Let’s talk about e scooters

One less car, so I support them in the big picture.

I see a few a day, and they’ve never bothered me in the slightest. They go about as fast as a slow bike in the bike lane, so I just pass them when I can if I encounter one. They don’t go fast enough to bother me on sidewalks when I’ve encounter them there.

I think if perhaps hundreds suddenly showed up in the bike lane I’d be ticked, but that hasn’t happened yet so I’m not really concerned. I’m more worried about all the f*cking cars parked in the bike lanes than I am about the occasional scooter I see.

Two wheels good.

eScooters are sort of the present day Segway, really. Open-air personal transportation without exertion. Certain limits apply – they are not very stable, you have to have both hands on the bar pretty much all of the time, and if you want to carry anything, its either using a backpack or *nothing*. Of course, the feeling of cutting through the air feels good on any machine, and one need not sweat while using an eScooter, so I can see some appeal. Overall if these help get folks out of cars, then bring ’em on.

It *is* indeed a brave new world, with boundless confusion. First, the advent of the modern E-bike, in varying levels of e-assist to full throttle, such that every governing body worldwide has to reconcile that line when a bicycle becomes a motorcycle. Even StVZO (in its native German: Road Traffic Licensing Regulations) had to write standards for fast E-bikes. And then there are the electric scooters. When the current rules about scooters on trails were implemented decades ago, I don’t think battery-powered scooters even existed, except in someone’s dreams. I made note of this during the last ABAC meeting. And there were *maybe* a few brave/crazy skateboards powered by a 2-stroke gas engine, which could never be employed by a ninja. But they’re out there now, running fast enough to cause great concerns about speed differential and safety on the trails.

We must update our access and safety rules and perhaps even infrastructure to address emerging technology. Still, at the end of the day, if it results in fewer cars clogging the road… net gain.

Maybe just make the trails better instead of handwringing about 15mph e-scooters and e-skateboards?

Buzzfeed piece on e-scooter injuries: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/e-scooter-injuries-are-becoming-common-in-emergency-rooms?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top-stories

@TwoWheelsDC 180450 wrote:

37000+ people died in cars in 2016.

An absolute figure just begging to be normalized by a population size…would not surprise me if the scooters were in fact more dangerous per mile or hour of use. Of course, they’re also early in the adoption curve and there has been little policy work directed at them, so it would be expected that these would be the subject of relatively more incidents than a more mature technology with established policy and infrastructure.

@arlrider 180458 wrote:

An absolute figure just begging to be normalized by a population size…would not surprise me if the scooters were in fact more dangerous per mile or hour of use. Of course, they’re also early in the adoption curve and there has been little policy work directed at them, so it would be expected that these would be the subject of relatively more incidents than a more mature technology with established policy and infrastructure.

They also may already surpass bicycles with regard to embarrassingly bad “journalism”…. like this story from Cleveland.com. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/08/woman_riding_electric_scooter.html

You wouldn’t know it from the headline, but the driver of the car was 19 and drunk! And it ends with this brilliant bit – “The scooters have been known to cause injuries to their riders in 32 other American cities where they’ve appeared over the past year.”

Yeah! Injuries tend to happen when you get drunk and mow people down in your cars!