[peterw_diy]

@mstone 191677 wrote:

No, it really can’t. Consumer GPS isn’t that good.

And it’s not a question of ten feet, anyway, is it? More like 2-3 feet. Have you never had the experience of your $500 smartphone not understanding that you’re driving your car in the HOV/HOT lanes, of it thinking you’re in the local lanes thirty feet away? Why would you think a $500 scooter be so much better?

For parking enforcement, scooter GPS is only useful for preventing grossly inappropriate acts like a known customer ending a ride in the middle of a bridge. There’s no hope of it differentiating between legally in the corral and illegally lying across the sidewalk next to the corral.

[peterw_diy]

@dasgeh 191563 wrote:

Other ideas that could address bad parking while not increasing car trips:

Only one thing can fix the parking problems (inconsiderate renters, jerks who deliberately move scooters to worse locations, juicers who stage poorly, scooters being accidentally knocked into bad positions): REQUIRING THEY BE PARKED IN WELL-PLACED DOCKS.

They’re too easy to move, there’s no reasonably clear and enforceable parking rules, there’s no way to establish fault, and I suspect too often scooters are knocked over in blameless incidents.

Dock them or ditch them.

…and hope my friend is right who thinks the dockless scooter companies will disappear but we will see individuals buy their own scooters, which they will have every incentive to park nicely (indoors).

[peterw_diy]

@sjclaeys 191533 wrote:

Why not? Why does a sense of equity for a scooter user outweigh public safety?

Shoot, why not fine anyone who walks past a poorly-parked scooter? Advocates seem to think it reasonable to expect Good Samaritans to fix parking problems; why not monetize the fact that some of us are too lazy and selfish to stop and fix scooter problems others created?

[peterw_diy]

Yet another chance to tell Alexandria staff that you think the new “hybrid” plan is inadequate: the City has a survey open until 11:59pm on Monday, June 10.

https://www.research.net/r/AlexandriaVA-SeminaryRdPublicComment

[peterw_diy]

@mstone 191412 wrote:

so if a kid moves your scooter you get a $25 bill?

Or even if it’s just knocked over by a raccoon. Totally reasonable.

[peterw_diy]

@mstone 191412 wrote:

so if a kid moves your scooter you get a $25 bill?

Exactly. This is one of the big problems with dockless – it’s virtually impossible to hold anyone accountable for bad parking or vandalism of the devices. Thus the obstructions and short service life.

[peterw_diy]

@Sunyata 191179 wrote:

Bumping this back up on everyone’s radar! Last day to register is Wednesday!

Quoth the website, “** Ride is SOLD OUT **”

😕

Have fun, everybody!

[peterw_diy]

@lordofthemark 191119 wrote:

There is no sidewalk part of the way there (the uphill side) . The City has a policy to fill sidewalk gaps. This is a priority gap to fill (one of the few in the City on a street with volumes this high) They can call the striped buffer “filling the gap”

Thanks much for the details. The illustration suggests the striped buffer will be “protected” on one side. Is that with the cheap plastic bollards of the sort we see around CaBi stations that are often knocked over with no evidence of damage to the car that knocked them down? Is there some authority like FHWA or AASHTO that blesses this treatment as a substitute for a sidewalk? ISTM it’d be better to make it safe for people to cross the street to the side where there’s a normal sidewalk with a 6″ concrete curb as protection from distracted motorists.

[peterw_diy]

I hope someone was able to attend last night. If so, did City staff explain the rationale behind that center section using seven foot buffers plus sharrows on the travel lanes? ISTM if you have seven feet between the main travel lane and the curb, you’d want to make that a painted bike lane. The proposed design looks more expensive (in addition to painting the lines at the edge of the main travel lane and the buffer and the bike logos, it requires lots of diagonal striping), more dangerous (advocating mixing modes of travel into the same lane), slower (when folks like Ken & I take the lane), and more dangerous (as motorists swerve into the other travel lane to pass us).

Is there some engineering guidance from AASHTO or some other organization explaining when you’d choose a no-man’s-land buffer plus sharrows over a normal painted lane?

I just don’t understand that part of the recommended design at all.

[peterw_diy]

@dasgeh 190967 wrote:

The way I read the law, right on red requires a car to stop behind the stop line, and to not proceed beyond the stop line unless the drivers is sure it is safe to proceed. If the driver can’t see, that’s not permission to go beyond the stop line to look – they should be staying put until the can know it’s safe to proceed.

Which would mean that at many intersections with mere stop signs it would often not be legal to proceed due to poor sight lines. Shoot, there are intersections where even on a bike, without six feet of hood and dashboard in front of the rider, it’s difficult to check cross traffic from behind the stop line. It’s absurd to expect people to follow such laws.

Ken, thanks for the details. Yes, failing to respect the stop lines and crosswalks without RTOR is deplorable. And I’d like to see more intersections ban RTOR especially where sight lines are poor. The only reason I much like RTOR is that it allows cars with internal combustion engines to move sooner and burn less fuel, but hopefully electrics and hybrids will neutralize concerns about fuel waste when idling.

Dockless scooters though, they just suck. There are too many physical and economic challenges for those to ever be a decent option.

[peterw_diy]

@lordofthemark 190945 wrote:

Temporarily blocking – but anyone trying to cross with the light would have had to go outside the crosswalk to get around.

Or wait. Radical suggestion, I know.
@lordofthemark 190945 wrote:

A friend of mine got hit by a truck that way, her bike was totaled, but by a miracle and good instincts she was not badly hurt.

That sucks but TBH it sounds like she was partially at fault.
@lordofthemark 190945 wrote:

But yeah, lots of people, both drivers and people engaged in the public discourse, don’t think that cars “temporarily” blocking a crosswalk is a big deal. Not as bad as someone putting one of those ugly scooters on their lawn. Feh.

For any motorist in the right lane where right on red is allowed, blocking the crosswalk is pretty much required to proceed safely. So yeah, it’s often not a big deal and is far more understandable than blocking right of way or littering private property with these rolling e-waste** contraptions, both of which are easily avoidable.

** $500 each and they don’t even last five months?

[peterw_diy]

@lordofthemark 190933 wrote:

Yesterday evening, as I was riding down King from Beauregard to North Hampton, I saw one scooter rider riding on the sidewalk (west side of King) and five, count em, five cars blocking crosswalks (one the crosswalk at Beauregard on the east side of King, four at 28th and King, on the east side of King, two on each side of 28th) So, er, yeah.

Parked and blocking, or temporarily blocking with vehicle operators inside?

[peterw_diy]

The free weekly Alexandria Times this week pulled a hard 180 this week and published a piece sympathetic to scooters, focusing on new riders. It has nice bits about replacing car trips, reducing environmental impact, etc. — but I LOLed on this scooter apologist quote about Scofflaw Scooterists:

Quote:

If you are already going to be inconsiderate and leave something in the way and diminish a public good, you were already going to do that. The scooter didn’t change it.”

As if the riders who park the bikes badly and the residents who abuse the scooters wake up with a “let’s go do some crimes” mentality and, you know, it’s just a question of which large metallic object they were gonna block the sidewalk with. Ha!

[peterw_diy]

@DismalScientist 190514 wrote:

Scientific “truth” is not determined by consensus, but rather by not being found false through experimentation or other relevant empirical observation.

Once again, I have not stated my personal opinion on global warming as it would be irrelevant; I have neither the time nor inclination to …

Blah, blah, blah. Congratulations, you’re now the second person added to my Ignore List.

[peterw_diy]

@Erin Potter 180267 wrote:

It’s definitely on our radar and wish list of requests.

Any update on https? It looks like this forum may have moved from a hosting company that focused on cheap forums using this vBulletin software and didn’t offer https at all its service tiers to a more traditional Virtual Private Server company (cPanel). This might mean that adding https would be even easier, and now free (except for the config work required). Here’s a blog post from this forum’s current hosting company that makes it sound like securing this site with free LetsEncrypt https certificates might be really easy: https://blog.cpanel.com/announcing-cpanel-whms-official-lets-encrypt-with-autossl-plugin/

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