on a bus route, or overpay for an uber/lyft/taxi, which due to their cost structure are generally less cost effective for shorter trips.
I agree the safety issues are of concern, but there’s really no better solution currently to that problem, which has been the hardest problem to solve since the advent of public transportation.
The response to automobiles when they were introduced was the correct response. It took a ton of marketing for the car companies to effectively privatize and ruin our public streets.
Scooters are often driven on sidewalks, illegally.
There is no viable enforcement options - cops do not have the easy means to stop scooters going arbitrary directions - and there are no license plates for scooters, yet.
Lobby your city to build bike lines instead of banning scooters. They help everyone, from the disabled, to cyclists, to scooters, to everyone else because of less traffic and cleaner air.
> And I thought to myself, some kid is going to die.
Traffic fatalities from cars are already one of the top causes of death for kids and young adults, but has that made us in the states invest more in other, safer forms of transportation? Lol, no.
Even accounting for that the fact is cars are massively more unsafe than scooters. Are you trying to say that being hit by a scooter at 20km/h is just as dangerous as being hit by a monstrous block of metal moving at 60km/h
What are you even talking about? Pedestrians being hit by scooters? Cars being hit by scooters? Do you have a cite for any kind of data suggesting cars are more unsafe than scooters?
I've not tried it, but how easy is it to fake the ID? Like, does the photo feed to a person that OKs the ID manually, or does it just look for some vaguely rectangulary shaped object?
It scans the barcode and makes sure the id is valid. If it can't determine that it will ask people to take a picture of the id, which then gets manually reviewed by a human.
Disclosure: I work for one of the big scooter companies.
And lots of people do die on these things: https://www.google.com/search?q=bird+scooters+deaths
These scooter companies suck, I wish they'd all go away. If they weren't all going for hypergrowth, they'd be less of a menace. I can see the boon for commuters on the last mile, but when I weight that against how they endanger children, encourage illegal usage of sidewalks, ruin pedestrian experiences, and don't provide helmets - I think the industry is in need of a reckoning.
They also totally wrecked the coastal street/"boardwalk" in San Diego. As a pedestrian, you're constantly looking over your shoulder for drunk idiots on scooters.