Many people miss the larger point that the scooter troubles have brought to light: this is a preview to what a post-ownership society would look like. It quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons when everyone uses public resources (rentable scooters and the space to park them) with little regard to the larger impact of their collective actions due to the absence of consequences for antisocial behavior.
In the vision of autonomous vehicles is a built-in assumption that people won’t actually need to own one themselves and companies will provide “taxi service” for some fee thus eliminating the need for the end-user to actually own one as they can always call for a ride. How quickly will these vehicles become dirty, unusable, vandalized, or otherwise ruined because a subset of occupants don’t give a shit about stuff that doesn’t belong to them and there is no consequence for wrecking?
Scarcity does make people value their things because they’ve already invested in it and most people would rather not have to continue to fork over money to replace items that suffered a premature end due to user neglect or mistreatment.
But driverless taxis aren't a commons: they're the opposite, a private resource managed by a for-profit company. I don't see how you're predicting a tragedy of the commons here. If you're a difficult client, then you get fined heavily and kicked off the service.
(And your fears are precisely why you'd expect corporations to run things like this: they'd respond to other customers' fears of "dirty, vandalized" taxis, and do what they can to avoid that image! You don't get that responsiveness from a commons).
The commons example as it relates to vehicles themselves is not optimal because you bring up a good point - in an optimal market situation, competitive forces will drive poor performers to do better or fail.
I’m not actually totally sure what point I was trying to make, or if this will ever become a problem, just food for thought/discussion.
You are absolutely right. I think these companies have only gotten away with the business model because the scooters seem to have less maintenance costs or are cheaper to replace. Many bikeshare companies pulled out of Paris because people were so hard on them and some have been pulled out of the Seine. Newer companies have entered with e-bike rentals and there’s still the public bike share program, but they’re expensive, which must be a discouraging factor for their abuse and helps the company recoup maintenance costs.
All the elegance of a bicycle is removed to make room for the indestructible design so as to be viable for public rental. And still they have flat tires, grimy chains, and shoddy brakes. They’re also so heavy, which makes commuting further than a few kilometers a slog unless they’re electric, and those are expensive.
I suspect that people are dissuaded from alternative transport for this reason of disrespect for common space and property. The metro is disgusting and sometimes dangerous, and the rental bikes aren’t a great alternative.
> Many people miss the larger point that the scooter troubles have brought to light: this is a preview to what a post-ownership society would look like. It quickly becomes a tragedy of the commons when everyone uses public resources (rentable scooters and the space to park them) with little regard to the larger impact of their collective actions due to the absence of consequences for antisocial behavior.
There is more going on here. Compare the condition of subways or buses in American cities, to those in Japan. In some cultures, collective property is rapidly vandalized and destroyed by the same people who rely on it. In other cultures, collective property is treated respectfully.
If I had to pick a society as an example of a place where the subways and buses get vandalized, I'm choosing Italy. American buses and trains are virtually spotless compared to theirs.
Yeah, this is something that the anti-scooter people in my town (Berkeley) do not seem to grasp. The public scooter companies are getting murdered by cheap scooters. Overwhelming majority of scooters on the streets are dirt-cheap Gotrax models. They are so cheap they are cutting into the mode share of bicycling.
My girlfriend rides a Mi Scooter Pro 2 to work, 11 miles each day. Cost us around $550 I think, and they’re very popular around here (hilly European capital). So I’d say that’s pretty cheap and also seriously usable.
You're comparing the cheap end of scooters to the expensive end of smartphones. The cheapest smartphones cost about 10x than the cheapest scooters. Tens of dollars (if not free) vs a few hundred dollars.
I feel very ambivalent about scooters. On one hand I hope they do actually take some cars off the road, on the other, I think they’re mostly used by people who would otherwise take the bus, bike or even walk instead.
And in the meantime the scooters are dumped everywhere around town: on sidewalks, in cycle lanes, in the parks and forests, thrown into the lake at the north end of the town. It’s always extra dispiriting to find them discarded in the undergrowth out in the countryside - presumably at the very end of their range. One time I found a scooter that someone had either intentionally or accidentally left so that it fell over and smashed a ground floor window.
I’ve personally seen so many accidents and near-misses, including some too-young kids who must’ve hacked a scooter and crashed it into a parked car, a colleague who fell head-over the bars after a drinking binge and cut up his face, a friend who broke an arm, and a young woman who was walking across a plaza in town while reading her phone and tripped over a scooter that someone had just thrown down there and landed smack on her face.
Also the strange behavior of people riding who seem not to consider they’re bound by the rules of any other transport system - cars, bikes or walkers - and simply sail unconcernedly across junctions with red lights, or in the midst of walkers on the sidewalk.
I’d love to see them work better - I hate cars way more - but the anarchic spirit of their introduction hasn’t been the best for everyone living in the city.
> And in the meantime the scooters are dumped everywhere
That is only a problem with "gig economy" rentals. I think that is what I distaste, not the scooters. Hopefully the VC money will dry up soon before the rivers are filled to the brim with scooters.
I guess cars really stick to the rules because they know they have to. Maybe we need to step up enforcement of scooter rules. Or introduce some rudimentary exam+permit.
> I guess cars really stick to the rules because they know they have to
I’d love to know where you live, because it sounds like Arcadia.
Where I live, at least, cars also ignore speed limits, don’t stop for pedestrians crossing, often cruise blithely through red lights, drive the wrong way on one-way streets…
For a while (when I was still cycling to the office) I was doing my best to film or photograph this type of behavior - which was difficult when it was over in a couple of seconds. I got quite a few films of cars driving on cycle lanes and the wrong direction, with the intention of somehow reporting it. But in the end I realized it was just a waste of time.
Anyways - at least I never find a car dumped in the forest. That’s something over scooters, I guess
Cars stick to the rules? There were 42,915 automobile related deaths in the US in 2021. Annoyances over scooters is new, so we all notice it and complain. The sheer volume of damage inflicted by people using private cars for transit has just become accepted as normal.
Well, it's not an absolute statement. But where I live I'd say 90%+ cars drive by the rules.
Anyway, my point wasn't that cars are sticklers for rules, but that to the extent they do, it's because the consequences of non compliance are potentially severe.
Drive on an escooter the wrong way with no lights at night through a red light, and hit a pedestrian? Get up and keep going.
You should calculate deaths per weight*miles moved. If ten people are riding scooters and 300 million people are driving cars, you'd expect cars to have more deaths.
I agree completely. I've been buzzed by an e-bike on the sidewalk in NYC. He had to have been going 25+, even faster than the vehicles. Numerous times I've seen e-bikes and e-scooters cut corners at red lights by mounting the sidewalk, usually without concern for whomever may be approaching from the other direction.
Here in Berlin, these things are everywhere as well. More or less the same companies as in Paris.
I think Germans are more upset about how messy these things are than about the safety aspect. People just leave them wherever and occasionally some bored people do silly things with them like creating a huge pile of them or tossing them in canals, etc. They are not very stable and that means that even if they are parked properly, they can still fall over. Or people just kick them over. But mostly, stuff like this is a minor nuisance. Berlin is covered in graffiti; there's lots of vandalism, etc.. This just adds to that. I don't mind the chaos generally.
You also see people using them creatively. I regularly see people transporting furniture or even Christmas trees (last year) on these things for example. Or multiple people sharing a scooter. I find this hilarious. And there is a fair bit of abuse involving drunk people, kids doing stunts with them, etc.
But mostly, you just see people using them as intended. Berlin is a big place. You can walk for hours without leaving the inner city. Rush hour traffic is very congested and these things are perfect for getting around.
I kind of dislike using scooters myself; mostly because I don't like the lack of stability and danger level. But e-bikes are great and almost as easy to find. Most deadly accidents here in Berlin involve cars though. Stupidly and pointlessly large SUVs and trucks driven irresponsibly are usually involved. Right hand turns involving trucks crushing cyclists are very common here.
> I think Germans are more upset about how messy these things are than about the safety aspect. People just leave them wherever and occasionally some bored people do silly things with them like creating a huge pile of them or tossing them in canals, etc.
It's high time these so-called micro-mobility companies are held accountable for the abusive occupation of public space. Their business model is based on their ability to just go to a public area and dump a bunch of equipment on the ground. Street vendors are persecuted by municipal police for less eggregious occupations of public areas.
If locals have to pay for licenses to briefly occupy a couple of square meters of public areas to be able to do construction/renovation work, why are these companies allowed to throw around dozens of scooters at will?
So in Chicago we have the infuriating practice of "dibs". People leave out all manner of large objects in street parking spaces they've dug out when we get lots of snow. You know what the city does every few weeks? Streets & Sanitation workers drive around and collect up all these abandoned chairs, couches, cones, etc because it's discarded stuff in a public space.
Why not do the same with e-scooters? If they aren't properly out of the public right of way and secured they should be collected up and treated as abandoned. Eventually scooter rental companies will need to start charging people significant fees for not properly parking scooters when they are finished with them.
I'm in favor of people learning how to use e-scooters correctly because they are a great mode of transportation in cities. We've all just become so accustomed to the impacts of cars that we don't complain any more. (Pollution, noise, collisions, fatalities, space required for parking .. all far worse than any annoyances caused by scooters.)
Just like anything new people need time to adjust and learn how to have scooters exist sanely in a community.
And every year in chicago dibs starts a few days earlier and ends a few days later.
Also for anyone who suggests to just move someone’s trash and take their spot. That is a sure fire way to get your car keyed or someone to take all of the snow and shovel it right on top of your car.
To your original point though, I disagree with have sanitation take the scooters as that puts the responsibility on the tax payers. In NYC they have an app where you can record an idling car/truck and if they do it for more than 3 minutes you get like 25% of the fine. IMO just doing something like that would make the scooter companies clean up their act pretty quick.
Oh boy "dibs". Had the same nonsense in Boston. I would pick them up out of the street and put them on the side walk in spite so another lucky person who claim the spot.
Where? In a car parking space? On the sidewalk? There is no "proper parking" for scooters because our cities aren't built for non-car individual transit. Hell, even the hip places in my city barely have bike racks. It's truly frustrating.
-- used to be escooter hell in Seoul - the government passed a law requiring the apps to make sure the user has valid driver license to unlock scooter - since then - considerably less insane --
My city did the same, and the e-scooters are geo-fenced such that they cannot be parked in certain areas, or have a reduced speed. They also cannot be used after 11pm.
The only think lacking is better dedicated infrastructute for bicycles and e-scooters alike.
In the UK to ride an escooter you need a provisional driving license. This is what you get if you are training to be a driver, but then also you just buy it from the post office. So not that much of a win.
Good question. I don't think so really. You can drive a car with it outside motorways and with a qualified driver on board, and if you are caught breaking the rules, it goes on your license, but that's about it.
Yah, but it's not like, committing a road offence with a provisional license is worse that committing one without.
There are some fine details, like if you cause an accident while cycling, i think you could get points in your license if you have one, but I never heard of this happening anyway.
kind of the same direction here in Oslo -- they reeled in how many scooters any given operator was allowed to have in distribution and started applying real road rules to the scooters.
Being caught drunk driving an app-based e-scooter is as serious as any motor vehicle violation and will result in your car license being revoked.
I'm curious how Lime is calculating their safety numbers. I have family in medicine, and they absolutely refuse to ride scooters due to the injuries and fatalities they see in the ER. They basically see it as the equivalent of riding a motorcycle without a helmet. And since the vast majority of scooter riders are young adults, they see devastating injuries that will ruin people's lives for decades, if they live that long.
Obviously all forms of transportation have risk, but the current environment where hardly any scooter riders wear helmets, and where they are used in tight urban areas competing with cars, cyclists and pedestrians, often with little clarity of where scooters should drive or right-of-way rules, is a recipe for high devastating accident rates.
the speed limit in Germany is 20kmh which is ca 12.5mph. that's about the speed of a normal bike ride. they are bikes for the sake of traffic rules and they are allowed to ride where bikes are allowed and they have to use bike lanes where bikes have to use them. minimum age is 18. the rules re clear and the speed is low.
other countries have scooter speed limits of 20mph aka 25kmh.
that's a speedy bike ride already. for an untrained person it's hard to keep and maintain that speed on a flat and even road, by bike. I don't get how it can be allowed for scooters. and I don't get how scooters can be allowed to rent below 18.
The scooters here in Paris are competing with a large numbers of bikes, cars and motorized scooters and feel more dangerous than the others vehicles.
There's also the common doubling-up of people, and you occasionally have to add taking selfies into the mix.
There's a lot of other options for shared mobility and they all seem way safer. I don't think that's universally true for a all cities, but certainly for Paris.
(Not a Parisian, but currently enjoying a week here)
What is the point of these being scooters instead of bikes in the first place? Scooters seem strictly inferior and more dangerous than bicycles. The small wheels are much worse on dodgy road surfaces, and without being able to pinch the vehicle between your legs, the rider has less control over what it does.
Is the whole idea that a scooter is cheaper because it has less structure and smaller wheels? Seems like a bad tradeoff, since it's a vehicle that can get you killed (I've seen this happen. The scooter rider got into an unrecoverable wobble, fell, and hit his head.)
I'd argue they became popular in many places due to a simple regulatory loophole - they initially existed in many places as a legally gray method of moving at bike speed without physical exertion that you could use without a license or paying tax.
Many jurisdictions distinguish between bicycles (unmotorized or with a speed-limited motor, possibly mandating pedal assistance) and motorcycles (can move at high speeds, fully unassisted).
Motorcycles are fast, but expensive and generally require licensing, registration, tax etc, and are generally banned from cycle lanes. Scooters offer the lack of exertion of a motorcycle with the convenience and low costs of a bicycle. For some that's worth the horrendous ride quality.
So how do you call the electric version of motorbike scooters, in a way that the recipient understands what kind of scooter is the subject of the matter?
Don’t understand this. Paris has the best e-scooter model in the world. Designated parking zones, geofenced speed limits, proper bike/scooter infrastructure. I and my French friends love them and use them frequently.
Apart from the business model and mobility benefits, those scooters are just plain dangerous. They are absolutely fun to drive, and easy to drive swiftly.
But your body mass is so high off the ground on a very small base, with VERY small wheels. Riding on a bird I hit a small pothole (it looked like a very slight puddle) and catapulted off onto the sidewalk. The physics are undeniable.
Personally I'd like to see the same model with bicycles, even if they are electric.
And for the love of public space: force all competing brands to share vehicles, drop-off zones and handlers.
Paris goes the same way Prague did in 2016, but with Segways. The problem is not in vehicle, but in the fact, that users were ignoring rules (you are supposed to drive on a road with cars or bicycle path) and were driving on pedestrian walk, causing collisions and injuries.
Just yesterday I witnessed a pretty gruesome scooter accident right in front of me on the sidewalk in Berlin. The young woman was just riding down the sidewalk bike lane, nothing at all out of the ordinary, and the scooter just slipped right out from under her on some slippery wet leaves. She went headlong into a tree and was left with a bloody nose on the ground. Her friends stayed with her until the ambulance came.
I was happy I did not relive it in my dreams last night.
I have two friends that wiped out on stand up electric scooters resulting in knee injuries. And actually another that did the same on a gas powered one. So I'm thinking these things are generally unsafe.
e-scooters in paris used to be an absolute mess: scooters everywhere on the sidewalk, people driving very fast etc.
But IMHO it seriously improved in the past years, now if you drive a scooter on some specific zone you're pretty limited (something like 5-10km/h depending on the zone) AND you need to park at specific location.
I hope that then don't ban it, because they're a life saver when it's late at night and metro is off.
The more general problem is, what do we do with powered vehicles that have too much speed, and thus kinetic energy, to share space with pedestrians, but not enough protection to share space with automobiles?
Bike lanes help. In congested areas, we may end up with slow scooter/slow bicycle/low speed e-bike lanes with low speed limits. Anything faster needs a motorcycle license, turn signals, mirrors, and more rider protection.
As a cyclist commuter, I've reached the point where I advocate requiring a license to operate any sort of motorized equipment in public roads. Too often I'll encounter close unannounced passes on the right, salmoning, or just general complete baffoonery on the part of e-bike or scooter riders on the road. Silly stuff always used to happen before with skateboards or bicycles, but in general if you're out there using your own body power to move yourself around you're going to be less casual. With the advent of ubiquitous cheap lithium legs, I'm seeing more casual road users show up in greater numbers, only they are armed with motorized vehicles that can travel much faster than their operators know how to manage safely and responsibly.
I'd happily submit to training and licensing requirements for my bicycle if it means everyone else on the road with me, especially motorized vehicle operators, also have to go through the same process.
How do you explain Germany having stringent drivers licensing requirements, and Germans being skilled and generally lawful drives? Just a coincidence? Do you think Germans would be just as good at driving if they dropped all the licensing and education requirements? Seems farcical.
Since advanced education and licensing requirement work for German car drivers, it should work for e-scooter and e-bike riders too. And for that matter, it should also work for American/etc car drivers too. If drivers' ed and the licensing tests for car driving in America weren't such a farce, our roads would be much safer.
What's farcical is that you think so highly of credentials. You know what's stricter that German drivers licenses? College degrees. And they don't mean shit.
Every other day or so I encounter this dark-green-colored e-waste strewn all over sidewalks, foot and bicycle paths just standing in the way being annoying and a hazard to any passersby on said paths. In some places in my city the footpath is blocked ~50-100% in its width by these things forcing foot traffic to evade onto the bicycle path, endangering both types of traffic.
Seriously, one of the (seemingly) more popular "parking" spots for singular ones of these scooters I've found in my city is on an un-/dimly lit foot- and bicycle path at night, cosplaying as a tripping hazard.
Fuck these scooters and the dangerous morons who ride and just leave them everywhere.
One issue discussed a lot here which I think is not mentioned in the article (I read it really quickly) is that those are not really helping the environnement. Those e-scooters have ridiculous lifetime (creating trash and pollution to build new ones) and also they (used to?) give money to anyone who would charge the scooter (so they don't have to hire someone to do it). The result that some people were doing it for a living, using a truck containing a diesel generator to go charge all the scooter in the city, which probably made the overall carbon footprint of using scooter even worse than a car...
Can you provide any citations for chargers using diesel generators? The batteries on these scooters don't charge quickly, and running charging cables in the bed of a truck would likely be pretty problematic considering none of the connectors are locking (one tug and your unplugged).
These things are a blight. Riders aren’t responsible when riding or parking them, and the companies aren’t efficient about clean up. The owners effectively forced Paris to make room by virtue of dumping them around the city. (How was that even legal?) Eventually there were hideous piles of them blocking parking and traffic, so the city made designated parking for them. It’s marginally better. Good riddance.
Renting these within the city centre was banned in Copenhagen a few years ago.
You can still own one yourself, or rent one outside the centre and drive all the way through.
But it immediately stopped all the clutter. Now it's just rental bicycles — somehow, every tourist on a normal bike manages to lock it appropriately in a bike rack, but paint an e-bike Lime green and people just drop them wherever they feel like it.
I love these things. They really nicely complement urban mobility, on short distances and for connections where bus, tram and underground have a poor connection (e.g. low takt, or need to connect or poor grid i.e. long walking distance)
I've happily used them in several cities already.
and I'm optimistic that we'll find more intelligent solutions to the rookie user problem than banning them for all others.
Here in Montreal we have a bike rental service (Bixi). You have to return the bike to one of the many bike stations otherwise the meter keeps running.
I have never seen a bixi abandonned in the middle of the sidewalk.
Instead of banning those scooters, maybe they should simply force the companies to provide designated parking spots and force the users to use them.
In the vision of autonomous vehicles is a built-in assumption that people won’t actually need to own one themselves and companies will provide “taxi service” for some fee thus eliminating the need for the end-user to actually own one as they can always call for a ride. How quickly will these vehicles become dirty, unusable, vandalized, or otherwise ruined because a subset of occupants don’t give a shit about stuff that doesn’t belong to them and there is no consequence for wrecking?
Scarcity does make people value their things because they’ve already invested in it and most people would rather not have to continue to fork over money to replace items that suffered a premature end due to user neglect or mistreatment.