We should disincentivize antisocial behavior rather than ban specific technologies. If rental e-scooters left in the middle of the sidewalk are a problem, require rental companies to provide parking where the e-scooter must be docked at the end of the journey, for example.
As long as e-scooters are primarily replacing car trips, they are a net benefit to society. Let’s iron out the wrinkles instead of an outright ban.
I can tell you how these are used in Prague because I’ve almost been hit by them multiple times while attempting to walk on the sidewalk.
They are used by tourists that don’t put in the minimal effort to understand the extensive and very effective tram and metro system. They are usually ridden on sidewalks which is against the law. They are ridden without helmets which has caused a huge uptick in hospital visits.
Basically we are all subsidizing the treatment of injuries caused by these fucking rental companies which provide no net benefit and defund our excellent public transportation. Meanwhile we have to play frogger every time we get on the sidewalk because tourists are riding these things illegally all over the place.
I support bans on dockless scooter rentals, but allow dock based systems
It’s hard to really think of a use case for scooters that isn’t already fulfilled by e-bikes, and there’s already good biking infrastructure throughout the city that’s rapidly developing, including storage and parking. I can understand an argument that a new transit mode that would require a lot of infrastructure isn’t worth it.
Some people clearly prefer e-scooters over bicycles, otherwise they would not have been successful so far.
Parking for e-scooters isn’t “a lot of infrastructure” when in the space of just one car you can park, say, 8 e-scooters? If we are going to be so particular about the downsides of e-scooters then we also need to take a hard look at the immense externalities of cars, from on-street parking to street noise and road maintenance costs.
How much of that preference is expressly because they don’t need to be parked, which residents are increasingly finding intolerable?
Remove that, and I don’t really see the benefit over just investing more money in expanding bikes. By all means, absolutely do take more space from cars though. They’re a blight.
You could try to mandate parking them is designated zones that are currently used for automobile parking, though I do wonder how effective enforcement would really be.
Mandated parking zones are very effective because you can’t really end the trip if you’re not on a parking zone, meaning that you keep getting charged until you park it in a parking zone.
Here you could leave the scooters anywhere for about a year, and it was nice because I could take one right to my doorstep - but my neighbours took them inside their house, and there were scooters everywhere taking up sidewalks. Around a year ago, it changed and now there are predefined parking spaces, around 50m or 100m from each other. I haven’t seen “abandoned” scooters outside of parking spaces for a few months now, and a lot of people still use then anyway.
Scooters are much cheaper than e-bikes. You can probably get two e-scooters for the price of an e-bike. They are probably closer to regular bikes in price. But regular rental bikes are less attractive to people with low fitness levels. Especially when they have airless tires.
e-bikes
Do e-bikes not have the same problems as e-scooters? If no, why not?
A huge reason why the companies behind the scooters have been able to fund it is because they haven’t had to build any real support infrastructure since they can just take advantage of public sidewalk space. e-bikes have had to deploy actual infrastructure with parking and docks.
If we were coming from point zero, I wouldn’t see a huge reason for one or the other, but at this point, infrastructure already exists for bikes, so why spend more time and use more limited street and parking space and money for another mode of transit that doesn’t really solve any new problems?
But a big appeal of it is, that you can drop it off anywhere. If you can only unlock and lock them a specific stations, you might as well make a bus/tram/metro line.
…which is fine. We can’t encourage antisocial behavior, and leaving private stuff for free in the middle of the street is antisocial behavior. Free on-street parking for cars is just as bad for everyone, but people have grown accustomed to it and get bothered by e-scooters even though they take a small fraction of the space of a parked car.
i fully agree with the parking of cars issue. But for that at least exist systems to reprimand people parking outside of the alloted spots and many cities have parking spots only designated for people actually living there.
For scooters we would need a default fine, of say 20€ per scooter that is not in the correct spot or is parked in a way to hinder other people. The fee would need to be deducted directly from the company, irrespectuve of whether they pass it on.
But that kinda brings us to the point that the whole business model is bullshit, as it can only be profitable with internalizing public goods and externalizing the costs of manageing the dipshits that are misusing them, endangering the safety of other people.
How do these things even work without being docked? When do they recharge?
Where I live, people in rental trucks go around at night gathering low battery scooters and unloading fully charged ones. Apparently you can make good money doing that work and recharging them.
It is not the scooter company who decides/limit where scooters need to be parked, it’s the city.
No they are not actually banned, it’s the rental ones that are banned. You can use your own if you want.
As it should be.
That sucks, in Montreal they have a good solution to this. Essentially you pay per minute, and people have to return it to the station to stop the counter. There’s parking stations pretty much everywhere, and I’ve never seen a bike left out.
Although pay per minute is an absolutely terrible system for something you’d want people to drive carefully and while following traffic laws. It really is no wonder you see them being driven at full tilt and never stopping at red lights.
Oh wow that’s so true, never occured to me. Definitely can be seen as an incentive to go faster.
Why not ban parking them in random places?
I guess it was up to e-scooter renting companies to come up with some kind of geofencing of reasonable parking but they failed to self-regulate which led to everyone being pissed off about them. If those companies were concerned about the spaces they littered they’d probably be still in business.
It’s a good sign that abusing good faith is punished with such severity.
Why not just stop trying to fuck with technology that supports an eco-friendly lifestyle?
Although to your point, when eBikes first came to Seattle as a service, they had hubs. You could only pick one up from a hub and had to return it to a hub. That could address the issue of them being parked wherever, but it decreases their usefulness. It’s pretty awesome to just walk a couple of feet and grab an eScooter, then leave it in front of your destination for someone else to grab.
Escooters are not eco friendly. The batteries burn through really quickly. E-assist bicycles and regular bicycles are by far the best option for public personal mobility.
Well they’re a heck of a lot better than cars!
But they are not used to replace car rides. They replace walks or short bike trips.
In Sweden they have to be parked in a bike rack. We have bike racks, everywhere. A rather great solution.
Right. There are plenty of simple solutions that don’t involve banning something that benefits the people living there.
Sure, if it was just a couple of them it would probably be fine. But the problem is that in many cities the amount of scooters that are left in random places gets annoying. I think that having designated parking locations would be the best solution and, as long as you have enough of them, that should not impact their usefulness.
Please bring this legislation to Prague! Please!
So cars are next right? Since they constantly are parking like shit?
I really like these scooters and bicycles when visiting a city - I do not need to bring my own stuff to the city and I can pick up whatever makes more sense. No more daily bike rentals for a way too high price which I need to return to a specific location at a specific time.
Tho, this stuff also attracts a lot of, for a lack of better word, dipshits, who will just throw these things in the middle of the walkway and call it a day. With this not getting better (either because the authorities and providers aren’t doing a good job or because the people even do not care about fines), this will happen in a lot of bigger cities. As people can rightfully not be expected to deal with this shit.
In my city in Germany 90% of users are teenagers that are using them for “fun” like racing on the sidewalk, dangerously forcing pedestrians out of the way and onto the street full of cars.
That sounds like a problem with scooters rather than specifically with rental scooters. I mean, you can just go get one yourself and still break rules with them.
But the barrier of entry is a lot higher. It’s a lot easier for someone to pay a couple of Euros to rent one rather than pay for the whole thing.
Especially for teenagers.
what @Estiar@sh.itjust.works said
Also if it is bought by and registered to a specific person, it is a lot easier to identify the person and reprimand them. Furthermore if someone pays a lot of money for a scooter they tend to drive in a way that will not risk damageing or breaking it.
A potentially good concept that has been ruined by corporate greed and a few bad apples in our society. I hope more cities ban them, because other rules and laws don’t seem to be effective in reducing the problems.
There’s a very effective solution - predefined parking spaces, and after getting a scooter you can only park them in one of those predefined spaces. It works that way in a lot of european cities, and it works well. The problem is the ability to leave them anywhere, it was chaos before they implemented the predefined parking spaces where I live.
I think they are also banned in the while Netherlands but I might be mistaken
The OECD report shows the risk of rider death per trip on motorcycles or mopeds is five times higher than that for e-scooters.
I would think that the relevant statistic would be death per unit of distance traveled, not per trip. If the typical scooter trip is much shorter than the typical motorcycle trip – which seems very plausible, given range and speed limitations – then “per trip” and “per unit of distance traveled” statistics could differ a lot.
